By PLS
This is a story about eggs, blue specked eggs, and pink-throated house finches and saucer-sized nests lined with fluff and soft stipa grass. I wanted to make it into an Easter story, but I couldn’t, because it is really a story about nature red in tooth and claw. Oh, there’s a bald eagle and a snow jay in it, too.
I hiked with the local Sierra Club along the Rio Grande north of Taos, near Questa, two Saturdays ago. We hairpinned straight down the canyon wall for a few hundred feet than walked about four miles north, crossing the inflow of the Red River and laboring over several high rockfalls. The air was cool, the sun was warm and dormant deciduous things had decided it might be safe to unfurl some leaves, which gave the brushy meadowy spots a soft green haze. 
We picnicked by an energetic little waterfall sluicing down from a idyllic pool with an awful name: Big Arsenic Spring. And then we retraced our steps along the river and up up up the canyon wall.
I have to believe that our path was an ancient one, because we passed many boulders marked with petroglyphs. Some glyphs represented deer and elk. Others depicted weirdly dressed humans. There were snakes and cornstalks, too. Several boulders offered amusing opportunities for selective perception. 
Looking at one particularly animal-rich speciman, I found myself thinking ruefully that local wildlife had been sadly depleted since the days when such plentiful herds grazed by the river running just below us. A guy standing right beside me saw a stag with a harem of does. On another he saw a spaceman in the humanoid figure; I saw a woman with curlers.
We all saw the eagle streaking down river as we headed back to our cars. We stopped. We pointed. We were a motley chorus of delight that the eagle ignored—or, more likely, never heard. Since I had never seen an American eagle in the wild before, I wanted a picture. I uncapped my camera and tried to focus. The eagle did not cooperate. It kept on course, flying into a lowering sun, getting smaller and smaller. Result: no eagle picture.
But I do have a photo of the tree it disappeared into—and from which it streaked moments later, pursued by a truly tiny dot of a bird that turned out to be a snow jay. Aha! The eagle wasn’t homing in on its own nest. It was hungry. Or simply feeling malicious.
I was amazed. An eagle running (so to speak) from a jay! Our guide explained that jays are not only bold but fast. They can fly rings around the heavier, less maneuverable eagles. When jays dart in close, they deliver a painful peck.
So the snow jay eggs in the nest we never saw survived. Or so I presume. But the house finches nesting in a cozy dark cavity made by a rolled up blind on the portale outside my bedroom weren’t so lucky.
Morning after morning I’d been watching the pair at their annual nest-building routine. They’d be flying in and out with building supplies. I’d be cuddled into my covers, delaying the moment of crawling out of bed. The same pair of finches every year? I don’t really know, but it was a nice idea, my annual tenants, though I’d never seen their hatchlings. I’d often been tempted to climb onto a porch chair and take a peek, but I restrained myself. Why alienate those hard-working parents from offspring (or eggs) they’d tucked so safely away between blind and wall.
But not safely enough evidently. I stepped out onto my portale a few days ago, to check on the progress of perennials poking up through the warming soil, and stopped dead. I’d almost come down on two broken eggs—little blotches of bright yellow, some shiny smears, bits of speckled pale blue shell.
Looking up, I saw a delicate little nest tilted precariously on the edge of the rolled up blind. One tiny egg had managed not to fall out, but my hope for its future was too optimistic. It was damaged. A day later I found a fourth egg. It had landed six feet away in a bristly clump of straw through which new blades of ornamental grass had yet to penetrate. This egg was intact. But it was too late to get the hatching process underway again.
What happened? My nominee for culprit was wind. It had been gusting strongly all night. A hard blast had rocked the blind, I decided, dislodging the nest, sending the eggs tumbling. CRK thought it was a malicious rock squirrel, though I’ve never seen a squirrel in my neighborhood.
I’ll never know who/what done it, but I do know that the lovely little eggs laid by my house finches were not a symbol of regeneration this spring. If anything, they are a symbol of nature’s indifference to the fate of individual young creatures, finches, sparrows, humans, however caring the parents.