Pointy Birds

The house in which I spent much of my youth (ages nine-17) had a big picture window in the living room that looked out on our front lawn, a tree, a sidewalk and a reasonably busy suburban street. I spent an awful lot of time sitting in front of that window, watching.

The neighborhood was small enough that I recognized most of the people walking up and down the sidewalk. Even came to recognize a lot of the cars. In the time I was there, the tree grew from a sapling into something that was taller than the house.

Not long after we moved into the house (in 1975), my mom took to hanging two planters full of flowers on the front porch every spring. They both dangled in front of the picture window?not obscuring the view, just sort of sitting there at the top. And not long after she hung them there, the birds found them.

In my neighborhood, you didn't see that many different species of birds around. A few bluejays, a few cardinals. Most of what you had were robins. When you grow up seeing nothing but robins (bob-bob-bobbin' along) they can get mighty boring. I remember going on grade-school field trips to the park to see how many different kinds of birds we could identify. Bird identification is a big part of every Wisconsinite's grade-school education. When we got back to the classroom, however, all 25 of us had seen robins and nothing else. (We could all identify robins like that.)

So when I was sitting in front of the picture window, watching the summer scene outside?one that I wanted no real part of myself?and the robin lighted on the planter, I didn't think much of it.

When it was back again a few minutes later, I thought nothing of that, either.

After the fifth or sixth visit that afternoon, I figured I should mention something to my mom, who was just around the corner in the kitchen.

"Oh, they're not going to nest here, nosir," she said, before going outside to shoo the bird away. No matter how many times she shooed, though, the robin always came back whenever she wasn't looking, and within a few days, it had built for itself a sturdy little nest with all the amenities?it was protected from the wind and the rain and, right there next to the picture window, it could spy on all my comings and goings. Recognizing that, it suddenly became clear why the robin had skipped the more traditional tree and headed straight for the hanging planter.

Within a week, the nest contained three powder-blue eggs. By this point, my mom had given up the fight. She had no desire to go around breaking up bird families. The eggs hatched, the birds grew and were pushed from the nest by the mother. The great circle of life and all. The rich tapestry of whatever.

Come autumn, the robin family abandoned the nest, and my mom dragged the now tattered planters inside.

The following year, the robins returned?and despite my mom's valiant efforts in the late spring, they took over again. The year after that, bird families took over both planters, and my mom gave up altogether. It became a kind of family tradition?our own mini-Capistrano. More than anything else, it became an annual science project, not just for me, but for other school kids as well. In later years, it served the same purpose for my nieces.

There are several problems, though, with having two bird families hanging around in front of your picture window all day. Shit's one, of course. Shit was everywhere. All that incessant chirping and peeping's another. So was navigation. Despite the aeronautical wonders these creatures are, well, it takes them a while to figure out "glass." A couple times a week there'd be a THWUNK, and a stunned bird would be sitting on the porch, shaking its head. This was particularly bad when I was sitting in front of the window, watching the damn thing fly at me, like that phone booth sequence in The Birds.

The other problem was those damn baby birds. Sometimes, see, when the time came, the mother would shove them out the wrong side of the nest. They come out the front, and they're gonna have a 6-foot drop onto the soft grass. They come out the back, they're gonna fall about the same distance onto cold, hard concrete. It got pretty ugly sometimes.

Once it even got pretty ugly when they came out the right way. I was sitting in a chair, staring out the window when I saw the four of them go?bloomp, bloomp, bloomp, bloomp?onto the lawn. They ran around in confused circles for a bit, then, as if following some magnetic pole, some invisible line of force, they all headed straight for the street.

I'm not sure why I did this, but I jumped from my chair, ran out the front door and went into the street myself to try to herd them back to the lawn. I guess you get sort of attached to these things after a couple months.

As I mentioned, the street outside our house was a busy one. Before they opened up the extension that connected 172 with Hwy. 41 a few years later, it was the quickest way between the two. We also had a lot of cattle trucks heading for the slaughterhouse down the road. Still, there I was, waving my arms like an idiot, dodging cars and trying to gather up four goddamned baby birds.

