Sunday morning, after 8, sunny sky, still air. I’m driving between fields to a fork in the road south of my Greenfield Meadows home. There, in a calm, waist-high hayfield, stands a thin, healthy, mature doe, tail slowly twitching from side to side as she feeds toward the woods less than 100 yards west.

It’s an unusual sighting for that time of day. Deer typically reserve such open-field foraging for nighttime, enveloped in darkness, shiny eyes the only hint of their presence to passersby. I pass that field many times daily and rarely catch a deer feeding in broad daylight. So, yes, this blatant variable suggests to me that the deer may have fawns concealed nearby and is out replenishing nutrition to build her milk supply.

Don’t let May and early June’s April-like weather fool you. The smell of clover and wildflowers is in the air. It’s nesting season. I’ve been on the lookout lately during my daily mindful meanderings with the dogs, the animals so picturesque and graceful as they bound through tall hayfields due to be harvested whenever they dry. Which reminds me. Six-year-old Chub-Chub — my male English springer spaniel, registered as Old Tavern Farm’s Rabble Rouser — has his first litter on the ground. Yes, five beautiful white and liver pups of aristocratic field-trial pedigree will be 3 weeks old Friday, secure in their kitchen whelping pen with nursing mother Cinda in Florence.

Last week, I wrote about spry, geriatric Lily flushing a woodcock hen from her marshy nest. Days before, the same 13-year-old bitch I had written off a year ago was lagging behind as she always does, scouring the meadows for scent when I gave her a whistle. She soon appeared, racing gleefully around the one-acre, upper Christmas-tree farm’s northeast corner some 50 yards east of me. Maybe 50 feet shy of me, she stopped on a dime, lifted her head into the breeze and lunged into the edge before I could react. She dug her head into the brush and I heard the telltale sound of a distressed baby robin, which she killed instantly, intending to devour it.

“Leave it,” I ordered.

Lily just stood there looking at me, a few feathers protruding from one side of her mouth, the bird beyond saving. She dropped it and I picked the wet, limp creature up, snapping off its head in case it had not expired, and tossing it over the escarpment edge. I was not happy but accepted what had unfolded before my eyes as an unfortunate act of nature that prematurely ends many young critters’ lives. I called off the dogs and proceeded along our daily path. I regretting the death of that young bird, which, to be honest, I poignantly thought about several times over the next few days.

Days later, at an adjacent site along the lower level I call “Sunken Meadow” — in fact, on the very day after my tale of Lily’s woodcock flush hit the street — I was turning the corner 50 yards south of that woodcock nest when the silence was broken by sudden commotion. I heard a sharp “Putt, putt, putt,” a rustling of brush and whooshing wings. Chub-Chub had flushed a hen turkey from her nest some 20 feet to my right. The big bird flew low toward the same oak knoll along the swampy tree line that the woodcock had fled to. Chubby, in aggressive pursuit, saw the turkey glide gracefully into the largest red oak on the knoll, rooted on its western tip. The bird perched maybe 30 feet high as Chubby raced through perimeter cattails to the base of the tree, tail wagging, looking up. I whistled him back and he raced straight to the flush site, circling it, ears alert. I called him off.

Ever since, I have skirted that wet corner to avoid further conflict. Why disturb a fledgling nest? I’d hate to encounter the need to save a pathetic little nestling retrieved by Chubby or Lily. Once I know that the little ones are out of their nest, off and running and able to fly, I don’t give them a second thought.

Actually, I’ve been hoping to pop a doe out of her brushy nest one of these days. I know the dogs will be interested but will not harm little spotted fawns. No, they’d just perk up their ears, excitedly wag their tails and attempt to play with the little critters much in the manner fawns play with each other — prancing and hopping and running in snappy, little, light-footed circles. I know I’ll soon be running into river ducklings and goslings, turtles and snakes and frogs along the edges, probably even dead little rabbits and baby birds killed by my cat, Kiki, around the yard. I can’t say I enjoy the sight of what’s left of those pathetic little bunnies and birdies, but I guess I’m hardened to death, accepting it as a distressing inevitability.

Although spring’s a time of birth and life and optimism, even nesting season is laced with death and destruction, natural and manmade. There’s nothing anyone can do to stop it? Not a thing. Sad but true.

That’s life.