An Elusive Bluebird

I was sitting there a few mornings ago watching a pair of bluebirds making a nest in our bluebird box.

They’d been flirting with the box for several days.

The male is neat and sleek in his bright blue frock coat and rosy vest. He has spent a lot of time sitting on a fence wire nearby. Keeping watch, I think. Sometimes he sits on the roof of the box, or on top of the fence post to which the box is attached. Occasionally he brings a tiny twig of something to the entrance hole.

The female brings larger straws. More substantial building materials. She looks more harried, too, or maybe that’s just my anthropomorphizing.

She is very industrious. Watching the process gives me an outsize pleasure. I know Hale, my late husband, would agree. We struggled for years to attract bluebirds.

One of the first things he did when we came here was put up lovely wooden bluebird boxes. Pleasant family accommodations, we thought.

He spent so much time thinking of what would please the birds that he forgot to place the boxes where we could see them during the course of a day. As a result I’ve never been sure that any were actually used by the intended bird.

I do know that chickadees liked them. I know that because I’ve come upon their nests in the box after nesting season. And the real proof lies in the superfluity of chickadees we have around our house.

Will this year be different? I don’t have high hopes, actually. Too much can go wrong. And it can go wrong before the first bird arrives.

Although I’m not sure of the best timing, I’m fairly sure I was late in cleaning out the box. And I did it inadequately. Just pulled out the old nest.

I had very little hope of bluebirds, at that point. But now that two have arrived, I realize a worse omission. I have failed to install a baffle to protect against snakes and other predators who specialize in climbing fence posts.

Not for the first time, I wish that I were a handy person. It would be tricky to install a barrier once the nest is under construction.

All that took place early in the week. Now it’s the weekend and I’m in Brownsville for a meeting. The life of those bluebirds goes on without my observation. Instead I am observing flocks of Texas writers—poets, novelists, journalists, writers of kid lit.

Members of the Texas Institute of Letters congregate annually somewhere in the state to make and renew friendships, hand out awards for exceptional work. I won one of those awards a few years ago and now I’ve been taken into membership.

Except for me, it’s an august body, if one knows the resumes. I was chatting away last night with a Pulitzer- and Tony Awardwinning playwright. Not that I knew he wore those accolades. We were talking very comfortably about work, when someone came up and mentioned the Pulitzer. And he became shy.

Writers in the wild—or shed of daily domesticity as they are here—do remind me of birds. This is not a new perception. Some are invested in hierarchy, some are insecure among newcomers, asserting themselves so that their position is confirmed.

The ones I like best are those who wear their plumage lightly, like bluebirds, elusive and desirable. To be known best in their song.

Readers can contact Hale at bfhale2017@gmail.com Her new book, This Familiar Heart, is available at the Fayette County Record office and bookstores, on and offline, everywhere.