Birds enliven our gardens. They fly, dart, and interact with one another. Their songs add beautiful sounds. They are helpful to us gardeners as they eat huge amounts of insects, especially while raising chicks, which helps keep their numbers in balance. It’s a delight to find nests in trees and shrubs when the leaves fall in autumn. I love to look closely to see how birds wove found bits into the nest structure: twigs, grass blades, and even ribbons of littered paper and plastic. Once I found a string still tied to bamboo skewers I had used to mark seeds I direct-sowed in the spring garden. I had wondered what had happened to that little rig…

If we’re lucky, birds make their nest where we can witness the construction process, along with eggs and raising of chicks.

A few days ago, I hung hummingbird feeders as I usually do in mid-April to welcome the weary little birds on their return north. As I stepped onto the front porch, feeder in hand, I nearly collided with a mourning dove, who flapped madly to get out of my way. I then noticed a puzzling amount of sticks and tangles of dried grapevine on the porch floor, and looked up. In the swing, still hung high for the winter, was a flat, haphazard nest with one white egg poking up. Robins have tried to nest in this same spot before, but I removed the start of those nests and lowered the swing to discourage them. But I was too late to dissuade these birds.

Mother dove is now a constant presence incubating her egg (or maybe eggs by now) just outside our living room window. We carefully peek to see how she’s doing, and she replies with a blink of her big dark eye. According to the Cornell Ornithology Lab website (https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Mourning_Dove/id), it will be another week before the chicks hatch, then another couple weeks until they fledge. Guess we won’t be using our porch swing for a while.