This Bird Won't Fly

     We have a bird at our house. He’s not like a friendly parrot in a cage or a mynah bird that sits on your shoulder or even a sparrow or a robin that will eat seeds from your hand; he’s a certified psycho bird. He’s a cardinal, and he lives in an evergreen tree just beside our driveway. I know he’s a he because he’s red and has all the defining characteristics of that breed, including a fierce demeanor that leads him to exhibit what can only be called bullying behaviors.  

     Now don’t misunderstand.  We have many, many wild birds in our vicinity.  There’s a hawk family that nests in a rather tall poplar tree just off the gravel road, there are Canadian geese - yes, I am assuming their nationality and breed simultaneously - that fly over our house honking furiously on their way to one of the several nearby lakes, sparrows that travel in incessant motion from a small branch to the ground and back, crows that fly over singly and in murders, and blue jays and mockingbirds that patrol the surrounding areas looking for other birds and animals to annoy.  If you listen carefully at dawn and dusk you can hear turkeys tell each other it’s time to do whatever it is turkeys do, and several families of barn owls call to each other at odd times during the day and night. They always make me think of Gomer Pyle doing his hooty owl imitation, but that’s a different story. We also have a number of robins that magically appear from nowhere and announce the beginning of spring, and some that remain local even during winter and assume a superior attitude and complain loudly about “tourist robins” as their relatives fly in from somewhere else when the weather warms up.  There’s also a family of starlings that tries every year - unsuccessfully - to build a nest on top of our hanging light on the front porch, but all they get is small globs of dried mud and straw on top of the light and on the porch underneath. If it weren’t for the beauty of watching a murmuration fly through the air, I might resent the mess.  A couple of wrens do manage to build nests inside the garage in inconspicuous places, and I only notice when the male flies out noisily when I open the garage door in the morning. He lets me know he doesn’t appreciate being cooped up in the nest with his pregnant mate all night, but he’s not generally abusive to any great degree.

     The cardinal is a different story.  I first noticed him a couple of months ago while I was sitting at my desk.  There are two windows that overlook the woods that is our front yard, and a couple of gardenia bushes in the flowerbed next to the house. I heard a clunk on the lower part of the window. I looked up from my computer screen and noticed a male cardinal sitting on a branch of the camellia bush and waving his wings as if working up the courage to launch another strike against what I was sure was his reflection in the window. I’ve seen this behavior in the past, so it wasn’t really surprising, but this was different.  He flew against the window again and again and again, and only stopped when I got up to go into another room. I remember wondering at the time if perhaps his anger was in some way personal, but dismissed the thought that a cardinal would hold a grudge.

     The next day I was sitting at the breakfast table and gazing out over the back yard. Since we are rather isolated, there are no blinds on these windows, and I noticed what appeared to be the same cardinal fly away from the bush on the corner of the house and directly into the window where I was watching. He didn’t hit it hard and seemed to brush his wings repeatedly against the glass. He repeated this several times until I got annoyed and moved to an interior room.  Was this the same bird or were there several of them experiencing the simultaneous insanity of mating season protective behavior? Was it safe to go outside or would we be subjected to a Hitchcockesque attack from all the cardinals in the area in a united front? I was beginning to suspect that all the incidents were the same bird, and he had only been recently released from either the Group W bench or the cardinal version of Antifa incitement training in Atlanta.

     I’ve seen mockingbirds swoop down on the occasional passing cat or our little dog Sammie when she walked too close to their nest. Once the offending animal moves away from the nest, the birds will let it move on followed by a few bird profanities as they return to whatever it was they were doing before the interruption. I’ve also seen meadow larks and quail do the “hey, look over here, I’ve got a broken wing” trick to lead people or intruders away from their nest, but when the offender moves away, they give up the pretense and return to their nest. I’ve also seen cardinals attack their reflection in windows, and it usually lasts a few days or a week at the most, but this bird has been at it now for over 3 months.  Every day…and his attacks have escalated. 

     My truck sits on a concrete apron just outside our garage, situated strategically so my wife can back her car out of the garage without me having to move my truck.  Not far from the passenger side door are several large evergreen trees. Back in November I noticed a movement in the tree nearest my truck just as I walked outside. It was the Psycho Bird! I was sure of it.  As I walked closer to the tree to get a better look, I glanced at something on the side mirror of my truck and saw the mirror and the adjacent window were covered in white bird poop that had oozed down the window and streaked the door handle, the door and accumulated in an amazingly large pile on the running board. As if to make sure I saw what was causing such a mess, the kamikaze bird - as I was watching - flew against the side mirror, fluttered his wings, pooped, flew to the passenger window just a few inches away, fluttered his wings against the window, pooped again and flew away with a look on his face strangely reminiscent of a mad teenage daughter that had just had her phone taken away.  

