The best nest, with no dreams of darkness

Remember when I told you about the Wren Family, a couple of weeks ago? It was part of this post and included a description of the location of Chez Wren. Wrens are opportunistic nesters, known for building nests in boots you leave on the back porch or wheelbarrows left untended for more than 10 minutes or so. This particular family has once again built a nest in a sandblaster, in a very high-traffic area of our garage. And since I told you about the nest, the eggs have hatched and four perfect tiny wrens are waiting for their parents to deliver supper. In this photo you can see a hint of what Rodney tells me is more properly called a sandblasting cabinet, in which the nest has been built. The black material around the nest is where you would put your right hand if you were using the machine. Well, it's where you'd put your right hand if you were a PERSON using the machine. Clearly the Wren Children are using the machine in avian fashion.

Beginning a long weekend, Rod and I went to the beach. I took pictures and thought about people just like me along the Gulf Coast, who love a stretch of beach or brackish wetland as fiercely as I do Guana and are now almost certainly unable to think of anything but approaching darkness in the form of a black plague of oil. If I am honest with you and with myself, I have to admit to pushing away thoughts of the coming disaster. I can hardly bear to think of it. It is too horrible, too enormous, too inevitable now. My heart breaks for those people and for us, for we are all sure to feel the evil touch of this horror. But I'll leave the writing about this to better pens than my own. I am not its equal, and I know it.

Still, even in the face of the unimaginable, life does go on. Wonder of wonders, we've been given a window into its magic: look!
You can see the four small birds, snuggled into their bit of unlikely real estate, sleepily waiting for their parents to bring food. Their tiny feathers are still sprouting, their tiny wings just being wiggled, though it will only be a matter of days now before they are fledged and cheerily calling to one another as they fly between the trees and drink from the little fountain on the back porch. We had a bad moment as we set up to take a quick photo with as little upset as possible to Chez Wren. The babies were perfectly still, almost too still. Rod touched the cabinet gently, checking for signs of life and in that instant all the beaks opened widely for incoming food. How to Reach Adulthood Without Being Eaten, by Our Baby Wrens: perfect, still silence while your parents are away from the nest, balanced by immediate readiness for food when your parents return. When the movement they felt proved not to be a parent and a meal, they returned to stillness in a heartbeat and we stepped away, leaving them to wait.



Photos courtesy of Rodney Christensen

The secrets of late spring

Isn't this amazing? Fig trees burst into leaf very quickly here, at least in our yard, bare trees transforming themselves into elegantly clothed, full emerald leaf in a matter of a few days. Very quickly afterward, the tiny fruit begins to appear. Is this, I wonder, a factor in the story of the Garden of Eden? Could the rapidity of the spring emergence of fig leaves be part of the reason they're cited as the flora with which nakedness was covered? It's not such a stretch if you're lucky enough to have a fig tree in your own garden.

As has been noted by other gardeners in the southeast this year (thank you, Ms. Moon) a more abundant spring is hard to recall. The long, cold winter seems to be giving us a spring of uncommon wealth. Our fig trees are evidence of this. We have three of them, the smallest of which has never borne fruit before. This year its small branches are covered with the tiny baby figs. What will we do with this bumper crop? In years gone by, when the crop of fruit was much smaller and our Mac still lived at home, he would simply EAT the figs as they appeared on the tree. In heavier years, we would pull the ripe ones off each day and drop them into a freezer bag. A couple of times I've taken the fruit of the different trees to work, where some of my colleagues simply eat them as quickly as I bring them in, and others have taken them home to make fig reductions to serve over pork chops or grilled chicken breasts. This year, I may finally have to take out the recipe box of Rodney's mother, Helen, in search of her recipe for fig preserves. Stay tuned, Surly Writer. I can think of nothing to which fresh figs can be compared for flavor or texture. For me they were as revelatory as fresh pomegranate seeds; not similar in flavor, texture, or dramatic color, but one of those small joys you find when you taste something completely new, undreamt of in your own mother's kitchen, and full of new possibilities.

The other secret of late spring here is finding out where the house wrens will nest. They return to nesting locations they've used before, but they also find new spots, and very quickly. If you leave a bucket of gardening tools in one place for a day or so, you may come back and find an amazingly well-contructed wren nest, and sometimes here will be a seriously annoyed-looking Mrs. Wren sitting on a nest, peeking out with a severe expression. Rodney has a sanding device in the garage, which has two arm-shaped openings. If you need to sand some kind of car part, you can put it inside the sander and place your hands into these openings to sandblast safely. A couple of years ago, a pair of wrens built a nest in the right hand side of the thing, seemingly overnight, and we watched from a careful distance as the eggs were incubated and the babies were fledged.

About two weeks ago as I got into the car, I noticed wrens nervously flitting around the garage, but it was early in the morning and I didn't think to mention it to Rodney or Dylan. A few days later, Rodney asked me if I'd noticed: there was a nest in the sand blaster. He had seen Mrs. Wren, sitting on her nest, glaring out of the hand opening at anyone who dared to look in at her. I looked for myself. Sure enough, there she sat, eyebrows drawn together like an extended "v", looking deeply offended. I know, I know: anthropomorphism run rampant, but these little songbirds are not to be taken lightly when they're nesting.

So here's the nest, from which Mr. and Mrs. Wren were momentarily absent. There are four tiny eggs, carefully cradled in a typically well-built wren nest floor plan. We'll keep an eye out and try to keep you posted on the magic of late spring here in north Florida. That is, of course, until the weather takes over, and I lose interest in being outside, which time span roughly aligns with hurricane season. Until then, nesting birds and gardenia buds and gradually ripening figs will be on offer. And in the deep summer, there's time to talk about shoes and ships and sealing wax, and whether pigs have wings...