Pardon my junco

Earl Fowler

Spring comes early to the southern tip of Vancouver Island. By late January, the daffodil bulbs and hyacinths I transplanted into hanging pots one rainy September more than a decade ago start pushing shoots through the surface at a petal-to-the-medal pace straight out of Little Shop of Horrors.

The tulips emerge a few weeks later. We’re visually serenaded with their classic shades and rich tones through mid-April or so, when the plants devolve into drab, grassy introverts until their astonishing renaissance the following winter. The bloom comes off the rose, then returns with a vengeance when we need it most.

As usual this year, spring began a few weeks after Christmas with our modest desire to dispel the gloom of monsoon season by hanging a cheerful pot of flowers on our townhouse balcony, immediately adjacent to the screen door.

We enjoyed the splash of colour, as ever a Pinterest-worthy touch of domesticity. But what we hadn’t reckoned on was an unpaid sublease arrangement with two dark-eyed juncos, an avian couple that treated our floral decor like prime real estate listed on Zillow.

They moved in without so much as a peep or a chirp. The first clue something was a-wing was a suspicious flurry of frenetic activity around the pot. I stepped out with a coffee in hand, only to be buzzed by what I took to be a confused bat or unaccountably irate hummingbird.

Turned out to be Mr. Junco, who considered me an intruder in his studio apartment. Mrs. J, having pledged her troth to her mate without any intention of becoming a meek female helpmeet, was ever the project manager. Though covered in mulch, she fluttered in and out of the flower pot with the urgency of Vin Diesel in the latest Fast & Furious reboot, every twig mapping out a hairpin turn, every leaf a turbo boost. Cue the dramatic car chase music. “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd will do nicely.

Endeavouring to be unobtrusive as Episcopalians at a graveside, we watched at a respectful distance from behind the glass as our new neighbours — members of the Oregon junco subspecies, if you want to get ornithological about it — performed the avian equivalent of an extreme home makeover.

They kicked out flower petals like entitled house-flippers, replacing our meticulously layered soil by felting together strands of twigs, feathers, moss, lichen shreds, dryer lint and a comically placed string that hung down like a pull cord for a condo light fixture.

In less than 48 hours, our once-handsome hanging pot had been transformed into a janky but fully functional nursery. When viewed by poking one’s head out of the bedroom window a storey above the balcony (a bird’s-eye view, as it were), the nest below resembled nothing quite so much as a round stretch of coastline fraying into an ocean estuary. But it was never half that peaceful or relaxing.

For there she was — the expectant mom, dead centre in the pot, brooding with the emotional intensity of a method actor wired on Red Bull and staring me down with a look that said, “You touch this basil and I swear I will end you!”

The correct pronunciation of that warning in Junconese, by the way, is: “Tink, tink, tink, tink, tink!” Chirped with extreme malice and, if necessary, accompanied by tactical air strikes.

The normal song of a junco at rest is a simple musical trill similar to that of their plain Jane cousin, the chipping sparrow. More of a rattle or a congested rale heard through a stethoscope, to be honest, than anything that would excite Brill Building talent scouts.

The “tink” call note is common to many sparrow and warbler species in situations of high alarm. Even straight out of their eggs, hatchlings know to stay still and keep their heads down when they hear it.

You likely know what a junco looks like, but just in case: They’re small, ground-feeding sparrows with round, dark heads and white or silver breasts and bellies. They have pale, conical bills and boast white outer-tail feathers that they flash —  with the arrogant flair of a white peacock spreading his fan — when retreating for cover after being flushed.

The males generally have darker heads than the females. In lieu of the the grey hoods juncos exhibit east of the Rockies, the ones you see here come with dark brown hoods, light brown backs and buffy sides.

The Oregon subspecies that lives in southern B.C. sticks around through the worst of the winter. When there’s snow on the ground, which usually lasts around here for only a week or two (some years it doesn’t snow at all), you’ll see them fold their feet under their bodies and fluff out their feathers as a convenient built-in quilt feature. Any Canada Goose outerwear salespeople would be wasting their time.

If I remember our 20 years in Montreal correctly, slate-coloured juncos also overwinter in much of Central Canada in decent numbers. But in Saskatchewan, where I grew up, the harsh Prairie climate drives them southward, as surely as it does human snowbirds.

From what I just read in my handy Compact Guide to British Columbia Birds by Wayne Campbell, Gregory Kennedy, Krista Kagume and Carmen Adams, juncos usually nest on the ground in a concealed space: “Whitish to bluish eggs are 19x14 mm; female incubates 3-5 eggs for 12-13 days.”

In our rental property, the three little eggs that soon appeared in the cup-like bassinet were more on the bluish side. We avoided using the balcony as much as possible during the incubation period, and I was taunted, heckled and derided with vigorous, unrelenting tinking whenever I crawled on my hands and knees to water the other plants on the balcony, always giving the nest as wide a berth as possible.

I didn’t dare water our new secondary suite for fear of flooding the tenants. As it dried out during our unusually arid April — with its dishevelled, yellowing leaves forlornly drooping — the pot increasingly took on the profile of a cross between Garth from Wayne’s World and Sk8r Boi-era Avril Lavigne, as seen from behind. In the sepia light of early dawn or late dusk, it was also possible to visualize encountering Johnny or Edgar Winter head-on. This took surprisingly little imagination.

