My baby birds are dead

For weeks now, I have been following the progress of a mother bird that has set up a nest on the top of our wood pile.  I noticed her picking up twigs and straw from our garden a few months ago not knowing where she was building her nest.  Then one day a month or so ago I was bulling our pram around the side of the house and noticed her sitting on the top of the wood pile in a rather large nest.  Since then, I have walked by her every once in a while and looked into her nest from the safe distance from behind my bedroom window.  Yesterday, the last egg hatched and mother bird was busy hunting for her 3 new babies.

Today it all went wrong.  I went out to the wood pile to get some wood since it’s now suddenly cold enough to start up a fire.  I noticed that there was a lot of straw on the ground and feathers blowing around in the wind.  The nest was ripped open from the side and a baby bird was dead on the bricked pavement.  I looked around for mother bird and noticed that she was frantically flying around in my front garden.  There were still two babies in her nest, but I couldn’t tell if they were alive or dead.  It was then that I realized that it must have been the neighbor’s cat that was the culprit here and I could have very well scared it away when I came out for wood. I looked around to make sure that the cat was gone, took some wood and came into the house again to my own baby.

Suddenly I could feel tears welling up inside my eyes.  I’m not stupid and I know these kind of things happen in nature, but what I had just seen seemed to hold so much significance at that moment.  I supposed I came to feel some level of ownership over those little birds – that I had followed them and had therefore become somehow invested in mother birds little project.  Or maybe it was the stark contrast I experienced by seeing a mother frantic about her dead baby and then going inside my own home to my healthy baby.  What a crappy thing to experience.