Birds

This morning, at least until I need to use the VOIP phone in my office, I’m sitting in the living room working. That’s because my office is cold, and also because here I can see the bird feeder on the patio. The work I’m doing today involves bursts of coding, then restarting stuff that takes a few minutes to come back up. I’m spending those couple minutes looking at the various species out there.

It’s been eventful. We have this motorized bird feeder that when something heavy lands on the perch spins like a mamma jamma. I got to see a squirrel flipped ass over teakettle, which is always great. We had this thing for over a year before we actually saw a squirrel thrown, and now we’ve seen three this month. Good stuff.

At one point I was looking down at my screen and heard a loud crash. A dopey fat turtle dove had flown straight into the window, and was lying on its back twitching. I went back to what I was doing, checking on it every few minutes and it stayed there, still twitching, for a long time. Today is trash day, and I figured it would be best to get it to the curb now rather than let it rot. As I grabbed a plastic bag and went to the back door to take care of it, it was on its feet, blinking and looking even dopier than turtle doves usually do. That was good timing on its part, because I was 30 seconds from putting it out of its misery. I had thought it was dying but I guess it was just knocked out. It got up, waddled around and finally flew off. Thank god. I hate to do those things that sometimes have to be done when you have lots of birds near your house.

Published by

dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.

5 thoughts on “Birds”

  1. a very cool feeder, going have to get one of those for my wife – she must have a dozen feeders around our house, plus some at our place in vermont…

    we constantly see robins, bluebirds, cardinals, sparrows, finches and all sort of song birds…

    the dogs and of course the cats love watching them, and chase of any squirrels in the yard – but they still come back for more…

  2. I once worked for this company with a large shipping warehouse. The warehouse had a large glass windowed area for a foyer. That windowed foyer was easily a hundred feet tall and thirty feet wide.

    The warehouse was out in the country, and because of the nearby farms, there was a large number of crows in the area. Crows are very territorial and will fight any crows they perceive are not in their “group”.

    One day, I was working at this warehouse, doing integration work on a conveyor system. I was working on the servers, in an office near the foyer that day, as opposed to deeper inside the warehouse where the actual conveyor hardware was. I noticed there was a lot of commotion at the entrance. As I walked over, I saw crow after crow, probably a dozen, crash into that glass wall, and fall dazed to the ground. It was awesome, and just so needlessly idiotic.

    Turns out the crow were angry at the “other crow” apparently hanging out inside the foyer. I don’t think they ever learned they were attacking their own reflection, cuz it happened several times over the months I was working there!

Comments are closed.