You Reap What You Sow

This year my brother and sister-in-law, Cash and Marisa, ended up with a bunch of fantastic produce from their little garden planted along the whole length of their back fence. It's nice for me because I get some of the leftover stuff when I happen by, which I should have done more often in the last month. We have a harvest at our house, too, only it's not nearly as useful as the Hill's. We grew baby birds this summer. Well, we didn't really do it on purpose, but it happened on our front porch, nonetheless. I wish I could say I was thrilled with it all, but there is a big fat downside to a nest built directly above the first step up to your front porch. It looks like this:

Yep. We have been sidestepping and spraying away bird poop all summer. While we were enthralled watching the swallow parents construct a nest on the 1/2" lip on the underside of our porch cover, we didn't stop to think what would happen when mommy and daddy swallow perched on the edge of the nest to feed their babies. Birds poop a lot. A whole lot. I think one of the reasons Dalin was so excited to go to school was that he wouldn't have to spray the poop off the porch everyday. Now Brent does it -- hee hee.

Ok, it was pretty cool seeing the tiny eggs in the nest and watching the ugly little swallow babies poking their heads and gigantic beak mouths up to be fed, but when the babies flew off in July while we were on vacation, we didn't cry too much. Unfortunately for us, we didn't take the nest down, and guess what? The mommy and daddy were very prolific this summer and deposited five more eggs in the nest. You can't take a nest down when it has eggs in it. That would be like abortion or something. So we suffered through round two. The funny thing about this batch of babies was that they weren't afraid of us. Where the first batch would hunker down in the nest whenever they heard the door or a car, these dumb babies poked their heads right out and stared at us. It was a little disconcerting and a bit creepy, to tell the truth. Not to mention that the swallow parents scolded us all summer whenever we opened the door and disturbed a rest or a feeding.

Moral of the story? As soon as you see a cute little swallow couple building a nest anywhere close to where you step, take it down. When you're a bleeding heart, you reap what you sow, I'm telling ya. It's best to watch the whole process on PBS.