My Friend's Baby

It's a hard life.

Nests are built with painstaking care, then destroyed arbitrarily by wind or weather or beast.

Eggs are laid.
Sat on for hours at a time by hungry mothers who wail and wait on dad to bring them a few bites of bugs and some backwashed gutter water. Then something happens. A raptor, maybe. Or a squirrel. Nest and eggs destroyed in a flurry of hunger and survival.

Or maybe the eggs make it. They hatch. Little babies poke little beaks out into the world. Parents look on with pride. Relatives come by. Everyone is happy. Everyone is hungry. For a time, life is only about nutrients and protecting the kids.

But maybe there's a raccoon with her own babies to feed. A nestling crow is just the right size.

Or maybe the babies fledge only to find themselves under the wheel of a car or caught in a power transformer or slowly consumed from the inside out by avian pox.

Maybe they die. Every single one.

All that hard work. All that love. Fragile. Finite.

And yet they persist.

Momo and one of her three babies. May they all survive and thrive well into adulthood.

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