Messing Up A Science Experiment

About a month ago a mommy pigeon built a nest in our rain gutter. You could see it from my bedroom window upstairs. At first I wanted Dan to get it down. Then I decided that, although I loathe the pigeons in St. Louis, this one was a mommy and was going to hatch an egg and have a baby. This might be a good thing for Charlotte to experience. From behind the glass window. So I let the mommy and daddy build the nest.

Then the mommy pigeon sat. She sat and sat and sat. Charlotte would come check on her every day, multiple times a day.

Then one day the mommy pigeon was gone. She was gone and she'd left her egg. There it was, alone, abandoned. How do I explain this to Charlotte? What's worse is that she's read the book, "Are you my Mother?" about the dopey baby bird that hatches while his mommy is gone. So then she went to the window every morning to check on the egg. The poor little egg just laying there. She was so excited that she might get to see it hatch.

Great. Just great.

The good news was that in the last storm we had enough water in the rain gutter to float the little egg down the spout. Now it's gone. And she's convinced that the bird hatched and is now finding it's mommy. And I don't have the heart to try to tell her otherwise.