Robin's Nest On Garage Ceiling

by Wendell and Lorraine Brenner
(Wauconda, IL USA)

Many weeks ago we noticed a bird flying in and out of our garage when we opened and/or closed the door. We weren't sure what kind it was, or why it was doing that, but it was a very curious situation.

One day I thought of looking up at the ceiling in our garage and, sure enough, there was the beginnings of a bird's nest being built right over the light/automatic opener in the middle of the ceiling.

We let things go for a week or so, but started asking around and talking about it with people. It seemed like a really cool thing to have a bird building a nest in our garage. We determined that it was a robin.

After careful consideration, however, we decided that it would be best to remove the nest before it got too far.

Our reasoning for initially removing the first nest was that we often were gone from the house for many hours at a time when the garage door would be shut. Also, at night we always kept our garage door shut so that was anywhere from 8 to 12 hours when it would again be shut.

So if the mother was able to get in and finish building the nest, and then was able to lay the eggs, she may or may not be able to get in to sit on them/incubate, and if she was . . . and they hatched, what if she couldn't get in to feed them?!


Well, we thought our dilemma was over after the difficult decision of removing the first nest, but within less than two days of infrequent times when our garage door was open, the determined mother robin had gotten in and completely built another nest and it was quite a sturdy, well made nest, too! She would not be stopped, and we didn't have the heart to remove her second nest.

Now we haven't seen the mother robin for many days, but we just climbed up a ladder and on top of the car to peer into the nest and found two pretty blue robin eggs nicely sitting inside.

Earlier today we had seen a little, killdeer bird flying in and out of our garage and we are worried that perhaps it would do harm to our baby robin eggs.

We are also very concerned that we have not seen the mother robin coming and going when we leave the garage door open for long periods of time.

Hopefully the eggs will be maintained by their mother and will hatch into baby birds and survive.

We are considering leaving the garage open just enough for the mother to fly in and out, but if other predators might also come in that might not be a good idea.

We will leave the garage door open as much as possible during daylight hours and hope for the best!

In a week or two we will update this story to let you know what happens.