Mayhem in the Love Nest

Before I tell you about the Yarn Sale, I have to tell you what happened AFTER the yarn sale.

We were going to have a nap after all that exhausting yarn shopping, and then we were going to eat dinner and go to Shakespeare in the Park. But first I checked my email and found an urgent message from my sister, Mudmama. She’d been watching the webcam and had witnessed a terrible drama unfolding in the Love Nest. Lester and Billie had been fighting. The babies had been trampled by Lester, and the littlest one – Sweet Baby Bongo – was believed to be dead. He was only two days old.

The experts on the chat were saying we needed to remove Bongo’s body from the nest immediately. Also, we needed to separate Lester from his family because he was too rough, Billie was getting stressed out by his presence, and he was “sucking her dry” of all the food intended for the babies.

All along, I’d thought Lester had been a devoted father, helping with the babies and adoring Billie. But others didn’t see him that way. I know he’s very attached to Billie, and maybe he had a pang of jealousy because she didn’t have much time for him anymore. I’m just anthropomorphizing here…the truth is, I have no idea what lovebirds think. Especially boy lovebirds.

What ensued next took the rest of the day, quite literally.

We went back to GC’s place, and opened the doors to the cage, so that Lester would leave. He did. We noticed he had a bloody nose. Then we took the nesting box from the cage. We opened it up and started removing baby birds. I held each baby in my hand for a few seconds. They were so little and warm. Their skin felt tougher than it looked, but they also felt so tiny and vulnerable. I removed Billie, who was just sitting there looking stunned. She panicked and started screeching while we dug through the nest looking for Bongo’s body. Eventually we concluded he wasn’t there, so we put the babies back in the box, and put the box back in the cage. Billie stopped screeching.

Next, we went out and bought a new cage for Lester. While we were setting it up, GC started melting down a bit because it was hot and he was tired and his house was messy because the birds were taking over the place. In order to put the new cage next to Billie’s cage, like the experts thought he should, he’d have to move his couch into the dining room and move his dining room table out, and so on and so forth. He wisely took a few minutes and went down to the basement, where it’s cool, to cool down.

Lester, meanwhile, was freaking out at being locked out of the old cage and separated from his family. He tried for a very long time to find a way back in.

Eventually he got so distraught by the whole experience that he flew down to the floor and sat right beside The Dog’s head. The Dog did a double take and blinked once or twice. Then we all kind of exploded into action. The Dog moved towards Lester, I yelled The Dog’s name, GC leapt across the room, and Lester flew back up to safety. Tragedy averted, we all sat back down again, just in time to see Lester fly down and land on The Dog’s back!

GC accused him of having a death wish. We put The Dog outside and set about in earnest to catch Lester and force him into his new home. This took hours, but eventually we succeeded. We all felt much better, including Lester, once this was accomplished.

Then we looked everywhere else for Bongo’s body. The experts said the parents would not eat him, but they might have pushed him through the bars of the cage, to get rid of the body. We couldn’t find it. We started looking at The Dog suspiciously.

Finally we lured Billie out of the nesting box and remove the box from the cage again. Billie panicked when she realized her babies were missing. We were hiding in the bathroom, rooting through the box in search of Bongo. GC found his tiny little body buried under layers of newspaper. I think I missed him the first time because I thought he’d be bigger than he was. He was so tiny compared to his older brothers and sisters.

GC said some nice words about him and we flushed him down the toilet. Then we returned the nesting box and babies to the cage and to Billie, who by then was apoplectic.

By then it was too late for Shakespeare. Too late for much of anything, really, except a good cry and some Key Lime Gelatto.