Tragic End

Sadly I have to report that Ms Robin and her nest of eggs were destroyed by a neighborhood feral cat. Last Monday (sorry it's been a wild week getting ready for school), I went with one of my best friends, Marty, to get school supplies and had a great lunch with her and my other best friend, Angie.  When we returned the kids immediately went into this long story of how Jaron, our oldest went to take pictures to see if the eggs were hatched yet.  One had started to hatch over the weekend so we were hoping we would see babies.  Sadly what he found was only one egg. They searched and searched for the eggs but never found them.
   Being that the nest was up so high we though maybe the mother bird had knocked them out of the nest or something.  We kept watch hoping we would see Ms Robin return for her last egg but she never returned.   Such sadness the kids showed.  I too was sad.  We had such high hopes of blogging the events with the little family. 
   Thursday while I was tending to one of our other sunflowers and was harvesting the seeds I noticed near our fence line on the the concrete what looked to be egg shells.  After investigating (putting on my glasses), it was the robin's egg shells.  After a bit more looking around I did find part of Ms Robin hidden under our pumpkin vines.  The feral cat had had a great breakfast Monday morning.  Sadly we checked the last egg and it too had been cracked open and although there was a baby inside it looked like the cat's claws must of scratched the baby just enough to kill it.  So sad!
   It has taught the kids the circle of life I guess you could say.  We hope in the spring we will find another nest that we will be able to chronicle the events.  We tend to have 2 or 3 every year in our pear tree.  We just hope it will be close enough that we can see them.