Today is a mixed bag of weather here in the Ozark woods.  A few years ago, my grandson Matthew and I built this really cool little cabin up on stilts out here on a wooded hillside and it has a nice roof so if the rain starts, Dusty, my faithful old border collie mix girl, and I should be able to stay dry if we get the forecasted cloudburst today.  I went all out and ran electrical circuits so I can plug the building into a small portable generator and have a porch light, interior light, and receptacles for temporary low power loads like this laptop I’m writing this post on, and the music box. 

I started out with this thing as if I was just going to make some sort of lean-to for a deer stand, but my daughter Casie, Matthew’s mom, got wind of what I was doing and decided to apply her engineering background; she started by making “helpful” suggestions, and the next thing you know Matthew and I are up here hanging plywood sheets way up in the air using the backhoe bucket as a crane, eventually building a Marriot Hotel.  We put these neat little windows complete with screens in the walls, double walled and insulated it, and as mentioned, ran wiring and installed lights and receptacles.  It’s a wonderful place to retreat and get away from the house and noise.

During construction as I was putting up the interior walls and before installing the door, a little mama wren found herself a nice cozy spot inside what was to become an insulated space between the interior and exterior walls.  Of course, once I realized she was interloping on my cabin and had brazenly claimed my wall for her nest, I had to halt that part of my construction, and before you knew it, there was a lot of raspy screeching going on in the nest, and that poor little girl worked as only a loving mama can, fetching grubs and grasshoppers for them, and somehow, she managed.  I had other areas of work to do, so I got used to hearing them and watching as she, at first kind of apprehensively, darted in and out to feed them and take out the trash.

I managed to peek in the nest once, and thought there were three gaping little mouths, but I tried to stay away as much as I could.  Mama got to where she didn’t mind me being in here at all.  This all went on for a couple of weeks, and then one day she flew in, and it was a bit odd that she used a different entrance than she had been using.  She didn’t go to the nest but stood on the very top of the wallboard in the opening under the roof and chirped until the little ones came out of their nest one at a time.  She flitted outside to a nearby tree and continued to chirp and call for them until there were four (I didn’t see all of them when I peeked in earlier) little fledglings in a row on the wallboard trying to work up enough nerve to make the jump out into the unknown.  One by one they clumsily jumped out and flitted and fluttered into the tree from where she had called, banging into the trunk, but somehow hanging on.  Before long, she was flying ahead of them as they all found their tiny wings and within just a few minutes they mastered the art of flight! 

Mama, with babies in tow headed down toward the wet-weather creek, and that’s where they were when I heard the last of her chirps and flight training instructions.  I never saw them again, at least that I know of.  I came back inside and started to remove their lodgings, but not knowing much about wild birds, I decided to leave the nest in case they needed to come back, maybe to sleep in the night, but they never did.  They were gone for good. When I started removing their little nest, I found myself thinking and wondering if they might have memories of their infancy there and resent having their childhood home torn down, but I realized that wild critters don’t necessarily have attachments to things like us people do.  At any rate, I quickly found that I really missed their fussing and mama coming and going – I didn’t realize how attached to them I had become until they were gone, but my consolation was that they were out in the wild as nature intended, chasing their own grasshoppers, and finally I could finish that wall!

I’ve been posting about spring lately, but I just can’t get enough of this nice warm weather and green shoots are just beginning to show up on most of the trees.  I get just as excited when the fall colors burst onto the scene, but for now we get to anticipate springtime and it looks like there’s going to be quite the dogwood show, maybe as beautiful as we had in 2021.  Maybe that little mama wren will find another cozy spot nearby to raise more babies.

Enjoy the spring ya’ll!