As brown-eyed susans and fuchsia coneflowers have taken over my garden, in that last glorious wave of Vermont’s summer, I feel wistful because my seasonal gig is ending. For three months a year, I am an avian extension agent: unpaid, self-appointed and yes, I made up the title. I help eastern bluebirds, black-capped chickadees and tree swallows raise their young in five tiny wooden birdhouses in Burlington. The houses on poles help bird species that need cavities to nest in.

The rest of the year I teach environmental studies at the University of Vermont and serve as a freshmen adviser. The jobs are surprisingly similar. In both spheres — the avian and the academic — I work with creatures who make me laugh, make me cry and inspire me not to give up on this troubled world. While I am a bit sad cleaning out empty nests from the birdhouses, I am excited as I spruce up syllabuses for my incoming students, especially the 18 fluttering, nervous, hungry-for-the-world freshmen I’ll be advising during their first year.

On the avian front, it was a good season, with 14 fledglings exiting the houses (the exception was one dead baby tree swallow, a runt half the size of the three siblings on top of it). The truth is human birdhouse managers really don’t do much. I mostly sit at a picnic table watching the parents carry in insects every few minutes, amazed at how hard they work. I intervene only in emergencies like the panicked call from a birdhouse-manager-in-training about an ant infestation in a tree swallow nest. The babies had just hatched and I rushed to her condo complex, imagining a Hitchcockian scene of ants swarming the tiny pink, featherless babies, eating them alive in the 20 minutes it took to ride my bike over there.

When a birdhouse nest gets infested with insects, or is blown down in a storm, we build a new nest. I am terrible at it, so I carry around an old sparrow nest instead. That day, we opened the little door — while the mother hovered overhead, clicking furiously at us — grabbed the nest, scooped the babies out, put them in a brown lunch bag, threw away the ant-infested nest, and hurriedly cleaned out the house and sprayed the pole with a grease gun. Then I took my standby sparrow nest, plopped the babies in it, put them back in the ant-free house and retreated. I counted 30 seconds before the parents zoomed in and took over. The replacement sparrow nest was prickly, while tree swallow nests are lined with feathers and as soft as a boudoir. The next day my assistant discovered that the parents had spread a piece of plastic wrap under the babies to mimic the softness of their old nest and add insulation.