Rockin' Robins and the Mounting Bird Poop Debate

Being the 21st Century's version of famed naturalist and bird-watcher John James Audubon, I regale people at work about my vast knowledge of nature and all life that abounds in it.

The picture above is my photo of one of two outdoor smoking areas where my company herds us, like cows, to our most certain demise to partake of the cause of second-hand smoke.

You will note the plastic ashtray stand. And you will note the trees where, on a hot sunny summer afternoon, I stand to seek some shade.

There's a little garden there, overgrown with weeds, but it's better than nothing.

Well, you can imagine the collective horror of the smoking populace when bird poop started amassing on the sidewalk under that first tree.

As if making us walk around to a secluded area of the building wasn't bad enough, now we had to trapse through bird poop.

I've already previously posted about the pooping pigeons on top of the building, which got me on the shoulder once.

This was too much.

Well, and this has become a major tourist attraction at Smokers' Den for the last week and half while I've been stuck in the office with all the nerdy-nerds, it turns out there's a valid reason for all that poop.

A mating robin couple built a nest in that tree in photo No. 1...

...Right above where most of us congregate to make jokes about the company and to talk about the weather and the pooping pigeons and other important news of the day.

And inside that nest, we all noticed, were three chicks, hatchlings or otherwise baby robins.

And so with all the expertise I have as the world's foremost bird baron, I mustered the thought, which I voiced to whomever happened to decide, unfortunately for them, to have a cigarette at the same time I did:

"Why would two stupid robins decide to build their nest right above the gathering location for a bunch of idiotic humans who will stare at them, threaten them just by their presence, joke about them, scare the living daylights out of them?

"And besides all that, who will exhale second-hand smoke that will be carried right up into those tree branches and endanger the health of their babies?"

I made sure this debate has continued all these past 10 or so days, driving fellow employees nuts.

The fact is, there IS no explanation for the choice of nesting site, although one woman did joke that the "crotch" in the tree must have been perfect. But couldn't they have found a safer crotch?

There have also been silly discussions about the redder breasts that male robins have as opposed to female robins, and I was proven right on that score.

The males must attract the females, you see.

However.

The point is, near as we can tell, two of the babies have already left the nest, which is about eight or nine feet off the ground.

Technically, assuming they're still alive, I believe they are now called "fledglings" if they're not "dead things."

The last remaining baby robin -- which I studied carefully all day to document its behaviour -- looked ready to fly the coop, so to speak.

But before it did, I took the following pictures, none of which turned out.

If you can see a baby robin in any of them, you're better than me. I think the third pic below I cut off the nest entirely from the photo, while No. 4 pic, I think, is either upside down or sideways.

Anyway, nature is a beautiful thing. It just seems stupid, sometimes.

I don't know whether the mommy or the daddy robin picked this nest site or whether they made this decision in the middle of the night with no humans there or what.

I guess despite it all, it appears that all three of their babies have survived.

And they did become big stars during their fledgling process as we watched the parents fly off to catch worms, grubs and caterpillars and return to feed them.

Somehow, though, I don't think they're going to clean up their poop. And now that they've all fled the coop, what the heck are we going to talk about now?