My Fan vs. My New Neighbor

Welcoming someone who ignores you can be difficult, but eventually you learn to live next to each other and find that you are very interested in their health and well-being

When you live in an area with a lot of undeveloped land, you know at a certain point others will be interested in becoming neighbors. In this case, I never planned on the new friend that took residence very close to my back door.

At first, I barely noticed she was building close by, but started to notice a lot of building materials in my backyard. It was amazing how a lot of the construction took place when I did not even notice. Once I did notice the construction, I was intrigued. Why did she decide on this location? She was bound to be disturbed by my backyard activity. The square footage was small, but probably enough for her. There seemed to be a few obvious flaws in the location, including the possibility of a catastrophic failure due to a mechanical operation or strong wind.

As the build-out continued, it became obvious there were kids involved. Maybe that is why she was taking these chances. There were a few times when I wanted to get close and say hello, but I could barely see her, and she seemed to have very little interest in becoming friends. She wasn’t lonely though, she had many friends visit and help her with the construction.

After a few days, sure enough, we figured out that children were involved. You knew by her nesting habits. She would sit there, in one spot, and look away, avoiding eye contact at all times. Her friends do not get the same treatment, as there have been many times that three to five visitors have come over and bring food. I know they brought food because much like the construction, they were messy.

One day I got a little brave, and decided to get real close to her new home. This was a mistake. Like an angry mamma bird, she came out and buzzed over my head. In fact, she is a mama bird. And she took residence within my back porch and decided to build her nest INSIDE a fan.

It is a pretty safe bet that our new neighbor is a Finch. Yes, we were internet creepers and looked her up. Finches tend to build their nest 5 to 10 foot off the ground. Well, she nailed that, as the fan is about 8 feet high. As mentioned above, the construction was messy, but it was amazing to watch. You would see three to six bird with twigs in their mouth go from our back fence to the fan. They would chirp, turn around, move around, and then fly away, and come back again. This build continued for less than a week, and the end result was a perfectly round nest that now holds baby eggs, but you would never know because of the depth of the nest. If only our builder was that fast and efficient!

Although it is difficult to know for sure, because she does not allow us to visit, we think she laid eggs about seven days ago. That means we should be hearing her little baby birds within a week. After that, the baby birds will leave their nest about 11 to 19 days after being born. That means we have about 30 days with the entire family together.

We worry about our little neighbor. Nearly every time we look out the window she is sitting there. She has to be bored! Sometimes we will see her eyes. Most of the time we just see her large back feathers. There are times we forget about her, and make noise, in our backyard and she will have a loud and precise chirp that almost sends a signal she is annoyed with us. I think it is fair that we make some noise occasionally, I mean, we do pay the mortgage. But that is not why we worry. We worry because she decided to build her nest on a fan. Not a ceiling fan, but more of a regular enclosed fan that includes a super high speed and oscillating feature. Although this is a great feature when combined with misters on an Arizona summer day, it is not a good place, in my opinion, for a Mamma bird that needs at least 40 days of a nest to lay eggs, wait for them to hatch, and feed them until ready to leave the nest. Until of course the kids decide to come back to the nest when they can’t find a job. Ooops, sorry, wrong story.

Anyway, when construction started, it did not take long to see the potential collision course of nest vs. fan. We needed to make a family agreement to never forget …..and turn the fan on. But, to make sure, we put blue painters tape over the switches. Now that we got that covered, what could go wrong?

It gets windy here. One day my patio umbrella pulled a Mary Poppins and ended up in a neighbors yard and we were thankful there were no injuries or property damage. Once time our patio furniture, a couch, was moving due to the wind while I was doing a FaceTime. The person thought I was pushing the couch, I had to convince her it was the wind. Now that we established the fierceness of the wind, we need to come back to our nest story. One evening the wind started to kick up and move things around. Whooops, suddenly we remembered, the wind will move the fan blades! What could we do to help our neighbor?

We watched the fan blades go at a pace that might have even been higher than a high setting. We decide to go outside and see if we could help. Well, Mama bird did not like this, and came out of the nest to express her displeasure. Geez, we thought, that was a close one. After a heated debate, we decided to go back in the house and do nothing. We figured Mama Bird though about this before she built. Or, we convinced ourselves of this, since there was nothing else we could do.

The next morning, we went out to survey the damage. Other than a few twigs under the nest, there were no signs of a windblown ending. After looking from a few angles, we did see Mama bird in the nest, sitting like nothing happened.

Now that the weather issue is behind us, we hope we are just mere days away from welcoming the new family. I mean we won’t do anything other than look out the window, but we will welcome them.

We now enjoy our new neighbor. It is ok that she has several guests over daily. They still drop food and even leave some other messes on our patio. We understand that she does not want to be with us. We even feel like she is a genius by building a structure strong enough to withstand winds that can be brutal. Like her, we are waiting for the little babies to come. The only difference is that we can’t sit here all day and wait, we have to go out to work and earn money to pay the mortgage.