Oh, crap

DD and I were enjoying a beverage outside this weekend. It was a warm, sunny day – and heaven knows, we haven’t had a lot of those around here lately. I was putting off starting dinner. DD was telling me all about the new laptop she’s planning to buy. The baby birds were screeching …

Oh yes, the baby birds. We seem to have a nest of some bird or another in one of the gutters on the roof. (Not the leaking gutter. This is a different one. You know: different gutter, different problem.)

These baby birds, like all baby birds, are noisy as hell. They are noisy as hell starting at 4:30 am. I know this because they have woken me up two mornings in a row with their screaming for food. I suppose I didn’t notice them prior to this weekend because they were too tiny to make much noise. Quite honestly, I hadn’t even noticed that there even was a nest up there till this weekend. Now I know.

So we watched the mother bird being run ragged to feed her progeny. Back and forth she flew, worms dangling from her beak. As soon as she would alight on the edge of the gutter, about half a metre away from the nest, the screeching would begin. She would dance around a bit, checking over and over again for predators, then she’d give in to the frantic cries and hop down to her babies. The cries would crescendo, there would be a great fluffing and flailing of wings and beaks, then there would be silence and the mother bird would fly off to get the next installment of dinner.

And of course, what goes in must come out. Look at the roof. Charming, eh?