Nesting Birds

Today, while cleaning up in the kitchen, I looked out the window and saw a female cardinal frantically tugging at a bare branch on my butterfly bush.  I must have watched her for a good 5 minutes.  She tried tugging one way.  Then she shifted and tried tugging another way.  Nothing.  Then she hopped down to the ground, walked around a little, flew back up and landed on the same branch (really just a twig I forgot to clip off!) and tried the tugging again.  She went through this routine at least 5 times!  And never got a piece of the twig/branch to come off so that she could take it to her nest.

While she's beating her head against an immovable object, mourning doves are picking up stray twigs from the garden bed and flying merrily back and forth from their nest sprucing it up.  Black birds are bomb diving into the newly cut lawn looking for the stray worm.  The male cardinal is zooming back and forth, obviously fed up with his mate's attempt at housekeeping. And a lone yellow finch loops-to-loop right by her and she never notices!!

Ah, the persistence of the female.  You can be told "it'll never work" and you refuse to believe it.  You just know you're right.  In fact, you'll be damned if you aren't right.  Meanwhile, the world goes merrily on its way and look what you're missing.  You never got that flash of yellow as the finch glories in the air shafts.  Your staid relative, the mourning dove is showing you how it's done but you just won't quit.

So when do you know when to quit?  When does your admirable perseverance become stubbornness or worse, blindness?  When is enough, enough?

I often think of this when I meet others who share their stories with me.  I'm so amazed at the tenacity of men and women, who, all evidence to the contrary, hang in there.  They just don't give up.  And you have to wonder, are they better for having not given up?

Isn't there a time when you have to realistically look at your situation and admit, it's just not going the way you meant it to?  Or the way it's suppose to go?

That poor female cardinal this morning.  I wanted to go out, rip that twig off the bush and put it in her mouth myself!  Yet if I had, she would have flown off the moment the door opened.  I could have put it down on the soil for her, but would she have known it was meant for her?  Would she even return?  More likely she'd have flown to another yard and looked for building materials in someone else's garden.

Aren't we blessed to have such lessons given to us from nature every day?  When will I know that my tugging and tugging at an issue/problem is enough?  More food for thought.