Bye Bye Birdie

Remember those birdies I was growing to *love* so much? They are gone. Dead, most likely. After blogging last night, I went to bed late and made the mistake of looking up bird mites on my cell phone while lying in bed. The horror stories about bird mites cost me an entire night of sleep. I was seriously hyperventilating, and I am not exaggerating. All I could think was that we needed to get rid of that nest ASAP, babies notwithstanding. I sound like a monster for that, but if you read the following links, you will perhaps cut me some slack. When it's between my babies and the birdie babies, I'll pick my babies every time.

At 8am this morning I called a wildlife removal company nearby and they promptly came to remove the nest. Heavenly Father loves me. I was struggling with my decision to deliberately cost these birdies their lives, but when the technician arrived, the nest had already fallen to the driveway below on its own. The tech said that's not uncommon with invasive bird species' nests and was especially unsurprised in this case as the nest had been built on the sloping surface of our garage flood light.  So we stood there and watched as this man collected the fallen chicks and the nest, nimbly avoiding the dive-bombing mama bird, and wrapped them up into a garbage bag.  It was a difficult sight to stomach.  Soren was especially sensitive to the plight of this little family of Finches.  Thankfully, the man told us that he would be taking the babies to a wildlife rescue to see if they could be nurtured and released.  Soren later related his emotional roller coaster he'd experienced this morning as I had first told him the babies would die for us to avoid bird mites, then the technician suggested they might live.  Soren also mentioned how much he felt for the mama since he knew how devastated I would be to lose my babies and he figured it must be the same for that little mama Finch.  I told Soren we could pray for that birdie family wherever they all may be and he seemed satisfied with that solution to our emotional attachment.

Lesson learned: never let a bird build a nest on your home.  Never.  You may think it will be a cute, cuddly experience, but it's not.  It's a poop-splattered, peep-dripping, baby-screeching, bug-infesting one instead.

As I survey our pressure-washed, hospital-grade-disinfected, poop-free driveway and flood light, I am relieved to have some peace of mind over this whole issue.  Hopefully tonight I will sleep deeply.  I am weary.  I have been having way too many run-ins with bugs and spiders of late and am worried I'm going to become bug-phobic.  I've been finding caterpillars in our CSA broccoli, we've had an influx of earwigs and spiders inside our home resulting in a couple of spiders-meet-laundry incidents, this whole bird mite issue cropped up and induced a very real panic, our backyard is a haven for Black Widows, and today we went to a new park with older, dilapidated play structures that were literally covered in spider webs.  I'm done, I tell ya.  Done.

Happy to have averted the deep deep doo doo.  Fly free little birdies!  I'm sure birdie heaven is so much better than your noisy start to this telestial life above our roaring garage door.

Bird Mite Nightmare
San Diego Family Nightmare