Businesses and baby birds: Sometimes even Mother Nature needs the help of a village

DEXTER — All of my life I have always heard the saying, “It takes a village.” Usually this saying is in reference to raising children, but this past June it happened to apply to a set of parent killdeer birds.

The killdeer prefer to lay their eggs on the ground. In this case, a little family of birds decided to lay their nest right next to the road in a patch of gravel close to the office here at the Dexter Statesman. At first glance, a passerby almost couldn’t tell the difference between the eggs and the gravel, which sounds safe. We would soon find out this isn’t always the case.

Our neighbors at Adams Paint, who are only a couple of doors down, were the first to find the tiny little eggs. We all decided to make it our personal duty to see that the mother and the father were able to bring these little creatures into this big, loud, busy world we live in.

Every day we would quietly watch from a distance and make sure momma and eggs were safe. If we accidentally happened to get too close, she would run away from the nest and act as if she was hurt or had a broken wing.

In my quest to find out as much about killdeer as I could, I did some searching on the internet and found the mother will do this as a defense mechanism to get a predator to come after her, instead of going after the eggs. We always took this as our cue to back away and give them some space.

Some days were calm, but as we all know, June was a very stormy and wet month. The adult birds were very diligent with their parenting. We watched throughout the month as storm after storm rolled through, and still the parents never left the nest. Most of the time people drove by in their cars going about their busy day never even knowing the nest was there.

That was until one day, someone in a truck hauling a flatbed trailer unknowingly happened to park too close to the nest. When the driver of the truck left the parking lot, he clipped the nest with his trailer accidentally and sent everything flying.

A group of killdeer bird eggs sit in a patch of gravel near the Dexter Statesman office. DAR/Lynda Whitmer

The momma bird was hysterical. She was squawking loudly and flying back and forth and so upset.

I happened to be outside watching the whole thing and as a mother myself, it was horrible to watch, even if it was just a bird. I beg to differ with the person who said that animals do not have emotions, that’s for sure.

After it happened, I went to check the nest and believe it or not, only one egg had been broken. I couldn’t believe it. This made me feel so much better and we all had hope that we would eventually get to see some babies.

After all of the chaos that happened, the mother started putting her little nest back together and finally got settled back in that afternoon. Just to make sure that another bad incident didn’t happen, the nice folks at Adams Paint put up a barrier so people wouldn’t get anywhere close to the nest.

After everything calmed down it was back to business as usual. I would peek at the nest every morning. Excited, as I pulled in wondering if this would be the day that I would get to see the little fuzzy birds all running around.

The one morning I got busy and barely got a look at the nest, of course happened to be the morning they hatched. When I found out they had hatched I quickly went outside with the camera and tried to get some pictures. I did manage to get a couple but the babies were so little and so fast it was really hard to capture just how cute they really were.

A baby killdeer bird explores the area near its nest. DAR/Lynda Whitmer

They looked like little color cotton balls on sticks running around. I was so excited, after all of the hard work the mother and father had done and all of the worrying that all of us humans had done, that at least most of the babies had survived.

In the end, it really didn’t matter whether or not I got the perfect picture after all.

I think one of the things I learned, besides the fact that killdeer like to make their nests and lay their eggs in some of the most dangerous places, is that even Mother Nature needs a little help from the villages sometimes.

Killdeer birds are protected by the Migratory Bird Act in the United States.