Cowbird - Monday, April 27, 2020

Tomorrow is The Husband's birthday.  He'll be 60.

When he was about to turn 50, I planned a big blow-out birthday party for him.  The night before the party, it rained.  I'm not talking about a spring shower.  It was literally a FLOOD.  Our county executive called it a "thousand-year flood."  We had to cancel the party because our guests could not get here because of flooded streets.

It would be nice to throw him a 60th birthday party, but . . . well, you know . . . the virus.  Ordinarily, I'd go ahead and invite the relatives on the hill to come over for hamburgers and birthday cake, but one of the relatives is a nurse, and though she does not currently have the virus, she is keeping her distance from us and from my mother-in-law, who is in her late 70s.  We can't chance making Nanny sick with all the other problems she has.

Poor Husband may not even get the birthday presents I ordered for him two weeks ago.  Some things have not even been shipped, and it appears that the rest are coming by turtle.

Damn it.

We were going to host a reunion for cousins in my mother's side of the family on May 23, but it looks like that might not happen, either.

On a lighter note, the wren eggs in the window nest have hatched.  They chirp like crazy when a parent lands on the perch.  I can't see anything but their beaks, but I'm halfway wondering if one of the birds is a different breed.  For a couple of weeks, we heard strange noises around the yard that sounded like water dripping.  Two drops - bloop BLOOP -  then silence.  Two more drops, then silence.  With all the rain, I first thought it was water dripping.  But the regularity of the noise, and the fact that the noise was usually repeated from somewhere else in the yard, made me think it was an animal, not water, making the noise.  A frog?  A bug?  I googled, and the most similar noise I found was the call of a Brown Headed Cowbird.  And I actually saw one land nearby, so I know they're around.  The article I read said that these birds do not build their own nests; they squat in other birds' nests and let other birds hatch their eggs.  What a shyster, huh? 

We had noticed the wrens acting strangely while all this bloop-BLOOPing was going on.  First, their birdhouse, which is suction-cupped to the living room window, became un-suctioned on one corner.  We had thought that the female was already sitting on the nest, but we began to see both the male and the female adding more material to the nest.  They were frantic about it, and worked hard at it for several days.  Then, suddenly, the female was nesting again, and it seemed like no time had passed before I heard the first baby chirp.  And it seemed like a couple more days passed before I heard more chirping voices from the nest.  Was that first chirp a Brown Headed Cowbird baby that had hatched earlier than the wrens?  We won't know until they all come out of the nest.

I hope they do it while I''m here to see it.