Bird's nest on your house
A bird's nest on your house asks you to share a doorway or a planter for about a month, a small lesson in giving room to something brief. Some Germans believed a robin's nest under the eaves kept fire away.
What it may mean
A bird that nests in your front-door wreath or hanging fern has made a decision for you. For the next three or four weeks you will use the side door, water around the eggs and keep the dog away from that corner. Most nesting birds need only a short loan of space: robins and house finches go from eggs to an empty nest in about a month. Such a guest puts the spotlight on the brief, fragile things that ask you to bend your routine a little, a friend's hard month or a project in its first weeks, and on how easily you can give that room once you know it will not last forever.
Depending on how you saw it
A nest in the door wreath
House finches love wreaths, which are sheltered, high and close to a wall. If you can, leave that door shut and tape up a note for anyone who comes by. A small sign can change everyone's path for a few weeks. What small notice would make your own life easier right now?
A nest on a ledge above the door
Phoebes and robins often settle on a ledge or beam just above a door, so you pass the nest every day. Watching eggs turn into feathered young in a few weeks makes time visible. What around you is changing fast enough that you would notice it if you checked every day?
A nest in a hanging plant
A nest tucked into a hanging basket calls for watering slowly from the side and never swinging the pot. You learn to tend two things at once. Is there a place where caring for one thing has left another neglected, and could both be looked after?
An old nest found in the fall
Most songbirds build a fresh nest each time, so an empty one found in fall or winter is almost always finished with. Taken down and looked at closely, it shows grass, mud, hair and sometimes a strip of plastic. Consider what you built this year out of whatever was at hand.
Why it happens in nature
Birds choose spots near houses because they are sheltered from rain and wind and harder for some predators to reach. In the United States, the nests, eggs and young of most native wild birds are protected by federal law, so an active nest should be left alone until the young have flown. After that it can generally be removed.
What folk beliefs say
Germany
Some people in Germany believed that a robin nesting under the eaves would protect the house against fire; others took the same nest as a warning that a fire was coming.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 687. View the page
England (Dartmoor)
On Dartmoor, in England, taking a robin's nest was said to foretell the breaking of all the crockery in the house.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 688. View the page
Albania
The Albanians won the goodwill of birds by hanging red thread and rags on rosebushes for them to use in their nests.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 584. View the page
To reflect on
What brief, fragile thing in your life is asking you to bend a routine for a few weeks?