A day or so after Palm Sunday last year, when spring’s newness still felt like a giddy novelty, our sister Jeanne made a waist-high discovery while trimming her nandina bushes:
A cardinal nest with two eggs in it.
“At first, I thought they were robin eggs,” Jeanne said. “But they weren’t blue.”
So she carried her coffee onto the back porch, as she does most days, with plans to use an app on her phone that identifies birds by their songs. Specifically, she had a mission: to solve the ornithic mystery of the ova nestled in her nandina nursery.
The most prolific crooners in her yard? Cardinals. She then found online photos that matched the eggs she’d seen.
“That first day there were two, and the next, three,” she said. “I looked the next day, and there were four.”
She became mesmerized by her discovery of the cardinal nest. Research told her that each cardinal parent takes turns watching the nest; observation confirmed this. The mother might not have had the fiery red feathers the father used to attract her, but her own brown feathers, Jeanne read and later saw, were a perfect camouflage to cover the nest.
Four eggs. Four tiny mouths.
Eggs, Jeanne learned, hatch seven to 10 days after being laid. Sure enough, the Tuesday after Easter, she was greeted with four tiny mouths, open and awaiting breakfast. The cardinal parents were, as always, watching her.
Jeanne was officially in love and in awe, filled with eager anticipation of watching the babies grow and, eventually, fly away on their own.
And then a series of storms hit. When Jeanne was finally able to venture outside, she found the cardinal nest at a sharp angle. She reached underneath to gently push it into the V of a branch.
“I knew that if it fell out, it would be the end of the babies,” she said. “I went to the garage and propped it up with some boards we had.”
It slipped again, but not enough to fall to the ground. But next time Jeanne looked, one little bird was half out of the nest, and she could tell it was dead.
“I left it there, thinking maybe the mom had pushed it out, and I didn’t want to interrupt the circle of life,” she said. “The next time I looked, it was on the ground. I put it in the trash can outside, but all morning I felt bad. So I took it out and buried it.”
Two babies were no longer there. One remained.
A rescue mission for the cardinal nest
Realizing the nest would no longer hold him, Jeanne thought, “What in the world am I going to do with him?”
She found a hanging basket with moss on the bottom, where she placed him with remnants of the original nest. Then she climbed a ladder and hung the basket from the branches of a crepe myrtle tree.
“It seemed a little too sunny, so I climbed back up and put more branches to create shade,” she said. “The parents watched, and I think they appreciated my attempts. Between us, we made a nice little home.”
They were very attentive to their remaining offspring, whom Jeanne named Francesco — the name Pope Francis, who died in April 2025, requested on his tomb. That name, plus the birds being cardinals, just seemed so fitting, and Jeanne felt optimistic as she left for church. But when she got home, she didn’t see the parents at their usual post.
“I climbed the ladder in my dress,” she said. “I was almost afraid to look in the nest. I found the last baby bird looking comfy and soft, with his little beak and feathers just starting to form. I kept hoping he’d breathe, but he was lifeless.
“I took him down and wrapped him in a Kleenex. I dug a hole at the feet of my St. Francis statue in my flower bed and laid him there. It seemed only fitting that’s where he should be buried.”
What nature teaches us
Right after this happened, Jeanne texted our sister Susan and me. It began this way: “My cardinal nest took a hard hit.” I was in the grocery store and wouldn’t let myself read more because I knew the news would make me cry. Which it did — once I got to my car, when I called her later, and again right now.
Nature, I jotted down as we talked, will break your heart. My words were prophetic: On my walk the next morning, my left foot almost stepped on the lifeless little body of a gray-and-white baby bird. I had to stop and catch my breath, not because I was winded but to stifle a sob.
I also stopped out of respect, I know now, for this and for Jeanne’s tiny creatures who had given life a go. For reminding me, through their deaths and their lives, of all that is holy and, even in a fragmented world, of all that is whole. For helping me appreciate, through the stopping of a heart no bigger than a grain of rice, the courage that surrounds us.
Life is fragile; it is fleeting. We feel its sorrow, we see its wonder, we marvel at its miracles — like the cardinals that visit my bird feeder. And we take a deep breath of gratitude, exhaling a deeper one of perseverance, of fortitude, and, for Jeanne, of hope.
“Maybe next year I’ll put the hanging basket out again,” she said. “Maybe the cardinals will see it, and maybe they’ll remember.”
Even if they don’t, lo these dozen months later, Jeanne remembers, and I do, too. My prayer is not solely that my sister’s wish is granted, but also that we can all learn from and hold onto these little avian marvels’ gifts of strength, of courage, of beauty, and of hope.
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