Persistence

(Don Dale photo, 2011)

My LBJ returned again, this time getting as far as building a nest for the fourth time and laying two eggs. Then she disappeared.

Back in early April, I wrote about this persistent creature that birders call an LBJ. The initialism stands for little brown jobs, small birds of indeterminate species. A birder might have recognized her for what she was, but I'm not a birder and I only saw her a few times -- and then only briefly.

Here it is late May, and last week my nephew Mike spotted the nest in my porch-light fixture when he came by to pick me up to go out to dinner. I watched the nest carefully for the next week, but the LBJ never returned to care for her eggs.

I removed the nest from the light fixture a couple of days ago. I was afraid the heat from the bulb might dry the nest to tinder and start a fire. One of the eggs had disappeared somehow. The pale blue color of the remaining egg had faded to ivory and it had begun to smell bad. I put the abandoned egg and nest in the trash can.

As I said before, I admire this LBJ's persistence -- assuming, that is, that it was the same LBJ and not four different little brown jobs.

Were it not for the light bulb, the fixture would be a perfect nesting spot for a small bird. But after four tries at raising a family there,she should have caught on to the innate problem. She -- or they -- didn't, however, and the effort was doomed. (Perhaps I should build a birdhouse next spring and put it up next to the roof of the porch. I'm sure I could find easy-to-follow plans somewhere on the Internet.)

Here's the moral of the story as I see it: Birds, like people, sometimes make bad decisions -- over and over again.

I'll paraphrase what Samuel Johnson once said about remarriage: Sometimes hope trumps experience.