Regardless of how large the world is, at some point you being here will matter

How many birds are there at any one time on the planet? There must be billions. It is not an idle question, though frequent readers here are probably starting to doubt I will get to the point any time soon. Patience.

Last year, a family of birds made a nest in a little crevice between the siding and the roof over the garage of the doghouse. I didn’t have the heart to forcibly evict them, so I let nature take its course and eventually all the small birds grew up, learned to fly and they were out. I then went up there with a can of foam and sealed that crack up tight.

Or so I thought.

I was staring out the living room window this morning (this is a pretty big doghouse) at the gentle rain we are so often graced with here in Dayton, Ohio and I saw a bird with a piece of something that looked like a worm in her beak land on the shingle. She looked around nervously and slipped into the crack I had so diligently sealed up last year.

“Son of a ….” I yelped, spilling coffee all over my paws.

Moments later, she emerged from the crack, shook herself off in the rain and flew off, disappearing quickly into the gray sky, leaving only the chaotic sound of frightened, helpless chirping baby birds behind her. And my first thought was, “I really hope she comes back.”

And then I thought a little more the about enormity of her task, how the odds of her being eaten by a neighborhood cat or hawk, being electrocuted by a wire or being blown off course by a wild wind or being hit by a truck were far greater than her finding food for her young ones and returning safely to the nest. But the very existence of these four or five birds in the nest depended on her being successful — not just this one time I watched her, but every time, many times a day.

And that was a very powerful feeling for me because I thought about how many birds there were in the world at any one time, how we see them everywhere and don’t give them a second thought. But to those four or five birds in the nest, that mother bird meant absolutely everything to them.

And then my thoughts wandered to ponder how many people there are in world and how we (I) can get easily lost in the downward spiral of feeling as if one person doesn’t matter; that one person can’t really make a difference. And then I see one little, very determined bird and my perspective gets all turned around.

If you don’t think you matter, you may not be looking quite hard enough. Or close enough.