Time for contemplation

10am this morning, both parents calling, searching for baby. Food delivery. They were checking ground, branches, tree tops. I watched this for 90 minutes.

My neighbor sent me an e-mail, that she had found the baby at 8:30am, dead, not far from the tree where it hunkered down most of yesterday.  Baby was alive after the rain stopped last night looking shaky, so sometime between 7:45pm and this morning something catastrophic happened.  I suspect it was stepped on. It had not yet mastered flight.  This space is the dog walking area, wood chips on ground, impossible to see a tiny bird at dusk.  I brought baby upstairs to take final pictures. There were a few ants running out of the feathers. They're dead now too! Little body in rigor, so it had been dead for a while.  The only sign of trauma was spec of blood on head.

Baby has now been properly interred in a shroud.    I've been outside, 2:30pm.  Parents still searching for their child in a wider  space. They're such wonderful parents. I don't know if they understand death, but they do know parental love.  I hope they try for another brood in the back garden where humans don't trod.
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