Homewrecker

I think little brown Carolina Wrens are one of my favorite birds. I love how they are so litttle and round, and always seem so alert. I have another story for another day, about how a little Carolina wren came to see me once, at a sad time in my life....but thats for another time.

I was getting ready for work the other morning, and was happily watching through the French doors in my bedroom, two little wrens outside flitting around on my deck. When the time came to leave for work, as I was locking up, I noticed the two little wrens flitting around my grill and actually going in and out of the small vent hole in the hood of the grill. I thought perhaps they might be hungry, or could smell the grill, so perhaps they were looking for something to eat. I decided, since I was out of bird feed, that I would take some dried bread crumbs out to them and leave it on a small paper plate right outside the grill. As I started to place the plate of crumbs down below the grill, I noticed some "stuff" sticking out of the vent hole on the hood. I lifted the hood, and it was apparent that the little wrens were in the throes of building a nest. Since I was on my way to work, there wasn't time to do anything about it, so I just closed the hood of the grill and left.

When I got home that evening, the first thing I did was go out to the grill to have a look. When I lifted the hood, there was a completed, beautiful work of art. The nest was huge, and full. Funnel shaped with a little burrow way down deep into the nest. It was incredible how the the leaves, twigs, moss, even pine straw from my garden, were created in a perfectly circular design. Indeed it was a thing of beauty. And the wrens had done all that work in one day. When I left the house that morning they were just getting started and had merely a small handful of nest materials inside the grill.

I was so upset. I knew that we would have to move the nest because we are avid users of our grill. There was just no way to leave it there. I was so sad, imagining how distressing it must have been for the little wrens to have us open the hood, leave it open and later move the nest. My husband, in an act of kindness, attempted to make a surrogate house out of a box that I had saved from my new blender. He took two big sticks and a shovel and picked up the bird nest, so as not to touch it with his hands, and sat it on the white chair you see in the picture. Having cut a small hole in the box, the same size as the hole in the grill hood the birds were using, he sat the box down over the nest. All in the hopes that the little wrens might see it and figure it out. But they haven't been back. I feel so badly, disturbing their plans, wrecking the home they had readied, I'm sure for mama bird to get ready for babies. I keep hoping they will return to the box we made for them. But I'm sure they have made another nest, hopefully one that is bigger and better, somewhere else.

But the box and nest still sit there, hoping someone else will take advantage of it.