3-20-2024 Sticky Business
As part of their ongoing bonding process, Jackie and Shadow continue bringing sticks and fluff to the nest. It is their way of committing themselves to this nest and to each other.
Jackie loves bringing the light-weight, dried-up reeds from along the lakeshore as soft fluff material…but getting them to behave is quite another story…
Tuesday, as Jackie dragged one long reed into its properly organized place, it argued back about where it wanted to be. Jackie thought about it for a moment, then grabbed hold more insistently to put that reed where it belonged…but it continued having its own ideas about where it would allow her to put it. Not to be defeated, Jackie dove in again… but that stubborn reed wouldn’t break into smaller pieces and wouldn’t fit itself into correct alignment with the other sticks.
So, Jackie got clever and pretended she was finished with it…then suddenly snatched it back up to make it cooperate. At that point, the whole operation turned into a bit of a juggling match when the reed kept attaching itself to the point on her beak and ended up back where it had started. By the end, the reed had apparently won the little negotiations…Jackie left it where it was and started arranging the much more cooperative pine needles beside her.
Later in the day, Shadow rescued Jackie from another reed fiasco by bringing a big, complex stick and giving Jackie a full-length back massage as he carried it across the nest. Jackie’s whining sounded like a little complaint about his actions, or maybe it was a complaint about the massage being so short. In any case, Shadow was busily focused on snapping off unwieldy branch ends to get his complicated stick to lay down. He looked surprised when Jackie left so soon, but immediately took the opportunity to take over nest duty.
Before dawn yesterday, Jackie was sleeping soundly in her comfy curled position…when she suddenly started talking in her sleep. She added lots of soft chortling comments to whatever might have been going on in her dreams. – for anyone who didn’t already know, Jackie often ‘sleep-chortles’.
By dawn, Shadow was already up to his clever stick games. He brought a nice long stick to the nest and put it right under Jackie’s chin. While she worked on moving that one aside, he picked up another stick to prop onto her back. His whole system got Jackie up and off the nest bowl quite quickly.
Shadow continued with his furniture arranging as Jackie flew out the back door. As he realized his stick shenanigans had worked, he forgot about the sticks and climbed carefully into the nest bowl. Having left in such a hurry, Jackie had to shout back instructions from a distance to make sure everything got taken care of.
To prove that she can also be good at tricky stick games, Jackie’s next one worked quite well. As the long stick she brought in bumped and banged its way across Shadow’s tail, he got right up…then he complained all the way out the front door and away from the nest tree. He most likely was letting her know how unfair it is for her to get nest duty back by using his own sneaky maneuvers against him.
No matter what is going on in life, Jackie and Shadow continue to teach us how to take every day in stride…and how sweet, mischievous humor can sometimes make things feel better. Though the eggs they are caring for are not hatching, we can hardly wait to see what they have in store for us next.
Sandy
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