Home Work

Father's Day Home Work

The construction noise outside my window has been waking me up every morning. I don’t quite understand all the fuss about the city being hostile to development, because from where I sit, it sounds like construction begins when the sun rises.

The earliest crew on site are the oriole songbirds. They begin before the gardeners, before the leaf blowers, before the trucks reversing down the street with that dull electronic chirp. You know the orioles by their sound. Unlike almost every other bird in the garden, their voices are lyrical and almost pop-like — bright, high, insistent, as if someone has left a tiny radio on in the trees.

They have been building a nest in the Banana tree outside my kitchen window. Every morning, while I make coffee, I watch them disappear into a folded Banana leaf that has become, through some combination of instinct and genius, a house. Inside that green cone they have woven straw, plant fiber, a little hair, a little softness. The whole thing is suspended and hidden, and somehow both fragile and totally determined.

Hooded orioles are sometimes called Palm-leaf orioles in California because they do something almost unbelievable: the female stitches her hanging nest to the underside of a leaf. She pokes holes from below and pushes fibers through, sewing the house into the architecture of the tree. Audubon says they sometimes use Banana leaves too, and line the nest with plant down, hair, and feathers. The squirrels have been trying to get close to it for weeks, and the orioles have been furious landlords. Endless negotiations. Endless border disputes. Endless little wars in the canopy.