Five years ago, a robin built a nest in the aspen outside our front window. Her mate tried to help, but most of what he built she had to redo. Only a female can make a nest a home.
She built it with sturdy twigs twisted together to form a cup in the fork of a limb, then lined it with soft grass and moss, comfortable and warm for the chicks soon to come. She sat for two weeks, never seeming to move. Always vigilant.
Always alert. Smothering the eggs in her warmth, waiting patiently until her babies cracked open the thin blue shells that surround their embryonic beginnings. I named her Ethel and her mate, Fred.
Fred has been off singing somewhere, but, when the eggs hatched and the babies raised their beaks and their voices in hunger, he showed up with food for Ethel and the babies. He did so Saturday, June 1. It was an exciting day.
When their feathers grew, he taught them to forage for food and fly to the trees while she built another nest for another brood. Each spring they return to where we live and look for one another so she can build another nest and raise some more robins. Who taught them to do this? How do they know to look for each other each year, and how does she know how to build a nest, lay her eggs and nurture them? I know that some say it is an accident, the result of random chance.
That somehow an amoeba evolved into a robin, built a nest and laid some eggs that hatched into little robins and that this has been going on for thousands of years. How did the firs.
