finchy dreams

Yesterday, after my venture into word and bird land, I wandered again into the kitchen, just as my daughter mentioned the finches outside were getting a good nest built.

I denied that could happen, and then I looked. Defying my published blog-post certainty, there seemed the possibility of a real nest. Wifey bird’s pointed look in my direction said, plainly, Don’t be hasty; we might pull it off this year.

This morning after a quick Windex job I updated our finchy photos. The couple had been gone since yesterday’s warm afternoon, but they reappeared early, the husband bird chittering and twirpering from the wire above, while wifey shopped the garden’s choice fabrics and brought each one up to weave in.

My camera-nosiness may have bugged her; in any case the two conferred for a bit before I left the area.



The difference this year — if there is one, if this couple’s endeavor isn’t following the same pattern as their forebears’ — if there is a difference, it may be that the blind near the kitchen window has a deeper “well” behind the rolled up part. In past springs the birds have always tried to build on the other blind near our bedroom. At any rate their production is looking more nestish today.

I find interesting our family nest population’s differing attitudes toward the finches. Daughter Victoria muses about the local ecosystem, how of course the major disrupter and shaper of that system is suburban humankind. And yet, she notes, to be a small enough animal that you don’t get in the humans’ path means to be able to take advantage of a secure place, away from cats and raccoons while inaccessible to crows. (I remind her that this nest, if it holds, will definitely be in one human’s path — her father’s. Victoria leaves a note on the refrigerator calling for no touching of the outdoor kitchen blind.)

Son James scans with interest the particular weeds brought up to the nest by wifey finch. He pulled those weeds and deposited them in precise areas per his adventure with backyard permaculture. Yet he seems to bear no ill will toward the natural home-builders out there.

Husband Tim, readying himself for work, mentions that the blind can move a lot in a stiff breeze. (But his expression upon reading Victoria’s note is one of resignation.)

For my part I continue pondering the picture of unwittingness seen in the birds who build in front of our window. Is it possible, one bird may ask its partner, that from another dimension (another sort of dwelling) beings could be viewing us at work here? That they might enjoy us, root for us, or alternatively seek to harm us? Certainly those sorts of finchy questions would be quelled by a reminder that it’s not polite to bring up either politics or heretical housing paradigms.

On the other hand — maybe in a truly better sense — I look wifey finch in the eye and cheer her. I think about attempts I’ve made to build that always have, from one perspective or another, failed. I wonder what this newest try by our feathered couple might portend.