From one nest to the next
Nests are everywhere when you spend lots of time outside.
My mom has a partner named Andy, and he lives by Coast Gravity Park in Sechelt. (You should check it out!) On the road to Coast Gravity Park, there is a dump where ravens and other birds like to go into the garbage and get things to make nests out in the trees close by. They turn garbage into houses! It’s not gross, like you might think. It’s actually fun to watch what they make.
Andy has made a house out of metal containers called sea cans. The house is really cool, and we have Wi-Fi (in an off-grid house! Like what?!). Here we have a raven named Dave, who has become our pet. He stomps on the containers and makes lots of noise in the morning to wake everyone up and also when he’s hungry. Not very long ago, Dave got a girlfriend, so now we have two ravens, but we just call her Mrs. Dave because we don’t know her name. I love that.
There’s also a bear named Barney and one named Bob, but they are not our friends. We even have a baby bird nest inside a birdhouse there. Most of the baby birds are chunky and fuzzy, and cute. They’ve made our home there their home, too.
In Sechelt, there is a pier that my sister, Andy, and I like to jump off of. At first, I was really scared to jump, but once I did it, I fell in love with jumping off at high tide. You can’t jump off at low tide because it’s dangerous. You have to climb up a ladder to get back onto the pier after jumping. When you are climbing, you can see a pigeon nest with pigeon eggs which is really cool, and I can’t wait until the babies hatch.
My mom, my sister, and I have lived in Courtenay for over six years, and I am 11, so that’s a long time. But now we need to change nests to make room for Andy. My mom just bought a house in Lund on the Sunshine Coast, so we’ll be leaving Courtenay soon.
Lund is close to Powell River, and to my grandpa and grandma, and closer to Dave, Mrs. Dave, and Andy in Sechelt, where he works. It’s only one ferry instead of two, so it won’t take as long. I’m a little scared to move and make friends, but I’m also excited to live so close to the ocean and have fun all the time—swimming, paddleboarding, and kayaking.
Leaving means saying goodbye to our house, Matilda. (Yeah, we named our house. Some people think that’s weird, but it’s not weird to us.) Our new house is surrounded by trees, so it feels like a nest to me—nice and cozy and warm. I’m pretty sure there are at least two or three nests by our house, too. The birds picked a nice place to live, and we think we did, too.
