Being a parent is no picnic

Being a parent isn’t easy. (You will have noticed that I didn’t say parenting. There is enough ugliness in the world already. The word parent derives from the Latin verb parere, and means bringing forth. Parenting therefore would mean bringing-forthing, which is not a term I can commit to paper while remaining at peace with myself. So now, having found an excuse to parade the Latin drilled into me 50 years ago by a man with residual malaria that flared occasionally in class to the delight of 30 boys with hairless chins and eyes as wide as soupspoons, I choose to close the bracket and return to today’s subject which is, as you may recall, parenting.)

Swallows nested in my garage. On a shelf of books within inches of the ceiling they built a nest of mud the size of a cupped hand. Feeling a host’s responsibility for their welfare, I left the garage door open so the birds could come and go as they pleased, alongside the burglars.

When the female was sitting I emailed Big Paul, who takes wonderful pictures of wildlife. (Though it seems to me that taking wonderful pictures of wildlife these days means pointing a $2000 digital camera at something less than a kilometre away and leaving the camera to get on with it. But I haven’t said as much to Big Paul and I’d be grateful if you didn’t either.)

Big Paul told me to let him know when beaks were gaping over the rim of the nest and he’d send his camera round to take some snaps. Rightio, I said, and sat down to wait.

Three weeks later the female had long since left the nest but I had neither seen nor heard any chicks. Fearful that they might have died I clambered on to the carpentry bench on which I do no carpentry, reached up and felt inside the nest with my fingers. Two chicks flew out. It was not an especially good moment.

One chick flew out through the garage door. The other fluttered to the floor and lay looking feeble. Jumping off the carpentry bench did not please my knees but did enable me to recapture the chick, at which point the parents flew into the garage. On discovering their last-born in a monster’s grip they seemed, as I put it to Big Paul in an email later that day, understandably agitated. While I returned their chick to the nest they buzzed me in the manner of biplanes buzzing King Kong.

After that little episode you can perhaps imagine how my heart leapt this afternoon when I walked into the garage to find the whole family of four perched on a cable. Their hearts, however, leapt with a different emotion. The parents and one chick swooped past me and out the garage door.

The other chick, already endowed with the high-speed wheeling flight that is instinctual in swallows, flew straight into a window. It fell like a stone. I picked it up. It was surely dead. I carried it out into the light, this scrap of feathered flesh, and laid it on a sun-warmed rock. The least I could do for the parents was to show them the corpse. But hey, this is Christmas, and as I withdrew I saw the chick stir, and then flicker into life and sit a moment on the rock as the parents danced about it, and then, to their relief, no doubt, as well as mine, the little darling flew.

Being a parent isn’t easy.

‘‘Fearful that they might have died I clambered on to the carpentry bench on which I do no carpentry ...’’