The Nest

I passed the nest every night.

So I said that to the stranger: a sort of young thing. “These owls have lived here longer than me. Isn’t that perfect?”

The park bench stretched wide between us while she waited for the bus, probably surprised to be confronted by an unfamiliar, older man. Her wide, glossy eyes told me it was more fear than wonder. Apprehension, maybe. 

Old fabric creaked as I sank further into the wooden bench, holding my binoculars up again. There they sat, high up in a moonlit oak tree, taller than any barn or building in this place. Proud. Sure. Four owls stare back with silvered eyes and patience like thread, just waiting to snap. 

A delicate voice cut through the early morning fog. The schoolgirl’s stupor cleared and left behind something curious. “How long have you lived here?”

“Since last Easter.” Three months. 

“Will you be around for the fireworks?” Her interest had little to do with my birds, but it made me happier to see such a subtle thing. A lot of kids around here didn’t have much to do for fun. Small town problems, if I had to guess. 

My fingers were slow to fiddle with the binocular’s lens, tightening and twirling about the knob. I would be around for the fireworks. I would be around the cornerstore, picking up some ear braces. The steadiness of my heartbeat flushed into a rapid pounding at the thought of the shaking sky. 

 The owls cooed, reminding me of her question.

“No, the park gets too crowded. I like the quiet.” I held the binoculars out to her and waited a moment for her eyes to return to me. She was scanning the roads for her bus, rubbing a pink watch impatiently. 

“Where do I look?” Her glasses clinked against the glass plates gently and her tentative smile withered into a concentrated pout. The girl was completely searching in the wrong direction, but I let her look for just a few seconds. It would make finally seeing the formidable bundle of sticks and feathers all the sweeter. 

I raised a heavy hand towards the untouched treeline that bordered the park, where the elbow of almost every tree had a nest of birds or squirrels. Nature enthusiasts: birdwatchers and the like, often walked the forested paths, unaware that the best view was from right here. “A little higher, to the right. It’s bigger than you’d think, trust me.” 

Hands wavering, she loosened the focus. The moonlight would fade soon, she would board a bus, and the girl would forget about this by the end of the week. But when she finally spotted the nest, I knew her reaction would stay with me for a very long time, nestled in my bag next to all the pamphlets I’d collected from the Veterans Affairs office down the way. 

“Very roomy.” She smiled in a shy, sweet way.

I knew what she meant. 

The hatchlings were only a month old. When I left in the morning and found another place to rest, their screeching and tittering would follow me. While the sounds never reached me all the way over here, I could tell what the three of them wanted while they flapped their bony wings and sent down feathers crashing over the nest’s walls. I could tell that they barely filled half of the nest when downy plumes puffed around their every squawk.  

Chicks left their eggshells as soon as the woodlands heated but refused to grow for so long, at least, not in any way I could track.

“There were six when they all hatched.” Her shoulders hunched and she tried to tighten the focus more, but it wasn’t any use. Their mother rested over the three of them, careful to protect whoever was left. 

“Oh.”

Her voice was heavier than it should’ve been so early in the day, and for that I almost regretted telling her about the birds at all. But I left the binoculars in her grip as she watched their white flashing outlines, bending down to shuffle through my pack. When the library had let me in for closing hours last week, the front desk worker had given me overstock on the way out. Birdwatching was less popular than you’d think, so they always had nearly pristine copies sitting in the back.

The streetlamps illuminated the page numbers until I successfully flipped to the sixty seventh, a section dedicated only to Great Horned Owls. Bubo virginianus, it was a funny looking name, but I pointed the scrawling words out to her. I placed it on the bench between us and allowed her to sift through the article, picking out whatever information pleased her. The whole thing had been read front to back a few times by me and whoever had it before, but it had never looked so important as it did in her small grip.

“I don’t think I’d like to eat bones.” She whispers in an odd, wondrous way. That was in the fourth paragraph. 

“Owls’ beaks are harder, like fingernails.” I stuck out a buckled pinky. The girl would learn one day that owls, large and small, hack up stumps of bone and fur. Too gruesome for the wait before school, a second before sharing I decided. 

The girl dropped the pamphlet back to the bench and returned to the nest with a different sort of vigor. Small beeps sounded down the road, and a bus rounded the carefully lit corner. She didn’t glance up. 

Moonlight dropped to a light shade of cool mist over the area, and the streetlamps shuttered off one by one in anticipation of the rising sun. Hopping up, the girl shouldered her backpack and righted her glasses. The bus came to a stop behind the bench with a hiss, and she glanced at it sadly even when her friends waved through a tinted window. 

The driver honked again when I took my binoculars and booklet back with lighter hands.

The birds would see her again.