FLOWN THE NEST

We have an integral garage at the side of our house. The bit between the garage door and an upstairs bedroom the wall is finished with vertical planks of wood, tongued and grooved and stained with Cuprinol. In the dead centre is a ventilation cover. There is a six-inch gap between the planks on the outside and the internal garage wall. I broke two slats of the plastic vent cover a few months ago and never quite got round to replacing the cover. Six or seven weeks ago, a pair of starlings innovatively built a nest in the space between the outer and inner walls of the garage. The father struggled gamely to bring food back and forward through the broken slats of the ventilation cover to his offspring. I don’t know how many babies there were, but there was certainly more than one. Eventually, my wife took off the rest of the vent cover so that entry and exit from the nest-site for the father and mother was easier. I thought that all of the starlings had left the nest a fortnight ago, but, in fact, one had stayed behind. It was the runt of the litter, still covered with downy fur and coloured light brown, not the deep bottle green of the adults. I saw it every day as it poked its little head out of the ventilation aperture and surveyed all around it. Once or twice it stretched its wings and made as if to fly off. I saw it last Saturday, as I put some newspapers out for recycling. I remember saying to it: “It’s about time you were away, so I can start opening and closing the garage door again without fear of disturbing you.”

I was working in the back garden the day after, on Sunday, sweeping a million sycamore fruits from the back lawn and cursing the pain in my lower back, when my wife came into the garden. “Can you come round the front?” she said. “I think the baby starling has just flown the nest. I can’t hear anything from inside and I can’t reach in to clean up the mess that’s left – I can’t see over the top of the ledge.” I donned a pair of bright yellow Marigold gloves and picked up my torch. I walked around to the front and climbed the small stepladder. I peered in through the hole in the planks to where the starling had built its nest. I shone the torch. There, in the corner, curled up as if asleep, lay a pathetic bundle of feathers. It was the baby starling. It hadn’t survived the night. I tried to ease it out gently but its feet were caught up in some twigs. I had to pull out the twigs as well. I couldn’t see any visible reason why it should have died so suddenly. Perhaps it had been abandoned by its parents and, too terrified or immature to leave the nest, it had simply starved to death. Perhaps it was the cold, because the last few nights had been wicked, even though it is June. I put the starling’s little body into a plastic bag and the plastic bag into, ironically, an empty box of cat food. I dropped the whole lot into the wheely bin next to the garage.

I don’t know why we were both quite so upset at this extremely common vicissitude of nature, but we were. Perhaps it was because we had been looking out for the baby starling every single day since it hatched and had started its twitterings and cheepings. Perhaps it was just the shock of seeing it lying lifeless in a darkened corner of the nest. For a while, the feeling was one of losing a family pet. I finished off the day by driving to the builders’ merchants and buying a new ventilation cover. I’m not going through all that again.