As Good As SOLD

It’s Darwinian…

July 5th, 2007

I took down a series of birdhouses last fall and left them in the atrium of our house over the winter. I overlooked one as I erected them this past May, a ‘down market’ straw coconut-like thing that no previous birds had ever bothered with. Over the winter it had fallen from wherever I had left it the previous autumn and wedged itself behind a set of stacking lawn chairs, and that’s where it was this spring when a family of Berwick wrens, renowned for their unorthodox nesting sites, found it and set up housekeeping inside.

They soon had a nest underway and from inside my wife and I watched them come and go…and it wasn’t long before it was apparent that young chicks had hatched.

Early one morning soon thereafter I looked out only to see a half-fledged baby on the atrium floor. It had either fallen out or, perhaps, pushed in some Darwinian application that sets in when food is scarce and needs competing for. One for the cat. It lay there all morning, its heart beating almost imperceptably, obviously not long for this world. The ‘tough love’ parents came and went with assorted insects for the siblings destined to survive, but paid this one no heed.

“Leave it be”, my wife counseled. “It’s obviously not meant to live. Even the parents have given up on it.”

I took a spade and prepared a small hole in the garden for the inevitable.

So imagine my surprise and amazement later that day when I noticed it had somehow not expired; instead, it was making an attempt at movement. And life. It reminded me in a small way of Jon Krakauer’s account of survival in his riveting book ‘Into Thin Air’ wherein he describes the disastrous climb up Mt. Everest and both the death and heroics that ensued. Its half-fledged wings attempted first flight but its legs, now caught in the gaps thoughtfully provided by the floorboards, ruled out any real mobility — and certainly precluded any return to the nest.

The parents remained indifferent to its struggle and continued to service the nest with no offer of sustenance to their fallen offspring.

“Should we pick it up and put it back in the nest?” my wife asked.

“Leave it be” I rejoined. “It’s obviously not meant to live. Even the parents have given up on it.”

But live it did, and I couldn’t but intervene. With the help of a Popsicle stick and rubber gloves so as not to impart human scent, I picked the wretch up off the floor and gently slipped it back into the company of its siblings. Whether they were pleased to see him I can’t say (see ’competition for food’ above), but when I took the nest down a week or so later it was, to my happy surprise, empty. No maggoty carcass bearing testimony to its demise as I had expected to find.

It’s Darwinian. As with the marketplace, the strong survive.

It’s just that some of us need a boost now and again.

Entry Filed under: Real Estate Matters