One of my kids came running into the house and said, “Hey, you’ve got to see this robin’s nest outside the sliding glass door.” So I walked over, looked into the little evergreen tree just off the patio, and there it was.
A perfect little bowl of twigs and grass holding bright blue robin eggs that looked almost too vivid to be real.
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It’s funny, when I was growing up in Medina, the last thing you’d ever hear me say was, “I want to live in the suburbs.” Now, having boomeranged back and living in the Medina suburbs, the last thing you’ll hear me say is that I want to go anywhere else.
Even with our modest backyard, there is something beautiful about the way Medina holds both rural and suburban life together. You can be standing near a sliding glass door with a cup of coffee, looking at a patio set and a patch of grass, and somehow still feel like nature is right there with you.
And there I was, admiring the blue robin eggs two steps outside my back patio. First slowly, then I became involved …
Every morning, I checked on the eggs. I looked out the window before work. I asked the kids if they had seen the robin. Before long, I wasn’t looking at the backyard as a yard anymore. I was looking at it as a little kingdom with threats. Were there crows nearby? Was the weather getting bad? Was some animal lurking around? Where was the mother robin?
Watching her work was something else. She was constant. Flying in and out. Guarding. Gathering. Returning. Watching. There was a kind of fierce motherhood in her that you could feel even through the glass. Then one morning, the eggs hatched, and instead of blue shells, there were three tiny heads, all mouth and motion, lifting themselves out of the nest like one little pulsing bundle of life.
Then came the crows. I was working inside when I heard them. A whole crowd of them – or, as I learned, a murder of crows, which suddenly felt like the most accurate name in the English language.
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They were loud, chaotic, circling the tree and dive-bombing the nest. And there was the mother robin, completely outnumbered, fighting them off.
Did this story spark a memory of your own? Or do you just want to say hello? Email Aaron at storiesinasnapmedina@gmail.com.Pete Whitehead
I stood there for a second, watching nature do what nature does. Then I opened the sliding glass door. Apparently, I had decided to join nature. I grabbed small sticks and little stones from the yard and started throwing them near the crows to scare them off. I wasn’t trying to hurt them. I was just trying to distract them long enough to give the robin a chance.
For one glorious suburban moment, the robin and I became a crime-fighting duo …
Batman and Robin.
She dove from the sky. I threw pebbles from the lawn. If my neighbors looked out their windows, they would have seen a grown man defending a bird’s nest like the fate of the world depended on it. Eventually, the crows gave up. The robin and I had won.
That night, I went to bed worried. What if they came back? What if something happened while I was asleep? The next morning, I walked out early to check on the nest. Everything was still. The mother robin was gone, so I leaned in a little closer. Too close.
At that exact moment, all three baby robins decided it was time for their first flight. They exploded out of the nest and hit me directly in the face. I stumbled backward with baby birds on my hands, shoulder and head, trying not to let them fall. I had somehow stuck my face into the exact moment they were leaving home. So I lifted my hands toward the sky and said, “Fly, children, fly.”
And they did. All three made it. They fluttered into the trees, awkward and alive and free. For a second, I almost cried.
She saw me standing there near her babies and immediately assumed the worst. Our partnership was over. She started dive-bombing me, aiming for my head like I had betrayed the entire bird kingdom. I retreated back through the sliding glass door and shut it behind me.
And there I was, inside the house, looking out at the robin who had once been my superhero partner. She looked back at me from the yard, and I could almost hear what she was thinking.
