There's a Bird in My Bush! 5/6/2009

Life in my town is starting to feel like a movie and the movie in question is Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds". First, I'd like to state that I am not a bird person (certainly not like my friend Susan, whose longest running relationship aside from me is with her parrot, Wilbur.) My husband however, is definitely a bird person. While other recession-savvy folks are finding ways to cut their food budget, we continue to buy large bags of sunflower seed, thistle seed and vats of peanut butter. Each year my husband recycles the Christmas tree by drilling holes into the trunk thus creating a peanut butter feeder. So I guess you could say that I've become a bird person by association (much the same way I became a Red Sox fan). While I do enjoy seeing a bright red cardinal against the snow in the dead of winter, and the vivid yellow goldfinch in the summer, in general I can take 'em or leave 'em.

Lately, when entering and exiting my house, I've been startled by a sudden flapping sound in the tall evergreen bush by my front door. While my heart returns to a normal rhythm, I'll think "crazy bird" or "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" before focusing on the zillion other things on my mind. After several more heart-lurching moments, I finally took a closer look at the bush only to find a perfectly crafted robin's nest...complete with four brilliant blue eggs. Cautioning my sons not to get too close or touch it, they marveled at this amazing bit of nature before shoving each other out of the way to get to their Wii inside.

Spying cautiously through my front window gives me a birds-eye view of the mother robin sitting on her nest. It's like having an ant farm through my living room window (except the ant has feathers, beady eyes and a suspicious nature). The downside to this miracle is that now we’re all paranoid about entering and exiting the house by the front door. We've now taken to exiting via the garage or the slider on my back deck. And while this is all well and good when we are home, unless we want to leave our garage door open (exposing the complete mess inside to the entire town) or leave my slider unlocked (hey burglars! c'mon over to my house!) we still have to enter through the front door when we've been out. Which sets our flighty robin flapping away into a nearby tree (causing me to wonder why she didn’t build the nest there in the first place). We won't be able to prune that bush anytime in the near future, further hindering our feeble attempts at landscaping.

Sharing my bird tale with several friends yielded many bird stories in return. "Dorito", an orange-bellied bird, would fling itself at my friend Donna's bedroom window at 5 a.m. hundreds of times in a row, day after day. Donna put wrapping paper, construction paper, even stuffed animals in the window trying to deter "Dorito" from slamming itself repeatedly at the glass (imagine how the neighbors must have appreciated this new décor.) Donna finally broke down and ordered a permanent shade, which did the trick (perhaps "Dorito" gets a kickback from "Blinds to Go".)

I mentioned to my friend Barbra, who I now think of as The Birdwoman of Hanover, that I had seen several wild turkeys strutting through her yard. These ugly trespassers simultaneously drove her dog bananas while causing her daughter to freeze in fear. Barbra also said that they have had several robins stand on the outside windowsill, in their own poop, pecking the windows repeatedly (and in the process transferring their poop to the windows). She’s also found a bird nesting inside her garage. But probably the best story was the morning Barbra heard a flapping sound coming from her chimney, which services a wood burning stove. Barbra called her husband in a panic, who rushed back home from work only to find that the flapping had stopped. That night they lit a fire in the stove. The next morning, the flapping began again. Barbra called in a specialist, who dismantled the stove, looked up the chimney and pulled out a live, soot-covered duck (luckily not a wood duck but a mallard). Taking it outside, it wobbled for a moment, and then flew off. About all this Barbra said, "I don't even like birds...I don't have bird houses, I don't have any bird feeders!" Yet for some reason they flock to her.

Getting back to the robin in my front yard, my husband brought up the interesting point that once the babies hatch, the mommy-robin is more likely to fly at us rather than away from us when we approach the front door. At this point we'll have to come up with a creative way to get into our house without leaving it unlocked. Because, while a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, a bird in the face is worth a trip to the emergency room.