This spring thing is strictly for the birds

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/05/2018 (2990 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I don’t want to sound like a monster, but I’m doing everything I can to prevent another family from moving into our house.

More precisely, I’m trying to stop them from moving onto our house.

I became aware of this unwanted home invasion Friday morning when, shortly after stumbling out of bed, I marched onto our back steps, clad only in my ratty blue bathrobe and a pair of flip-flops, to demand that Bogey (a.k.a. “Mr. X”), our small white dog with a huge Napoleonic complex, come back inside.

I was still feeling pretty upbeat from the Jets’ big Game 7 victory the night before — at least I was until, suddenly and without warning, a cacophony of flapping and fluttering exploded in the air beside my head, which is one of my more important appendages.

What with being a courageous newspaper columnist with steely blue eyes and naturally curly hair, I calmly surveyed the area for signs of danger before wisely retreating to the safety of our home.

Ha ha ha! I am, of course, lying. That’s what might have happened in an alternate universe. What happened in this universe was that I immediately flung my hands on top of my head, hunched over like a boiled shrimp, then began screeching like a terrified schoolgirl before sprinting back inside.

If you had been there, it would have sounded something like this: “EEK! EEK! WAH! WAH! SLAM!!!”

After my heart stopped pounding, I poked my head out the screen door, which is when I noticed a bunch of twigs and straw and twine and leaves had been tucked on top of the light fixture jutting out from the outdoor wall at our back door.

I pulled all the junk off the light fixture, and that’s when I spotted the culprit — a pudgy robin, perched on our backyard clothesline, its tiny beak clutching a load of nest-building materials.

We stared at each other, and I could tell from the look in his eye — OK, it could have been “her” eye, but I am no amateur ornithologist and it’s hard to determine gender when you are hiding behind the window in your back door — that this bird meant business.

Every other year, a family of robins will try to build a nest on the light atop our back steps. It’s not a good situation for any of us. The robins do not like human beings constantly coming and going through the back door, whereas I personally do not like it when an irritated bird dive bombs my head because it sees me as a threat to its home, when all I am trying to do is gain unfettered access to my barbecue.

If any birds are reading today’s newspaper, I would like them to know they are welcome to any of our backyard trees, of which we have a wide assortment suitable for avian lodgings, but we would appreciate it if they would steer clear of the light fixture at the top of the steps.

Sadly, in a battle with birds, my wife is a non-combatant in the sense that, if you can imagine, she is even more terrified of birds than she is of mice. “OH NO!” she squealed in a text when I informed her of the turmoil raging that morning on our back steps.

I am mildly less terrified of birds, though I have had my moments over the years. In our last house, we were continually forced to evict big, black grackles, hefty birds that would perch on our chimney, pass out after breathing in the fumes, then wake up in our basement, where they would find their way into the walls.

Back then, I would be alerted to their presence when I climbed into the bathtub and, in mid-float, would hear strange noises coming from under the tub. “SCRITCH! SCRATCH! SCRITCH! SCRATCH!” The noises would go as the birds apparently tried to claw their way up through the tub.

The terror peaked one day when I innocently marched downstairs to fetch dog food, which required me to reach into the opening of a 20-pound bag… WHICH IS WHEN A (BAD WORD) GRACKLE ERUPTED OUT OF THE (BAD WORD) BAG AND FLEW INTO MY (BAD WORD) FACE.”

Sorry for all the capital letters, but even now the very thought of that incident — which caused me to fling myself onto the stairs and crawl, screaming, back to safety — gets my brave little heart pounding.

That bird was only evicted after my then-six-year-old son donned his plastic gladiator outfit, a hockey helmet and, armed with a tennis racket, chased the bird out the back door.

Getting back to our most recent battle, what I did was fetch some tinfoil, crumple it on top of our back door light fixture, then retreat to the kitchen window to see how the nest-building robin would react.

What the bird did was, with its mouth loaded down with twigs and straw, fly into the foil, retreat, fly back into the foil, retreat again… and then repeat the process until the foil finally blew away into the bushes in the backyard.

So that is what the bird and I have been doing for the past hour or so. Still dressed in my bathrobe, I stick up some foil in a bid to make the light an undesirable spot for a nest, while the bird glares at me from the clothesline before mounting a counter-attack.

I have replaced the foil several times, each time squishing it down even harder in hopes it will repel efforts to turn it into a comfy nest.

Like the quest for the Stanley Cup, this is an epic spring battle. And right now, it’s impossible to say who will emerge victorious — the bird or the bird-brain.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca