Yes, Animals Grieve and Yes, They Love

This morning, I took my cat, Rumble to the vet for a chiropractic adjustment.  Honestly, I can’t say how much faith I put into such things, but Rumble has been suffering from back pain for weeks now and cats don’t metabolize medications well, so the only options for pain management lean toward the holistic approach.

There is nothing quite so pitiful as an animal in pain, an animal that can’t tell you how much it hurts, how long it’s been hurting, or how to make it better.

There’s nothing quite so heart-wrenching as watching an animal sprawled out on the floor, unable to do much of anything but cry every other minute or so.

And no, he isn’t like this twenty-four hours a day, every day, but he is like this enough to break your heart.

I would do anything in my power to make him feel better.

After I brought Rumble home from the vet and watched him prance around happy to be home and immediately run to his food dish to eat (I think he must be a stress eater), I snuck off to the Wetlands to decompress.

I always say that Rumble wears himself out at the vet just with his trembling.

I wear myself out taking him to the vet and having to watch him tremble.

I needed the Wetlands this morning.

I almost avoided my favorite Great Blue Heron nest.  The past two days, the nest has been without either the mama or daddy heron and I worried that the babies had been abandoned.

The good news is that the mama heron was back in the nest this morning.

The bad news is there are only two heron babies now, not three.  The third had been much smaller and I had never seen a nest with three babies before, only one or two.  I’m pretty sure this third one didn’t make it.

I have no idea where the mama heron has been over the last two days.  Maybe I just missed her.  I don’t stake out the nest.  I’m only there for a few minutes.  Maybe I just caught her when she was out.

There is a part of me that wonders though about that third baby, a part of me that wonders what happens to the babies that don’t make it.  Are they tossed unceremoniously from the nest?  Are they left for birds of prey to come and pick apart?  Does the mama or daddy heron take the baby out of the nest and deposit it elsewhere?

Is that where the mama heron has been these last few days?

Has she been grieving?

The two babies that remain are strong and vigorous.  I watched them fencing today with their beaks, like two little kids might do with sticks in the backyard.  And while they played, the mama heron stood tall, staring out over the water, watching for predators, looking for food, waiting for daddy heron, thinking about the one she lost.