In this episode, Dr. Cari Wise shares an update on the Bluebirds that nest on her deck each year including unexpected events, heartbreak and a reminder we can all lean on when things don’t turn out exactly the way we planned.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is auto-generated and may contain typos.
Hi there. I’m Dr. Cari Wise, veterinarian, certified life coach and certified quantum human design specialist. If you are a veterinary professional looking to uplevel your life and your career, or maybe looking to go in an entirely new direction, then what I talk about here on the Joyful DVM podcast is absolutely for you. Let’s get started. Hello, my friends.
Welcome back to the joyful DVM podcast. For those of you who have been following the podcast for a while, you have heard some of my Bluebird Saga over the years. And here we are in the spring of 2024 and it’s time for another episode that is dedicated to what has been happening here on our farm in regard to the bluebirds. Now, I titled this episode,
it was always going to happen that way, and that really is the heart of the message that I wanna share with you today. But we have to start with a story that brought us to where we are at the time of this recording. It is May of 2024, and our bluebirds have yet to successfully raise a clutch of offspring. Now, this year started out in quite unusual fashion,
the Bluebird showed up like they always do. They’re actually here year round. So I do have periodic sightings even during the winter. And they showed up, they were around and they kept checking out the nest box that I put out on the back deck. So we put one on the railing of the deck we have for years, and it was out there and they would,
it had actually been there all winter, and they checked it out and they would leave and they would come and they would look and they would leave. And I was watching them, and I had never seen them taking any nesting material to the box. I thought this was a little bit unusual. So after this had been going on for several days, I went and checked the box thinking that I was gonna find a partial nest.
And what I found was something I did not expect. I actually found inside of that nest box, a dead bird. Now, it wasn’t a blue bird, it was a house sparrow and house sparrows. They’re really common and they’re pretty territorial and losing a few of them here. And there isn’t necessarily the end of the world now to find a dead one inside of this nest.
This nest box was a little bit unex. Well, it was quite a bit unexpected and a little bit unnerving. But as I thought back over what had happened this winter, it’s not too surprising. We went through a period here in Missouri where we were under zero degrees for about 10 days in a row. It was really, really cold. And after that cold spell,
my husband had made a comment about how he found a lot of dead birds just kind of lying around the farm. So I’m suspecting that this poor bird tried to use this house as a way to protect itself from the weather, and it just didn’t succeed. Now, this bird was, was pretty much petrified. It wasn’t gross or smelly or anything like this,
and I’m sorry if this is way too much information, but I promise you I really am going somewhere with this story. And so I went ahead and I cleaned out that that house left it open for a few days to air out. And I thought all was well. Well, the bluebird, they kind of came and they would look at it and they would leave.
And this went on for a while. And about 10 days later, I checked the the nest box to see if they had created a house in there. And what I found was something that I’ve never found in one of my bluebird houses, it was a chickadee nest. Now, the chickadees had been around and we have chickadees around here and the round all the time,
but they have never nested inside of one of my bluebird houses. And so I was in a bit of a quandary what to do. I also did some research because that’s what I do, and I have found that Bluebird will actually nest right on top of chickadee nests if a chickadee has moved into a place where they typically build a nest. So I waited,
and over the next seven to 10 days, the chickadees really stopped coming around and the bluebird were hit and miss. But after about 10 days of this, I checked the nest box again, and it was pretty much unchanged. There were no eggs from anybody, and just a little bit of an attempt to build something on top of it, but really not any concerted effort.
So at that point, I made the decision to clean out that nest. And so I did. Once I cleaned that one out, the waiting game began again, and the bluebirds this time did build a nest. Finally, I felt like we were making some progress here with these bluebird for this season. They built a very beautiful nest and they began laying eggs,
and we got up to five eggs. Now last year, and I’ve talked about this in a previous episode last year, we successfully managed to raise two clutches of five eggs each. So 10 Bluebird were hatched here on my back deck and went out into the wild last year. So they had five eggs again this year, and all was well, all was well until about four days later when I was standing at my kitchen counter looking out at the box,
and I noticed that there was nest material on the ground around it. And my heart sank because I knew exactly what had happened. See, I had set up the perfect scenario. This Bluebird house was right on our deck rail, which was really easy to jump up on. And last fall, a stray cat showed up, a cat that was completely feral,
a cat that over the months since then, I’ve been able to trap and neuter and vaccinate and release and feed, and get to the point that when we had that really cold spell, I was even able to trap him into the garage. And during that time, built up some trust, trust that has had him hanging around, having me feeding him every day now to the point that he’ll climb up in my lap and let me pet him.
And he’s gotten so comfortable that I didn’t even consider how much time he was spending on the back deck. And so yeah, it was him that reached right into the bluebird house, pulling out nest material, breaking eggs. There were even feathers on the deck. My heart sank. What had I done? Automatically, I went to self blame like so many of us do.
