This Property Has Been Abandoned

Ah well… I can only hope the pair of house sparrows who moved in April 3 and built a nest inside one of the paper lanterns in the backyard only to have it and their two eggs destroyed in the April 12 wind storm have found a safer more secure place to rebuild and repopulate it because it seems clear that they have no interest in coming back to the scene even though I situated the nest — which survived the devastation relatively intact — into a new lantern that I hung up not more than 12 hours afterward.

I can only figure that if basically 10 days has passed and the birds aren’t moved back in then they’re pretty much not going to do so. As such I opted to take the nest down yesterday and reilluminate the lantern.

But we’re keeping the beautiful intricate and amazing nest, which I snapped this morning (click images to enlarge):

nest1.jpg

nest2.jpg

While it leaves me more than melancholy to see so much marvelous and remarkable engineering end up not serving its purpose, at the same time I’m thrilled to be able to appreciate it and share it.