Paul Turner: Trying to communicate with robins is for the birds

Readers are not exactly clamoring to join me on a predawn bird-listening bike ride.

Ahahahahahahaha. Who could have predicted that?

As you might recall, I had said Sunday that I wanted someone to tell me what kind of birds I’m hearing on my bike ride downtown shortly before the sun comes up. So I had proposed meeting up with a reader who knows his or her bird songs and pedaling around a few South Hill neighborhoods in the dark, listening to our feathered friends.

Crickets.

Actually a few readers did step forward. But none was the perfect fit.

Either they lacked a bicycle, lived too far away or mostly wanted to talk about why I’m no longer doing the Slice column.

Then I heard from a longtime correspondent over in North Idaho, Bruce Werner.

“Bird songs are available online,” he emailed.

Ah, yes. He’s right, of course.

He shared a story. It’s somewhat beside the point but I liked it.

“The other day I ran for a phone call I was expecting and when I opened the door realized it was a flicker ‘laughing’ at me in a way that sounded like my phone.”

Anyway, as I was saying. Thanks to Bruce’s reminder, I knew I could go online and confirm that the song stylists I am hearing are robins.

Speaking of beside the point, did I ever tell you about my late father’s Aunt Kat in Vermont, who once cooked and ate a robin? But again I digress.

Before I even tried listening to bird sounds on the computer, another identification protocol presented itself.

Tuesday morning, I was in our kitchen and heard bird chirping. Loud bird chirping. I feared it was coming from our attic.

A bit later, my wife came in and heard the same thing. She speculated that the bird was broadcasting to our neighborhood from his perch atop the stove’s exhaust fan pipe. Though that would place him above the roof, the sounds he made seemed somehow amplified as they came down the pipe and out of the hood above the stove.

It seemed evident to us the avian vocalist was pretty pleased with the notes he was hitting.

Do you remember the episode of “The Andy Griffith Show” titled “Opie the Birdman”?

It’s considered by many to be one of the series’ best. It has some truly touching moments.

But, in a comedic aside, at one point it has Deputy Barney Fife interpreting what various bird chirps mean. And because of our shared memory of that TV show, we imagined the bird on our roof was saying “I feel pretty good” and “I sound great!”

Then my wife, who is smart, got an idea. Perhaps we could communicate with the bird on our roof. Wildlife outreach, you could say.

Years ago, when my parents were in and out of the hospital on a somewhat regular basis, I spent a fair amount of time in Sacred Heart’s gift shop. I wound up buying quite a few toy birds that, if you squeezed them just right, produced the bird song that corresponded to their species-specific appearance.

(Once, back when I used to walk to work, I took our toy red-tailed hawk with me to see if it would freak out the sparrows and others along my route. But the bold screech that filled our living room seemed faint and pathetic when played outdoors.)

So my wife got the stuffed robin. I can’t remember if it was the male or the female. We have both.

She positioned it under the hood above the stove and activated its song simulation.

Meantime, the real bird kept up his unbroken stream of chatter.

The recorded robin sound seemed to match the real bird song coming from above.

My wife played it several times. But the real bird never shut up, so we weren’t sure if it was listening.

“Can’t get a word in edgewise,” said my wife.

Eventually the robin on the exhaust pipe must have flown away. We imagined our toy robin had scared him off by claiming our house as his territory.

The language we used paraphrased a line from the classic movie Western, “Shane.”

“Looks like (our bird) put the run on that sodbuster.”

The next morning, the kitchen was quiet, which made us both a little sad.

We never meant for that robin to go away mad.