And I was torn because here are two things that I really value. I really value these bluebirds. I spend a lot of time trying to make sure that they have everything they need to be able to do what they do every year. And I really value this silly cat that I’ve spent so much time earning his trust and taking care of him, even though he is still pretty darn feral.
And now these two things are just being what they are, a bird and a cat, and doing what they do, nesting and attacking. And I’m sitting here feeling terrible that any of it has happened. So what did I do? Well, I went out, I cleaned out the house, I saw the feathers on the deck, and I just prayed that the bird wasn’t dead.
And about 30 minutes later, I found I saw both of the adult birds in the tree and they came over to the nest. They just kinda looked around and I thought, okay, well at least they are still there, but what am I gonna do about the cat? Now, I knew for sure and for certain that it was this cat. It was the cat that I’ve named Jet that did this.
We have security cameras. I was able to go back to the camera, see him sitting, looking up at the box, see him on the rail. So I knew that it was him, but what was I going to do? It wasn’t like I was gonna trap him and keep him away. That wasn’t the solution. Was I gonna just set the bluebirds up for failure again?
So I went into this overdrive of what am I gonna do next? And you guys know that I have been in this situation before. If you’ve listened to any of the previous Bluebird stories here on the podcast, when I say been in this situation that I’ve been in a situation where I’ve been in solution mode, I have to fix this. What can I do to keep this from happening again?
And so back to the research, I did find some things that we could connect to the the house, so that would make it more difficult for the cat to reach in. I also repositioned it so that it was facing outward and not facing the deck rail. So he couldn’t just sit there and reach in like I had done before. And I did get my summer planters put up on the deck as well,
one on each side of the bird house like I always do, which makes the space a little bit smaller. That was really the best that I could do. And since doing that, the birds have since built another nest. And they’re in the process of trying again. You have to love their resilience because even though that they were attacked by a predator,
they are going to try again. Even though somebody else was in their house to begin with, they tried again. They just keep doing what they’re here to do. And it’s such a beautiful reminder for all of us that even when life throws us curve balls, that doesn’t diminish our purpose. That doesn’t mean that we’re supposed to stop trying. Yet oftentimes that’s exactly what we do.
And in this situation where I was feeling so torn between two things that I love so much that I have genuinely been putting true effort from a very good place to try to support and to see these things collide in such a tragic fashion, I was really finding a hard finding it very hard to find any comfort in any of that. And yet I went back to what I know to be true,
which is that everything happens for a reason, even when I don’t understand it at the time. And as I considered that, I remembered it was always going to happen this way. I just didn’t know it at the time. This one simple sentence, it was always gonna happen this way. I just didn’t know it at the time, brings so much relief for me,
it’s a sentence and a belief that I go back to any time that I feel a bit consumed by chaos, when I feel really out of control of my circumstances, when I see that there’s nothing that I can do to change an outcome, that there’s nothing that I could have done to prevent one as well. When I go back to that truth, it was always gonna happen this way.
That really does bring me peace because I remember that what’s going on here is so much bigger than me. It’s so much bigger than this cat and these birds and these eggs, that all of these things are actually all happening together for reasons that I don’t even understand right now. And I don’t need to understand in order to believe that it’s still all working out for the ultimate good.
And I do believe that. I believe that no matter what is happening in my life or in the world, that ultimately it is all working out for our good. So even though I have yet to have the big lesson from this experience, maybe though in saying that I actually already have, maybe it is just that reminder that it is always going to work out for our good,
that it was always gonna happen this way. And that no matter how hard I try that I will still continue to bump up against things that I can’t control, that I will have these reminders that I need to stop trying so hard to control all the things. We all get stuck in our own patterns. We get stuck in our habits, and the lives that we create are simply the results of the habits that we hold.
And so whenever things happen to disrupt our patterns, there’s always a reason for it. Sometimes it’s really obvious and sometimes it’s more subtle. It’s true that there may be some big lesson that I look back on this event three months or three years from now, and that is a light bulb moment. I understand why today that’s not so much the case, but I can still find comfort because I do know that I know that I know that it was always gonna happen this way even if I didn’t know it at the time.
And I’ll be grateful that I didn’t know it at the time because of the efforts that I put in on the front end and the enjoyment that I have had both with the birds and the cats in the months that preceded this event. And I will also know that it’s ultimately happening for my good and for their good, even if sometimes it doesn’t seem that way.
So my friends, as you bump up against the unexpected in the coming weeks, as you face challenges that seem to see things that you value, things that you love colliding in a way that you never anticipated, I want you to remember too that it’s still all ultimately happening for everyone’s good. And that these crazy things that happen, these things that we might tell ourselves in the moment that,
that we should have done something to prevent. Just take a nice deep breath and sit in the belief that it was always going to happen this way. You just didn’t know it at the time, and it’s not a problem that it did because eventually it’s all going to unfold perfectly. It’s all going to make sense, and you’re going to end up exactly where you’re supposed to be.
All right, my friends, that’s gonna wrap it up for this week. I’ll see you soon. Bye for now.