It is bird season. I am neither devotee or detractor. I don’t mind having them around as long as they keep their beaks to themselves and don’t peck away on my house (evidently, some missed the chapter on Property Rights).

I only mention birds because of an incident two springtimes ago, when my wife and I, inadvertently, disrupted the 100-million-year-old Jurassic imprint on two parental birds that set up home in a hanging flower pot on our deck. After a wind storm, we were standing on deck, when two baby birds suddenly exited the nest and fell, clumsily, onto the deck flooring. We blamed the wind and with our own parental instincts (obviously lacking the birds’ 100-million-year-old evolutionary patterning) we flew into action, scooping the birds up and putting them back in the nest.

Their parents, pleased as the Plaza finding bedbugs, flapped around us with the sizable menace from their Jurassic lineage. Moments later, the birds again hit the decking and we realized that this was the go-out-and-get-a-job moment for the baby birds. One skittered across the deck, got airborne for an instant, hit the deck and tried again …eventually adding itself to the flighted bird population. His nest mate cheeped weakly that the other one got all the good genes…and expired.

The parents stood by and then flew off. I guess it helps to have a brain the size of a ball bearing devoted to instinct and not memory.