And then, suddenly — they’re here, they’re here, let the bells ring out and the banners fly! — came the hatchlings. Nestlings for nothing! Chicks for free!

There’s really no way to prepare for the sight of baby birds: equal parts hideous and holy, like a patchwork of random body parts spliced together by eminent Swiss scientist Victor Frankenstein. They looked like damp chicken nuggets with closed eyes and impossibly large mouths on impossibly small heads.

In the early days, with mom sometimes sitting on top to warm them, the ugly infants seemed to be enjoying the douceur de vivre of spa life — even as complex networks of tissues and neurons were carving themselves into three wondrous little balls on four-toed feet. Even as three separate sparks of avian consciousness grew ever more cognizant of their surroundings.

The moment the chicks sensed motion — me, a breeze, a passing thought — they’d erupt into a frenzy of wide-open beaks, pleading for bug-eyed vittles.

Both parents immediately shifted into full-tilt SkipTheDishes mode, shoving impaled, partially digested insects into the red maw of gaping beaks with the speed and frequency of an Amazon Prime warehouse during the holidays.

The adults were especially fun to watch in the evenings as they dive-bombed for flying insects like Kim Novak falling from the bell tower in Vertigo, then soared back up like Top Gun’s Maverick Mitchell against our glorious backdrop of dark coniferous pillars relieved by the light frivolity of maples, dogwoods and ferns here in the Wood Wide Web.

The chicks grew at an alarming rate. One minute they were bald, burnished jellybeans. Then fluffless meatballs. Then amorphous cotton wool. A week later, they were awkward, hopping teenagers with bright eyes and streaked brown coats, light grey hoods and zero self-awareness. You know the type. Frequently seen vaping at bus stops and outside malls.

As they grew, the jittery critters spilled over the sides of the nest like they were trying to crowd-surf out of it. We became more emotionally invested. On Thursday afternoon, we cheered their clumsy bounces and practice wing flaps like little league grandparents.

But by Friday morning — the fledglings were gone.

Just ... gone.

Off they went, into the wild blue yonder to seek their fortunes. No goodbye, no thank you note, not even a poop-free flower left behind in gratitude.

The adults, too, had vanished. The balcony was eerily quiet but for the sound of the wind animating the wedge of rainforest behind our place, and I figured the once-claustrophobic pot was now an empty, existential void.

I stood there, experiencing a full-blown empty nest syndrome over creatures that had nearly pecked my face off on several occasions. So you could have knocked me over with a feather when a single fuzzy head suddenly appeared over the edge of the nest, peering back at me.

The third fledgling, smaller than the others so presumably the last to hatch and the least able to compete for morsels of food from the parents, hadn’t gathered the strength yet to venture out of the nursery and learn to survive on its own. Its jerky motions were those of a sleepy drunk at closing time.

We were initially concerned that the parents had abandoned the little guy, but they soon reappeared with another round of bugs in beaks for Mr. Failure to Launch. We switched to Netflix and went to bed optimistic that night that God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.

The nest was completely vacant on Friday morning (this time I double checked), which didn’t seem like a cause for concern. At least, not until that indeterminate lump under a chair turned out to be a tiny airless torso instead of a fallen leaf, a lifeless feathered wrapper with the clawlike feet of a fetal Tyrannosaurus.

It met my tender view with the force of a sharp blow to the solar plexus. If God so loves the little birds, I know he loves me too. “Death is woven in with the violets,” Virginia Woolf had written in The Waves in a line that had always haunted me. “Death and again death.” So here we were again.

Not sure what happened overnight, but Tennyson wasn’t wrong in his famous description of nature being red in tooth and claw. “Nature is Satan’s church,” Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character tells Willem Dafoe’s in Lars von Trier’s 2009 movie, Antichrist. That might be overstating it, but this much is true: Whatever feelings and consciousness had stirred in that little bird brain in the last two weeks had leaked out again into the cosmos as mysteriously as they’d appeared.

It was heartbreaking to watch the parents continue to arrive with food all morning while sounding their distress call. They fluttered around throughout the afternoon, even after I’d removed the little body from the scene.

By Saturday morning, after I’d hosed down the balcony and scrubbed away the dirty bits, there was no evidence that the birds had ever been there. Apart, of course, from a perfectly good straw cradle, four inches across and two inches deep. No reason any small songbirds couldn’t start a new brood in there. But from what I read, nesting juncos prefer to start over from scratch. In any case, we prefer to reclaim our balcony for the summer.

So what did we learn? Mostly that juncos make for both terrible tenants and an excellent spectacle. Also: It’s a bad idea to hang flower pots early unless you’re ready for nature’s chaos to move in and emotionally compromise you.

But miss them, I do. Sitting here at our table on the balcony as I write this — without being dive-bombed as I would have been only yesterday — I think I might finally have an inkling of what Wallace Stevens was getting at when he wrote about seeing both the “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

Next January, we’ll hang another pot and hope for a new chapter with a better ending. Why put ourselves through all this melodrama again? Well, to quote the fabulous Cowboy Juncos, simply ’cause cheep is how I feel.