I found this little robin’s egg while walking this morning. I wanted to take it home but I didn’t have a way to carry it without risking crushing it further as it had some other cracks and I wasn’t all that close to home. So I took a pic and left it there.

I instagrammed it and a friend commented that it was a sad day for baby birds. Well, I know how sad life can be for baby birds (we’ll get there in a minute) but it hadn’t actually crossed my mind that this had been a tragedy. I’m not sure what I was thinking. It had fledged maybe and left its egg behind? I don’t really know much about birds or what happened to this particular baby bird but it is just possible that it is alive and well, in its nest, and its mooma flicked the egg halves out of the nest with her beak. Here’s a video cam of a hatching robin. It starts with an ad (you can click away in five seconds) and is a couple minutes long. After watching this, I have hope…

But not too much hope. Here on the Planet Ann Arbor, we have an ongoing saga at Swan Corners, which is a rural crossroads with several ponds right smack next to the roads and level with them. A few years ago, a swan family was killed at Swan Corners. It was initially thought that someone shot them and people (including me) got all into a dither and someone started a facebook page and I joined it. In the end, it turned out that they weren’t shot, they were hit by a car. Not a good thing either but like I said, the ponds are right next to the roads and the swans often cross the roads with their cygnets and sometimes the cygnets even nap on the roads. What do a bunch of concerned people do? As much as possible but unfortunately there isn’t much that *can* be done. I doubt that most drivers are out to hit baby swans but stuff happens…

Not to mention good old Mother Nature. Lemme see… This year, a pair of swans began nesting. The male was found dead in one of the ponds early in the season. Not shot or hit by a car. Just natural causes. The female went on to lay six eggs. Four of them hatched and lived for a while. As I write this, two of them remain. Someone reported to the facebook group that two cygnets were dead on the road, run over by a car. Turns out that it was two *goslings* that were run over. Just as tragic in my estimation, no matter what you think about Canada geese. The other missing cygnets? Snapping turtles or an eagle is the general consensus.

Me? I’m thinking about “hiding” the facebook group so I don’t have to read the cygnet countdown every day. We have had some baby bird tragedies in our own back yard over the years but I think I am done for the night. You’re welcome.

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