We didn't know how long she had been dead, not versed in country things. One night, coming home, Amber noticed the tiny mother had splayed her wing over the nest. This might have been a maternal, avian technique with which we were unfamiliar, some method of keeping her eggs safe from the stiff breezes as spring turned to summer.
When her posture was no different in the morning, I let Amber know the bird had died above our notice, and I would give her a respectful burial when I returned home. Amber could not leave the task that long undone, not on days with threatening heat, not when leaving the mother on the nest might keep away a father to tend the eggs. The father of this species--the eastern phoebe--does more than fertilize and flee, sticking around to raise the brood. I do not believe he sits on the eggs, so perhaps he didn't see much of a point in lingering until there were mouths to feed or nests to make. I don't recall having seen two, but I would rather preserve the fantasy of hoping he would arrive in time to claim his nascent children.
We were never good neighbors. They nested the light above our front door for as long as we had lived here. These tiny birds left their droppings all over our welcome mat. They didn't even have the courtesy to sing lilting songs or regard us fondly, instead flying away whenever we came within a dozen feet of our home, making us feel like the interlopers. We were. Their nest was on the light the first day we moved in.
They live for three to four years. The dead mother is not the first to nest near us. She will be the last. Were we playing unwitting host to the second generation, the descendants of those first birds?
The bird was not a remarkable creature that would captivate us, a handful of puffed brown feathers over ecru with a pointed beak meant for berries and insects. Phoebe may honor the Roman goddess Diana--she of the moon, the hunter, and childbirth--but it may as likely be the transliteration of its call.
Once, when I was sure no nestlings remained of that brood, I took a broom and knocked the nest onto the porch, where it smashed to a dozen easily scattered pieces. I didn't wish the birds any harm, but I didn't want to extend the invitation any longer than I had to. Let them nest somewhere more hospitable.
Before the week was out, they had rebuilt their nest. Understanding creatures with brains the size of my pinky nail had bested me, I conceded defeat and left it.
As Amber prepares a site for the bird's internment -- little more than digging a hole on the forest's edge where we might pretend scavengers will overlook her corpse for a little while -- they study the bird as we never could in life. The corpse does not indicate the source of death, no blood or infection. A dead bird is not like an expired mammal, not something in prompt need of burial to hide the nakedness of its expiration. In death, a bird becomes all feathers and hollow bones. One can spread the wings as if the specimen might take one final jaunt into the sky, though the air no longer loves a dead bird and will not accept her. Nevertheless, the earthbound cannot help but admire how the sunlight plays over even the dullest pinfeathers. She is holy in her element, seeming still to glide on zephyrs even when reduced to an object.
Inside our apartment, Amber glories over the inside of the eggs, seen via a flashlight from beneath. They are rife with veins that suggest life, though only inasmuch as life had once begun to grow within; even the dead have veins before decay takes over. Their initial assessment discounts one egg as unviable, as it comes pre-cracked. In their words, this is not a terminal condition for an egg, but it is not auspicious. We don't know how long the eggs were without a living mother, if these nights on the edge of summer were enough to stop the forming hearts of baby birds. Amber can only proceed with optimism. They rig a makeshift incubator of a damp cloth and heating pad in a Tupperware container. It wouldn't suffice to hatch most birds. Still, it is better than abandonment atop our light fixture until a new bird kicks them out to lay a clutch of eggs in a stolen nest, as happens with the brown-headed cowbird--though they only do this when they know they have some dupe who will do the child-rearing in their absence.
The eggs sit at a perfect ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit, quiet and unregarded for days until I endeavor to ventilate the apartment by opening the window. Amber reminds me that a stiff breeze might shift the scales between birth and death. Amber is inclined to research the statistics of any animal put in their charge, but they don't rattle off the chances of survival. Just as a dead bird seems more like a still life than a corpse, eggs do not speak to the viewer as anything but the suggestion of a potential life. To us, the eggs are not living but something that might live under perfect circumstances we cannot promise we have provided. They would make poor omelets, of this, and only this, am I sure.
It is a better chance than I could have given them. I would not have smashed them in sweeping the nest again to the ground, nor would I have thought of coddling them. I am not cruel, but a lack of cruelty doesn't equate to an abundance of nurturing intent. Without my wife, they would only have whatever an impersonal nature meant to grant them, absent their mother, dead without explanation.
Spring, even one with unseasonably warm nights, is a time of renewal. The Christians honor the resurrection of their savior--whether he died then, whether he died--floating on the moon tide. The witches hold their equinox--which exists on balance whether witches hold it or not.
Some prayer or magick might bring the cluster of veins and albumin within the shells to the arguable dignity of being another generation of eastern phoebes, even with human foster parents. We help with electric heat instead of maternal feathers. It does no good. Maybe if I had called the time of death that night when first Mother Phoebe did not fly from Amber's entry, the babies might have stood a chance. Their mother's final cooling act of caring extinguished the opportunity. They did not have the sacrament of death, having never formed enough to be called alive. It is reasonable not to regret missing hand-feeding droppers of nutritive pablum to fractional, peeping chicks, all mouth. There is nothing to mourn, so we concede defeat and leave the failed eggs approximately where the earth remains upturned above their mother. It is sentimentality that would have been foreign to the eastern phoebes.
I would not have wanted the obligation of baby phoebes, who would likely not have made it to fledgling flight feathers. They can tolerate the changeability of parents who do not weigh half a pound, but their hearts would have been too finicky for the comfort of an apartment.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.
