And no birds sing.

The robins I wrote about in June have abandoned the nest under the deck. I made sure they were gone for weeks before I got the ladder and removed the nest.

Looks like I was wrong about the little beak I saw when I thought the egg had hatched.

Never did.

The shell looked intact, but nothing has sat on that egg in at least a month. The little robin never hatched.

I'm kicking myself. I always take the dog around the back, and Mama Robin would fly off at our approach. Did we keep her off the egg too much? Was it too cold?

Probably not; probably just one of those things. Still, I feel bad about it.

Look, I'm not going to tie myself in knots. Life is hard, and sadly some animals never even get that far. It's too bad about what happened to Cecil the Lion, but it's over and I'm not going to wail and rend my garments, especially considering the kind of man-on-man butchery going on in the Middle East and elsewhere. The expressions of grief over a lion no one ever heard of before yesterday and no one will remember next year have gotten embarrassing. Cecil would have eaten me for lunch; I can't get too worked up. We've totally lost all perspective about animals.

Still, I wish the robin had made it.