At the end of last year I noticed several birds swirling around our porch. More specifically, the front door. I began to suspect they were making a nest out of the fall wreath it held.

Suspicions were confirmed when I checked out the wreath and saw there was indeed a new little nest in there. A few weeks later a tall friend expressed surprise at seeing eggs inside the nest. I started taking progress photos once the chicks were born and figured out they must be house finches, based on their physical characteristics and the fact they nested in a front door wreath.

Our first batch of hatchlings learned how to fly and left the nest quickly. I was excited to read that it was likely the finches would return to lay more eggs this season. Soon enough, I took a photo of the nest and found there were two blue eggs inside it.

I continued taking progress photos, but then one day, the two blue eggs were gone. There was a single brown egg in the nest now. I took to the internet to research and realized what was happening.

It looked like a brown-headed cowbird, an invasive nester, had pushed one of the blue eggs to the outskirts of the nest, not sure what happened to the second one (the cowbirds could have eaten it), and laid their own brown egg. The last photo I took was of the chick that had hatched, which was noticeably bigger than the previous chicks.

While all of this was happening, I was recovering from sinus surgery and one night where I had been having a particularly rough date, our roommate informed me that there was a dead chick on the front porch. The chick died from neglect, probably when the finches realized this was not their baby, and after it passed, the parents then “cleaned the nest” and removed it.

I managed to ask our roommate to remove the dead chick and throw the wreath in the trash before I started crying. Which, let me just say, crying right after sinus surgery is not a path I recommend. Yet, I keep doing it!

I decided being a bird mom was not for me. Nature is wonderful, but it can be harsh. Unforgiving, even. At the time, I couldn’t imagine trying to do all of this again. I thought maybe one day I will invest in a finch house, which would be too small for the cowbird to access, and see what happens then.

Maybe I also need to learn not to get so emotionally invested in the random lives of bird.