Heroes Not Zombies

There’s a little bird which makes a nest in the garden each year. I don’t know what the bird is. She’s very shy, and hard to see. What I find strange is that she makes the flimsiest nests I’ve ever seen, and often makes them in what seem pretty precarious locations. Usually, she make a nest out towards the end of one of the branches of the mulberry tree and when the wind blows the nest bounces about crazily. One year, I found about four very young chicks sitting on the grass. They had all fallen out of the little nest, which I saw when I looked up above my head to see where they might have come from. I gently placed them all back into the nest, but the nest was really tiny….it was quite a squeeze! And the construction of the nest was so flimsy that it had almost fallen into two or three separate pieces. However, putting them back worked, and a few days later they had all matured enough to fly off, leaving the tiny, bedraggled nest to the winds.

This year I found the remains of her nest in one of the buddleia bushes. Look at it. Isn’t it tiny? The construction of nests boggles my brain. I am amazed at how birds know how to weave together the little stalks and twigs and other materials that they gather into the shape of a nest. I’m especially amazed when you see them do it for the first time. How do they know how to do this? As best I know they aren’t taught the technique by older birds. They seem to be born with the knowledge. So, finding a nest always evokes my feelings of wonder and awe.

As I looked at this little nest, I was aware that, although I judged it flimsy and precarious, it seems that for the most part, it is good enough. It does the job. It enables an adult female to lay her clutch of eggs, for the eggs to hatch and for the little ones to be fed until they are big enough to fly off and live their lives elsewhere.

These little nests aren’t exactly what we would call home, or are they? What I mean by that is that the birds don’t seem to construct a nest as a permanent home. They don’t build what we humans call “a forever home”. Maybe some species do, but I don’t know enough about ornithology to know if that’s true. What I see in the garden is nests built by different species of birds, all of which seem to use the nest for a single season.

So, what is a home?

I heard someone say “A home is not what you own, it’s where you feel loved”. That’s a nice thought. And maybe for the baby birds, that’s exactly right. Maybe these homes are the places where they are born, where they nourished, nurtured and protected, until they are ready to set off and live a more autonomous life. Maybe they just don’t need the effort and expenditure of energy necessary to build a permanent home. These seasonal, single use, ones seem to fit the bill (if you’ll excuse the pun!)

What do you think? What creates a sense of home for you? How many homes have you had in your life so far? And how many homes do you think you might live in, in the future? How do you create a sense of home?

Do you agree? Is home the place where you feel loved? The place where you feel nurtured, nourished and protected? Surely that’s the basic minimum for a home, and surely, everyone deserves such a place they can they call home? It’s a sad fact that for millions of people, that’s not the case. Surely we can do better than that. Surely we can create a world where everyone has a true home?