When Morgan was working at the ASPCA, she had to deal with her share of chickens?and in one instance, a cage full of chicks. Whenever you opened the cage door, she told me, the chicks transformed themselves into fuzzy yellow pingpong balls, bouncing every which way?around the cage, onto the floor, around the room.

That pretty much describes these four I was chasing. They couldn't fly yet, but they were real, real fast, and they had no sense of direction. Perhaps that first taste of freedom had driven them completely insane. Every time I got two of them herded over to the curb, another one would be headed straight for the tires of an oncoming station wagon.

(Funny thing is, I bet most of the drivers couldn't even see what the hell I was chasing. They probably assumed that I was just all hopped up on goofballs, the way most of the kids back then were.)

Tires screeched, horns honked, people screamed at me, but though I'm still not sure how?or even how long it took?I got them all back onto the lawn, after finally simply snatching the last chirping little vermin up into my hand and carrying it back to the nest for another try. It stared at me with what seemed to be rage the entire trip, its tiny beak open, peeping insults.

As I approached the nest, that's when the mother robin went apeshit and flew at my head.

"Ahhhhh!" I said, as I dropped the bird on the grass and ran for the house.

Yeah, so, it was a story with a happy ending, as before long I saw the mother in the back yard, leading her four youngsters around in a little parade.

I avoided birds after that, for the most part, aside from getting shat on a few times. It seemed the wisest thing to do.

Then recently Morgan and I found ourselves down at Coney, celebrating Rutherford B. Hayes Day. We'd been out on the boardwalk for a while, where she'd been taking some pictures, but we'd now stopped for a bit and were leaning against the railing, looking out over the beach. There weren't too many people around.

Last time we were there, we'd seen a man out on the sand, tossing bread to the gulls. They hovered around him in the air like a cloud of filthy electrons, making the occasional dive for his head. He seemed unfazed by it all. It was quite a sight.

This time, it was Morgan who produced the slice of bread from her bag. She tossed a few pieces onto the sand, and within seconds, a small flock of both pigeons and gulls had gathered. She tossed a few more to a few who were just flying in, and they snatched them in mid-air.

"Jesus Christ," she said a bit later, as she tossed more crumbs straight into the air. "This is incredible."

But you know, though I tried to follow her gaze upward, I really couldn't see what she was talking about.

"I'd love to get a picture of this."

I offered to take over the crumb-tossing if she wanted to step back and get her camera out, and she handed me the bag. I broke off a piece and tossed it aloft. Then another. With the third piece, I looked up, finally.

There I found myself staring into the cruel black eyes of an enormous seagull, floating motionless inches above me, its wings outstretched in front of the sun like some lice-ridden Angel of Death.

"Aaaahhhh!" I said, as I took an involuntary step backward.

I regained my composure, stepped forward again and continued tossing bread toward the long, pointed beak poised so near my face. On earlier visits, we'd seen those beaks used to impale crabs?so Lord knows what they could do to the human skull. After all, look at what happened to Fabio?and that was just a pigeon.

Behind me, Morgan snapped pictures, and I kept a lookout for flying shit.

Funny thing about that, she pointed out a couple days later, is that birds seem to shit on men a hell of a lot more than they shit on women. Between the two of us, in fact, we could only think of one woman we knew of who had ever been shit on by a bird.

Something to think about.

Soon there was another gull floating closely behind the first, both of them now floating above my head. I understand how commonplace this all is, but I'd never seen the bottom of a bird in flight that close up before. After a bit, it began to take on an air of unreality?almost as if these creatures were computer-generated, or models hanging from thin wires. They simply didn't move.

This time around, other people stood on the sand and watched us. And I'm sure they were wondering, as we had been the last time, just when we were going to be attacked.

When the bread was gone, we decided it best to hightail it down the boardwalk before that happened. The gulls screamed after us for a while, but stayed put. Maybe they were on wires, come to think of it.

It was strangely thrilling, this bird encounter. I could've reached up and whacked it right out of the sky if I'd chosen to. But I didn't. Likewise, he probably could've plucked my tongue from my head had he chosen to, but he didn't either. Still, walking away, I decided that it had been a simple issue of luck and bread, and that it might be best to avoid birds for a while again.