It’s spring at last…well…sort of…I mean it somehow went from gorgeous, sunny, 60-degree weather on Saturday to freezing temps and snow on Monday. Mother Nature is a freak sometimes. Anyway, back to the idea of spring…the grass grows, flowers begin to bloom, and birds…oh birds…they head begin to head North.
Birds do not manage well at my house. Before Mac, the psycho, attention-loving Brittany Spaniel (who is a BIRD dog) was taken in, we had a miniature pinscher named Dolly (not to be confused her successor Daisy).
Dolly thought she was an actual Doberman Pinscher instead of the miniature version. Anything that managed to creep into her yard was barked at incessantly. One day, years later…Dolly stopped barking at birds. In fact, she wouldn’t even look at a bird. Based on her previous actions (the altercation with the horse-sized raccoon) we believe that a bird must’ve swooped at Dolly and scared her.
And then we bought Mac. Well, at ten-and-a-half years, Mac has yet to be scared by a swooping bird. If you’re a squirrel, you might as well save you hiss, climb a tree, and fall asleep because Mr. Tom Cruise is patient if he thinks he might’ve found a playmate. But being a bird dog, Mr. Cruise is very in tuned to birds and where there are. He listens. He sniffs. He points (he’s even taught Daisy to mimic his action though we’re not sure if she knows what she’s doing). He’s even lovingly carried dead birds to the back door, lovingly carried a poor defenseless baby bird that had fallen from its nest into the house and sat it down in the middle of the living room floor for all see.
Yes. Mac is proud of his innate instincts (Wait, aren’t all instincts innate…hmm…I still like how it sounds).
It’s safe to say that birds have had many misadventures with our dogs. And yet there is one brave bird who has made the wreath on our front door her summer nesting place.
Last year, this kamikaze bird nearly took off my 6’1’s brother head.
During the day, the bird is gone finding worms or whatever it is that birds find. At night, it returns to its nest (and babies, but more on that in a minute). With it being dark out, the people is easily spooked by people and has the habit of bolting out of the nest like a jet and into the path of incoming person. The taller you are, the more prone you are to the flight of the mamma bird.
Which is why we plan to stay mum on the subject of the bird when Hans and all of his lanky 6’8 phys iqué arrived at the house this evening. I’m hoping for decapitation. Well, they might be a little heavy because I do like Hans…but seriously, can you tell me that if you had the chance to see the bird fall straight smack-dab into someone’s head you wouldn’t want to see it happen and liking or not liking a person would have no bearing on your decision?
I mean honestly, who would pass up that chance? It’s a great story. “Oh, get this, my sister’s fiancé got hit in the head by a bird!”
I live for those kinds of stories.
But back to the bird. This summer, you had to remember to open the door a fraction of an inch, shut it, and then finally open it again so the bird wouldn’t fly into the house (Birds in the house SUCK – I’ll get to THAT in a minute).
The bird also laid eggs that hatched this summer. And every time you opened the door (this door opens into the house by the way), the little scrawny, veiny, ugly baby bird heads would squawk and reach out of their nests. We only hoped they wouldn’t suddenly learn to fly when we opened the door.
But that’s not all.
Birds, like all of God’s living creatures, shit. And when you have three baby birds living on your front door, guess what. Bird shit down there door.
Nice, I know.
With these thoughts in mind, I’d like to now tell a story about a bird, a chimney, and the curious LB.
It was in the spring when I was in seventh or eighth grade and was just barely a teenager (and I had this cute, little bitty, tight gymnast’s ass…sigh…those were the days). I was sitting at the kitchen table pretending to do my homework when a funny scratching sound was heard.
My mom, sister, and I were all in the living room/kitchen area and we looked at each other and shook our heads. Then we heard the sound again. The three of us decided to investigate and followed the sound to the chimney in the living room.
We decided it was a bird. Mom wasn’t worried about it because the damper was shut, but just in case, she put laid the screen across the mouth of the fireplace. We all went back to our business.
That is until a few hours later we heard Kevin yell, “Mom, there’s a bird in the house!”
We all came running into the living room to see that, yes, a bird was flying around the living room.
It didn’t take us long to figure out how the bird got into the house because the metal screen was no longer leaning against the fireplace.
“Kevin,” mom yelled, “What did you do?”
“I just wanted to see what was up there,” was his lame excuse.
Anyway, getting the bird out of the house was nearly as hard as getting the bat out of the house in the movies “The Great Outdoors” with Dan Akyroid and John Candy or “Black Sheep” with Chris Farley and David Spade. It took quite a bit of engineering on our parts to “corral” the clearly agitated bird out of the door.
One experience was enough and we retired our bird-catching engineering skills. Besides, knocking on the door every time you leave is so much easier than catching a bird when you have cathedral ceilings (yikes).
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