As I stepped through the still-unfinished opening of one of the big doors, something exploded by my right ear. I ducked away, and a very disturbed and outraged robin squawked off into the woods. The annual battle was on!

We go through this every spring. The robins seem to think this place is a gigantic birdhouse. They return from their winter sojourns in the American South, hop around the yard for a week or two, and then turn their thoughts toward their summer nurseries. This development invariably coincides with our leaving our windows open for the fresh air. Since we’ve long used casement windows, we’re unwittingly providing natural nesting platforms on top of the open hinges.

The first few times it happened, we grinned and bore it. We’re both suckers for the innocence and vulnerability of nativity and new life in almost any form, from tadpoles to fawns to infants in strollers. But last summer, realizing that robins are largely creatures of daylight and our hours of television viewing are largely after dark, we became concerned that our bedroom TV set, only a few feet away from an open window supporting a mother-to-be with five eggs, might be harmful to them. Mother bought a snazzy half-round basket to which I transferred the nest, eggs and all, one spring afternoon. They seemed to love it, and they’re building anew in it as I write.

But the garage – more a barn, really, slowly inching toward completion – is a different matter. Wide open to incursion, it’s got to be irresistible to a bird laden with eggs. Inside, of course, it’s just studs; and the headers over the doors and windows are perfect places to plaster a grass-and-mud nest. There’s a good, tight roof overhead. The openings are beneath the nests, which shields them from the prying eyes and talons of hungry hawks and crows.

As if all that weren’t enough, the owner is happy to share such prime nursery space with birds or bats. The only request he makes is that, if there’s a vehicle parked in there, the birds refrain from pooping on it. He’ll help by parking out from under any nests. That’ll change someday when the door openers are installed; but the birds won’t be able to get in then, anyway.

So what’s the problem? Why is there a war going on at the moment over nesting space out there? And why is the owner marching out there every hour or two with a long-handled mortar hoe to scrape the nascent nests from the headers above the garage door openings?

Like most wars, this one begins with a misunderstanding. Botched communication is at the heart of more disagreements than we dream. That’s the case here. But unlike most wars, this one has a morally conflicted component. I’ve got to keep the birds out of there not because I don’t want them there; I do. But if I let them nest and lay their eggs, I’ll have to make a tough decision in a week or two when some guys show up to help me with the installation of the roof fascia and the digging of a French drain. One nest failed last year when we put up rafters and sheathed the roof, and the sight of those abandoned eggs was a lingering reproof, whose translation ran: Was your project so important that you were willing to snuff out a generation of our offspring? It must have been; I went ahead with it. So the current skirmish out there – I can see it from where I’m sitting at my desk, just over my right shoulder and about 100 feet away – this current skirmish is more in the line of a preemptive strike. Another year, I’ll put up some birdhouses. Not this year.

The North American robin, as it’s called, is a true thrush, one of probably a hundred other species in the same genus. It goes through life laboring under the singularly uneuphonious name of Turdus migratorius, the migrating thrush. Its genus is common worldwide. This species, along with the bluebird, is our particular warm-weather visitor. It takes its reproductive duties very seriously; we’ve seen one pair raise three broods in the course of one very busy summer.

It’s an omnivore, specializing in grubs, caterpillars, and berries. Our popular image of a robin shows it cocking its head, listening for sounds of juicy invertebrates just beneath the grass of a lawn, or leaning back to pull a worm from its burrow.

Robins’ parenting habits could be an inspiration to us all. They’re at it from before dawn till the evening twilight, ferrying various morsels back to the voracious kids. Mother has watched them for hours. They’re two weeks as eggs, she says, and two weeks more getting ready for their maiden flight: always a traumatic event, tracing a degrading trajectory downward from the nest to a noisy crash-landing on a branch or in a bush. There’s usually a predator around; our neighborhood broad-winged hawk seems to keep as close track of them as does Mother. We’re always tickled to see them hopping around the yard the next day, becoming robins.

But not this year! Only the approved nests on the front of the house will be encouraged. The garage birds will have to wait a year. Except that they don’t feel like it. I haven’t seen any fluttering out there since my last foray. But it’s about time to go out and check again.