BIRDS OF A FEATHER
I’m not an authority on animal behavior but I do believe that most, if not all, of God’s creatures, have a very basic need to belong, certainly at key points and phases of their life. I have this belief because I have enjoyed animals and paid special attention to them most of my life, but honestly, I’ve always just considered myself a watcher of animal behavior but never got too involved with any particular ones except farm animals and pets.
However, the little wrens that live in my yard have stolen my heart. Twenty years ago, when I lived in Tennessee, I also had a pair of wrens that lived in my yard, building their nest and raising their young just like here in Orlando. I know they are only supposed to live seven years but I’m not positive that that pair didn’t follow me to Florida because this little lady wren looks at me exactly like she did in Tennessee. She draws her fantastic little body up and scolds me severely if I get too close to the family nest, which is not often because they hide them so well; but then too at, key times, when I’m going through tough emotional and spiritual things, she’s right there on my office window ledge, right by my writing desk pacing up and down stopping to peck on the window, looking me right in the eye to let me know she’s there for me, This little lady may know me better than my wife does.
Well, today I’m writing about her not because she’s always touching my heart or my funny bone, making me wish I could hold her, or reminding me that there are many mysteries that I know very little about but because she’s amazed me again with her intelligence. (I just heard her call out as I wrote that last sentence) I couldn’t believe what this pair had done this time.
Yesterday, I was going out through the garage to finish clipping the hedge when my wife stopped me to show me what she’d found on top of the storage cabinet right beside the door going from the kitchen to the garage. She’d pulled down a plastic kitchen stool we keep on top of the cabinet, and it had one of her cloth sun hats tucked in it. The stool had been put atop the cabinet upside-down forming a safe little cavity in which someone had built a clever little nest on top of the hat to hold their eggs and subsequent chicks. There was leftover egg residue and tiny feathers, but the babies were gone. We looked at each other and said in unison, “how did they do that with the big garage door closed most of the time?” Wow, those two have outdone themselves this time!
We are in and out of our big garage door several times some days and not at all other days, yet these marvelous little birds figured out, with their most precious babies at steak, how to time the feeding and caring for their little ones; what an amazing courageous plan and decision-making process they had pulled off to maximize safety for their babies while neither my wife nor I had any idea they were doing it. They had pulled their plan off, literally, right over our heads, zipping in, zipping out…….. maybe, they just know and trust the creator much better than we do, living and loving eternally and securely in His grace.
Jack