This past April, on an unusually warm day, a resident of Berkshire, United Kingdom, named Emma Bundy decided she wanted to do some barbecuing. She asked her husband to clean out the grill, but as he opened it up, he was surprised to find a bundle of moss
and sticks inside.
As Bundy’s husband looked more closely, he saw some small eggs in the middle of the moss and realized that a bird had built a nest inside the grill. Not wanting to disturb the eggs, he closed the lid, but the couple installed a camera near the nest so they could observe their yard’s newest residents.
“[W]hen I got the spy camera, I could see the parent bird, and a friend helped me identify it as a great tit,” Bundy told The Dodo.
Over the next few weeks, the couple waited anxiously to see if the eggs were going to hatch. They watched the parents coming and going to sit on the nest. One day, Bundy noticed the birds hadn’t been coming in and out of the grill as much as usual, so she went to see what was going on.
“I hadn’t seen much movement, so I opened the BBQ and saw these tiny baby birds,” Bundy said. “They were just flesh-colored and wriggling.”
Bundy watched in awe as the baby birds got bigger and bigger each day and started to grow feathers. Unfortunately, a few of the babies didn’t make it, which made it even sweeter when the couple got to witness the remaining healthy birds learn to fly.
“[When they] started to fly, it was really special,” Bundy said.
Once the fledglings were strong enough, they flew off into the distance to start their own lives. So Bundy was surprised when just a short while later, she found an adult great tit in her kitchen who seemed oddly comfortable there.
“When I went to encourage it out of the house, it didn’t want to move,” Bundy said. “It then happily climbed onto my hands and just sat there. When I encouraged it off my hands, it clung onto my fingers.”
Before this whole experience with the nest inside the grill, Bundy actually had a phobia of birds. But watching them grow up and fly away in her very own backyard gave her a new appreciation for the animals.
She couldn’t help but feel that the great tit in her hands was one of the birds who’d grown up inside her grill. She cherished the opportunity to say a proper goodbye.
“I genuinely believe it was one of the babies, and that it came back to say thank you,” Bundy said.
