This morning I got up and walked the dog out into our backyard. She can be insanely brave at times, and sometimes very cautious and timid- in the mornings she really wants my wife or I to walk out with her, just in case some dangerous monster crept into the yard overnight and is laying in wait… a monster has yet to materialize.

The yard is a mess of garden prep, containers of dirt all over as well as a pile of stakes we used last year to support plants…

As we walked out I saw some motion by the stakes, a robin was struggling to collect a 2 foot section of jute twine for its nest. It is apparently highly prized as a construction material by robins- the nest a robin built last year on the light fixture by our front door contained a lot of the twine we had used the year before that.

Unfortunately the twine this robin was tugging on was still tied to the bamboo stake, so there was no way it was getting it.

I told our dog, Kea, to stay- and walked over to the robin- it gave a few last desperate tugs and then flew away to the fence to glare at me as I picked up the stake with HER prize and broke off the twine and set it down loose on the grass- for good measure I freed a few sections of twine from others stakes and added them to the pile.

I then walked the dog back into the house for a while… 10 minutes later when I went back out all the twine was gone… so I assume somewhere out there is a very happy robin with a very sturdy nest.