AAn underemployed male blackbird sits on top of the hedge, doesn’t sing, doesn’t feed, or peck the hell out of another man. Just watch. Down in the garden below, his mate is working off her beak.
For them, caution is a winter word, so strong is their spring instinct to build a nest. She may be a leap from a cat’s claws or a second from the claws of a sparrowhawk, but all prudence and caution seem to have left her as she pounds with woodpecker simplicity on the mossy bank of the pond.
Sometimes she lifts her head with a limp mustache made of moss on the handlebars, with others she fishes out a ball of dirt the size of her head. Or she plucks straws from the grass or bushes until she has gathered a bundle. She sighted, collected and returned to her nest for four days with no selection pattern apparent. A package of mud here, a supply of hay there.
Gone is the habitual “scolding and fleeing” response to a human approach. When I pass nearby, she looks at me with a face full of straw and does not move. We’re trying to get her used to being able to move around freely because she chose to nest in a laurel bush that isn’t ten feet from our kitchen window. In the next few months we will be close neighbors.
In the house I have a side view of the washbasin in the nest, a gap slit on the side of an arrow through leaves that is evergreen but not completely impermeable. I have noticed that on her repeated dives in the bush she uses a separate entrance and exit, perhaps so that the path to her nest is less frayed and visible from the outside.
She sits down in the hollow, flicks her last load against the side, and then the plastering begins. She presses the curve of her chest against the loose material and works it hard and smooth, a body-shaped cup that has been shaped into its own shape. The male sits in the hedge, waiting for it to finish, lays its eggs and incubates. And then his work will really begin.
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