A tale of two sunbirds

This is not a cooked up or exaggerated story. This is a real life story of a pair of sunbirds who has just finished building a beautiful nest in our entrance ceiling.

Well building nest is not an easy task for birds. It’s a tedious process. Firstly, they have to find a secured place to keep the nest away from the predators’ sights, then they need to cope up with their competitors, they have to do territorial fights to fix a place and they have to collect the proper nesting materials,… and, the struggle goes on. This is pretty common in every birds life.

But here, these birds confronted too many torments other than these, to build the nest. Let’s get into their nest making story.

The pair visited our home, a few days before and was gliding here and there. After finding the wires hanging on the ceiling, the birds decided to make their nest there. Actually a few years before, a sunbird pair build nest over there, exactly at the same place and successfully raised their chicks. I am not sure where these were the same birds or their off springs who are here to continuing their parents’ legacy. But we are pretty happy in either ways

So, here, they have decided the place to build a nest but then noticed a French door with a mirror at the entrance. After seeing their mirror reflections, they were perturbed and were knocking the windows with their curved bills. Perhaps, they were annoyed and disturbed thinking the reflections are their competitors.

I don’t know the reason exactly. But they had been doing that for a week. After discussing the incident with ornithologists, realised that this behaviour is not good for them as it would hurt their beaks badly and as per their advise, we closed the window with a curtain. And after that, they seemed to be relaxed and started building their nest.

And here comes their major struggle. Well, in sunbirds, the female alone involve in nest making process and the male just stay along with the female, help her locate the nesting materials, watch and guard the nesting area. So as you see here, the bird decided to build the nest at the edge of the hanging wires.

But it didn’t get the grip and the materials were falling down continuously and it made the place total mess. But that’s ok, that didn’t matter but what mattered was her efforts.

I had been seeing her spending a whole day, collecting materials from the obscure regions, building the nest by putting a strenuous effort, but at the end of the day, her efforts went in vain. It was not just on that particular day, the bird had been facing this problem for more than a week.

I felt it’s high to interfere in this problem as I didn’t want to see her efforts wasted. I know, the birds take lessons from their errors and they know what to do but still as a bird lover, I couldn’t resist myself doing something in favour of them . So I placed another jute rope near that wire, but it didn’t use that rope. The pair was hanging on the rope and discussing but was not intended to build their nest over there.

Again’, the female Sunbird was collecting nest materials, building nest and again the materials never failed to cascade down and making the entrance tidy. Many a time, she completed building almost 3/4th of the nest but her toil ended up as a fallen nest. And the bitter part was, she never bothered about the fallen materials. Every time when the nest fell, she didn’t even look down, she just went, and collect new materials from outside. Through out this process, the male bird was assisting her, giving some suggestions.

So, it’s already 15 days and I could not see any improvement. I couldn’t see her fail also, so discussed the same with other birding group and they advised me to seal or close the place but since it is our entrance, i couldn’t do either. Finally I decided to cut the wires on the ceiling so that they would find some other places to make their home.

But I wanted to wait for another couple of days. And then, the miracle happened.

Suddenly the pair was thrashing out in a louder note, examined the place carefully and decided to make their nest a few metres above, where there is a default oval shaped knot. And started trying, building nest there and it worked out for them. Yes, a beautiful nest had been built by them on the same place, now.

Although they took a long time to find the solution, they have atlast figured out the strategy. I should not have stated it as a miracle. It was not a miracle, it was the outcome of their hard and smart work. It was their formula for their trail and error techniques. And now a happy family is in progress… Quite a feat, is not it?

Well, that’s a happy story of the sunbirds. Every story has a lesson, right? I have learned a lot new lessons from them.

1) Never give up

2) Be persistent

3) Don’t bother about the failures

4) Never count the tears that roll, never mind the flowers that fall

5) Hard work is needed but smart work is more important.

6) Every problem has a solution and the best part is your solution is right there in your problem, all you need is to perceive and resolve smartly.

7) It’s not mandatory to follow the guidelines and rules strictly. Sometimes, thinking out of the box will be the only way to sustain in this modern world.

I hope you all like this Story…