Liar Liar! Pants on fire!

If I don't tell my children something, does that make me a liar? This will be a photo-less post, by the way. You will know by the end why there are no pictures.

About a month ago, a pair of chickadees moved into the birdhouse that my sister gave to my mother for Christmas. It has been such a sweet joy to watch them at work. And work is what they have done! Our girls filled a net onion bag--you know, the red ones you buy three pounds of onions in at the grocery store--with bits of dried grass, yarn, and hair from their hairbrushes. And guess what? A week or two later, we peeked in the bird house and we found . . . a nest! Built with soft green moss and . . . long soft strands of blond hair. And a few tiny white-with-brown-speckles eggs. So sweet. A few weeks after that, we peeked in the bird house again. No eggs. Hmph. Well, either they hatched and we completely missed it. Not likely with how religiously we've all been watching the parents come and go! Or . . . the eggs were abducted by squirrels or racoons or some other local neighborhood bandit.

So we watched and waited. A few days later, the same or another pair of chickadees (can you tell them apart?? Then hush!) moved in. Soon we discovered two sweet tiny eggs. We'll give Mother Nature a second chance.

We have to back-track here for just a second. When we hung up the house at the end of winter, there was some discussion about where to hang it--ideally high enough and sheltered enough to provide protection from predators (fail?) and securely enough that it wouldn't be blown down in a windstorm, etc. Well, being the lazy bum that I am, I threaded a twist-tie through the hole at the top of the box, and looped it over a nail that was already at the top of the stockade fence in the back yard. Epic fail, as they say.

Yesterday morning, I looked out the kitchen window to see what the chickadees were up to. No bird house. WHAT?? NO HOUSE?? CRAP!! I dashed outside in my slippers and discovered the house on its side in the flower bed. Really no words for this. With dread, I picked up the box, tapped on it gently with fading hope that a parent was inside and would come out before I opened it . . . and then I opened it. My gut wrenched. Inside was one egg unhatched, and a tiny featherless baby chickadee. Still and stiff.

I take full responsibility. Internally. I feel 100% responsible for this second failed clutch of eggs. Clearly the parents were doing their job. They were flitting back and forth all day long. And maybe all night, for all we know! The baby was clearly too big to have just hatched. They had been tending it for days successfully. Until my jimmy-rigged half-baked non-secure system predictably failed.

So the question now is . . . what do I tell the girls?? So far I have told them nothing. The house sits at the edge of the flower bed, and no one has said a word about it. We've been too busy with end of the school year chaos and moving preparations. But they will ask. They have child-curiosity. What do I say? I don't want to say a word. I want to crawl into the bird house myself and pretend I did a better job. If I cross my fingers and hope it never gets discussed, have I been dishonest?