Front Porch: Robin’s antics give birds a bad name

Normally I like birds. I am, after all, the chicken lady.

Several years ago I began writing about a feral chicken who lived in my neighborhood for a year and who my neighbor and I helped keep alive until my husband was able to corral her. We removed her to a lovely home for unwanted and wayward chickens in Spokane Valley. Since then I have been happy to write of Miss Chicken’s exploits and progress, and she has developed quite a fan club.

And then a year or so ago, there was the saga of the baby birds who fell from a nest into my front yard. We endeavored to keep them safe until they were able to fly away.

I’ve gone to the birds and am happy to be there.

But now there’s this one robin that’s making me rethink this whole love-the-birds thing. It began one evening a few weeks ago when we heard a kind of bumping noise. We looked around and were able to isolate the sound to the dining room, which is on the north side of our house, but we still couldn’t see anything. Still the peck-thud sound persisted. I stood silently along the wall and waited and watched.

There’s a deck that runs across the back of our house. Out on a lawn chair on the deck outside the dining room window sat a big, fat robin. Every 15-30 seconds or so he would fly into the window. Sometimes he’d back off to the railing of the deck, wait a few more seconds and then launch into the window again.

Figuring that this is the season of love in birdland, when he saw his own image in the glass he went to fight off this intruder. So we just lowered the blinds, hoping that would cut the mirror effect. Problem solved. But then the next day, it began again in the morning just as the sun was coming up. He was back at it, and he didn’t let up for hours.

We were watching TV in the evening, and here came the sound again, but this time from the living room, where there is a slider that opens to the deck. Birdie was standing on the deck just a few hops away from the base of the slider, and he was hop-flying into the glass. Over and over. We dropped the shade there, too, and closed the screen. So he moved over and began his ballet on the tall vertical glass window next to the slider. Dropped that shade, too. He moved back to the dining room where the shade was still drawn.

And then one morning recently, at sunrise, he began launching at the only other window on the north side of our house – our bedroom window. The deck does not extend under that window, so he sits in a branch in a tree across from the window and flies at it again and again, hitting both the bare glass side of the window and the side covered by a screen, where he sometimes hangs for a bit before falling back. This is not charming at 5 a.m.

And now he moves back and forth along that side of my house, attacking whichever window seems a threat to him at the moment. All of them have shades drawn. I have been reading up on what to do. Cover the outside of the windows. Hang flags or windsocks or other moving objects. Put out balloons. I’m beginning to try some of these, but so far, no luck.

And on top of my new unwelcome, robin-induced early-to-rise regimen, I have the pleasure of washing off what seems to be more bird poop than one bird should possibly be able to produce from my deck railing, deck furniture, deck flooring, windows and window ledges.

The added bonus is that now, on the south side of my house, there are smudges on the two tall vertical windows off the side of my front door and piles of poop at the base of those windows, too. It’s beginning to feel like an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

I’m hoping that birdie finds a girlfriend and gets busy with her darn soon. Or that one of these homemade remedies will finally prove effective. One friend suggested a shotgun. I rather doubt I’ll go there, but the bump-flap alarm clock at my bedroom window is going off earlier and earlier these days as we move toward the summer solstice … which is allowing my mind to fantasize about that lock-and-load solution.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast. net. Previous columns are available at spokesman.com/ columnists.