     I considered myself fairly adept at solving what I called “living in the country issues,” and had, over time, developed a series of defensive measures to discreetly discourage wasps, dirt dobbers, lizards, ants and snakes from invading our immediate space. I had noticed, for example, that carpenter bees were slowly but surely destroying the wooden posts that held up our fence around the pool.  I considered calling a pest control company but remembered my grandmother telling us once that stuffing a brown paper bag with plastic bags, tying the top and hanging it in an area near where the carpenter bees were would make the bees think it was a hornets’ nest.  Evidently carpenter bees and hornets are natural enemies, and the bees would move out to the suburbs to get away from the hornets. Believe it or not, the bees were gone within a week and the only cost was a rather unsightly brown paper bag hanging from one of the fence posts. I was pleasantly surprised that it worked so well and so quickly, and that grandma had been right.  Of course, she also believed that if you didn’t put plastic inserts in your unused wall plugs that the electricity would leak out and build up in the room and make your hair stand up.

     So I did what any normal person would do. I was going to ask an old person until I remembered that was me now, so instead I googled it. Some of the solutions were impractical, like parking inside the 2-car garage because only 1 will fit because of the accumulation of stuff in the garage I evidently am not willing to do without.  You never know when I might need that large metal cart with empty flower pots and potting soil just in case I want to grow something the deer won’t eat, whatever that might be, so I covered the side mirror with a blue cloth, and secured it with an otherwise useless face mask that seemed happy to be involved in something useful for a change, but the bird simply pooped on both to show me his disdain for my efforts. I tried putting a plastic owl in the tree and found it two days later on the ground under the tree covered in - you guessed it - bird poop.  I had no doubt as to whom the poopetrator was. The plastic snake idea seemed to work for a couple of days until my wife forgot it was there and it surprised her as she started to open the door on the way to church and ran back into the house hyperventilating and trying to tell me there was a snake on the car at the same time. Reminding her that it was plastic did not seem to help, so I made a mental note to make sure it got hidden in a garbage bag inside the garbage can when she wasn’t looking.  Phobias are phobias and I have learned there are some things that don’t have to make sense to me, they just are.

     Near the beginning of this tribulation, I had discovered from other old people that a combination of baking soda and water was necessary to clean bird poop effectively, and that the wishy washy high pressure soap and water just wouldn’t cut it - so to speak.  The drive through car wash was also a bust, so there I was in my driveway with a hose, a bucket of soap and baking soda and a brush cleaning my truck like I was 16 and car washes hadn’t been invented yet. It wasn’t nearly as much fun as it had been back then. 

     I had reached the limits of my frustration and started planning ways to ambush the psychobird with my grandson’s BB gun - no, I wasn’t happy about that solution, but desperate times call for desperate measures - when I got a welcome piece of advice from a friend - another old guy - who had heard me whining about the bird and his personal vendetta. He told me to put aluminum foil on the side mirror.  “Yeah, right” I thought while he was talking, “and I’ll get some of those plastic plug thingys so the electricity won’t leak out while I’m at it.” But I did it anyway.  It’s been three days since I tried it, and the psychobird is still in the evergreen tree next to me truck - I see him sitting there on a branch with a puzzled look on his face, plotting how he is going to get past the aluminum shinyness that has temporarily stalled his nefarious campaign - but there’s no more poop on my truck.  Not yet anyway.

     I’m a little more hopeful at this moment that the current solution continues to frustrate the psychobird until mating season passes, his psychosis abates or he dies an unfortunate death from an accidental gunshot. The gunshot solution would be a last resort at this point, and I would rather do things differently. Shooting him after he’d pooped on my truck for 3 months would be like, I don’t know, maybe allowing a $1,000 spy balloon to fly across the country before you shoot it down with a $200 million dollar plane and a $2 million dollar missile, but I guess you have to do what you have to do to convince people you mean what you say.  Sort of. Some of the time, anyway. I think old people like Grandma might call that “closing the barn door after the horse got out,” but you know how Grandma was.  Lord, I just hope the psychobird doesn’t mate.