Parenting is Hard Work

Imagine, for a moment, that you have five babies that depend upon you for all their survival needs.   You need to keep them warm, keep them safe from danger, and you need to feed them…all day long. 

Now, imagine that to acquire the food that your youngsters need, you must run fast…really fast…with your hands tied to your mobility.  You don’t have a grocery story, but rather you need to hunt down the required sustenance that your offspring require to grow rather than perish from starvation. 

As soon as you wake in the morning, you take off to acquire the first meal.  You’re running – fast – while your hands are in use to achieve this speed. You need to locate and nab your kids’ breakfast with your mouth!  Sometimes you grab a big meal and race home to feed just one of the kids.  When the morsels are small, you grab several (somehow without dropping the first ones that were already in your mouth!)

When you’ve reached your capacity to grab and hold the food, you fly home to deliver the very first meal of the day to your exceedingly hungry infants.   Then, you take off again for meal number two, then three, then four without taking a break. 

Your kids are ravenous. You rarely get a break.

Fortunately, you have made a great choice regarding your partner who is doing the exact same work as you are…all…day…long.  You barely have time to greet each other as you pass.

Sometimes, you actually get a bit off timing and almost run into each other while coming and going! One parent must abort the entry, and accomplish a do-over!

From the moment the sun rises to the twilight hour past sun set, you race as fast as you can snatching up morsels of nutrition for your growing family.  

The chicks also need to tend to “toilet duties” and often are observed departing from the nest with a “poop sack” in their beaks. 

If people worked as hard as birds (like these Tree Swallows) to rear their chicks, they would be considered super-human.  Regardless of how windy, cold or hot the environment presents to them, Tree Swallows work tirelessly (well, that’s probably not true – they are likely exhausted at the end of every day.)  They work hard.  Very hard.  As they fly (up to 45 mph!), they catch insects in their beaks without the assistance of an opposable thumb (an attribute that we humans often take for granted as we hunt and gather (or grocery shop for) our meals.  Take a moment to be grateful for your thumb!

The next time you think you are working too hard, just think about these Tree Swallows.   BirdFact.com states:  Tree Swallow “Parents make a combined 15 to 30 trips to and from the nestlings each hour for about 15 hours per day.” 

These birds utterly amaze me.