Front Porch: Feathered enemy is back for a second annual window assault

Earlier this month, just before the start of spring, I spotted a big fat robin standing on one of the patches of brown lawn that was emerging from under the melting mounds of snow in my front yard. I wondered if he was the same bird from last year as I pointed him out to my husband. I kind of meant it as a joke.

We remember last year’s robin quite well. After spring was underway, he arrived and spent seven to eight weeks assaulting our house. This flying-into-windows thing is not uncommon for birds during mating season, as they are busy chasing away rivals. Sometimes when they see their own reflections in windows, they see that rival – and attack. Normal activity or not, I am not thrilled with this particular springtime ritual and not anxious for a repeat performance.

I have multiple windows and a slider along the north side of my house, and last year Birdie flew into all of them. Less often, he’d also launch into the slider on a lower deck on the west side of the house. And he just loved ramming into the two tall narrow windows near my front door on the south side of the house.

In the early mornings and late afternoon – and sometimes at random times during the day – we were under siege. I was entertaining lethal options before he finally lost interest in us.

He never seemed to hurt himself, probably because his flights were of short duration and not at great speed. He sat along the railing of the deck that runs across the entire back of the house and would hop-fly from there into the designated glass surface. We’re surrounded by ponderosa pines, so sometimes he’d launch from a branch. No long-distance flights.

The problem with this close proximity was the volume of bird poop that built up on window ledges, the deck railing, deck surfaces and deck furniture. I’d hose everything down and scrub, and within days, it was all spackled in white again – hence the murderous thoughts.

Worse still was that the later it got in the season and the days got longer, the earlier in the morning the bump-flaps started occurring. I cannot tell you how irritating it is to be sound asleep when the morning sky begins to lighten up ahead of sunrise, say around 4:30 a.m. or so, and be woken by the sounds of my bedroom window being rammed into. See reference to bird-icidal desires above.

It’s not like we took this passively. I tried many of the recommended techniques for deterring this bad bird behavior, but to no avail. When I wrote about this a year ago, many of you sent in suggestions. I tried some, including the one where I stood by the window under attack in an effort to scare him off. At first he was wary of my image, but that passed quickly. And, of course, he’d just move on to another window on the days when my presence seemed to be working. I wasn’t going to spend my day running from window to window to act like a scarecrow, so I rather quickly abandoned that labor-intensive technique.

When I wrote that I sincerely hoped he’d find a girlfriend soon, one commenter suggested that Birdie already had – me! That provided probably the only laugh I had during our mini-Alfred- Hitchcock-movie event.

Returning to the robin sighting this year, I stayed up rather late that night (good movie on TV), so I slept later than usual the next morning. It was just getting light out, and I was sleeping peacefully, when … flap and thud. He’s baaaaack, no joke. The siege of 2017 had begun.

Once again, I’m seeking solutions, but this year I decided to go to an expert. Dr. Jerry Ponti, who opened his veterinary clinic in Otis Orchards in 1977, has been treating injured wild birds for many decades, releasing them back to the wild once they are rehabilitated. If anyone would know if there were a definitive answer, a sure fire solution to this problem, it would be him.

He sighed. Not so easy, he said. I asked about shimmery bird-repellant ribbon, aluminum foil and other shiny things. “Reflective objects aren’t so effective for robins,” he said. “They work better with birds like starlings, but not robins. Better to find something that robins are afraid of in nature.”

He suggested a black silhouette, 8 to10 inches tall, of a great horned owl in the windows that are being flown into. And even with that, he wasn’t really confident it would work.

But I need my early morning sleep, so I’m giving it a go. That’s this week’s project – getting black construction paper and tracing the outline of an owl and “owling” my house at the right heights and locations.

I’ve got a lot of windows. It will be a busy week.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net.