SECOND WRITING PRIZE WINNER –
WINTER 2022 – 2023
is Donna Pearce
of St. Thomas, Ontario – CANADA
WOMAN versus BIRD
By Donna Pearce
As citizens of the world, I believe we have a sacred trust to live humbly alongside nature and to treat all other species with consideration. This is why I gently gather spiders in a Kleenex and release them into the wild. This also explains why I will remove the screen in our bathroom window and shoe lost and confused bees out to continue their essential task of pollination. Aside from flies and mosquitos, who deserve a most violent end, we are considered gentlefolk.
We treasure our mornings, a cup of freshly brewed coffee in hand, sitting side by side on the loveseat in our great room, watching the flurry of activity at the feeder hung from the latticework above our large picture window. Sparrows and wrens, vying for a perch, eagerly pecking at our offerings, nuts, and seeds littering the ground as they scatter them in their haste, only to take wing back to the safety of the cedars that rim our back yard, in response to some threat, real or imagined. We find it mesmerizing.
Little wonder then, when a pair of nesting robins chose to raise a family on our front porch, we embraced the experience, accepting the mess of twigs and other nest-worthy paraphernalia that littered the porch with reasonably good humour, sweeping it off into the garden when the parents were out foraging. We tolerated the droppings, which ran down the siding and onto the back of our expensive rattan chairs with little complaint. We bore the loss of enjoying our front porch in the warm spring evenings, all for the sake of being good stewards.
As happens with all families, the little ones grow too fast. It seemed we had only just been blessed with a brood of chirping little bird heads peaking over the edge of the nest, then they were full of feathers and flying off. It was bittersweet.
We had only just reclaimed our porch when we observed something unexpected.
Woman versus Bird
It seems the parents decided to have another go. By the time they returned for the third time, we could not muster any enthusiasm and lost no time in disposing of the nest once the brood had flown the coup.
Thus began a yearly ritual. We endured and watched as the fledglings matured and were relieved when our mating pair eschewed a repeat performance.
One year we noticed two eggs smashed on our porch directly below the nest. A day or so later, we found a dove comfortably ensconced in the robin’s nest, apparently having recognized its superior workmanship. This invasion was sufficient to dissuade our robins from coming back to build in the same location. We thought we were free to reclaim the porch. Wrong.
I was puttering about in the front garden one day in early spring and happened to notice the beginnings of a nest on top of the light fixture right beside our front door.
This would not do- I swept the debris away. The following day there were more twigs. I cleaned it up again. The robin was not dissuaded and we repeated our little dance
for several more days until I came up with a scathingly brilliant idea. Armed with a small tinfoil pie dish, filled with urine-soaked cat litter and a roll of duct tape, I secured the offensive mess atop the light. There were no more attempts at a nest. We were in the clear. Wrong again.
I was emersed in a good book one lovely spring afternoon when I heard an unfamiliar noise. A “rat-tat-tat”, like a rapid-firing sub-machine gun, on the front window. Getting up to investigate I was at first surprised, then troubled to see it was a robin, flying at the window, smashing into it, hitting it with its beak, leaving feathers smeared all over. How peculiar. Was it trying to get at the plant on the sofa table? I closed the shutters, to no avail- it continued for the remainder of the day, only ceasing as dusk fell.
When I mentioned this odd behaviour to my friend the following afternoon, she informed me that this was territorial behaviour. The bird thought its reflection was
Woman versus Bird
an interloper and was attempting to drive it away. How fascinating, I thought, in my naivety. When she told me that they ended up covering their back window in newspaper to stop their bird, I was determined to find a better solution.
All you had to do is disrupt the bird’s reflection by drawing a grid on your window with a yellow highlighter, according to one source. Simple and logical. A quick trip to Staples ensued and armed with a new package of yellow highlighters and my large wooden ruler, I marched with purpose into our living room and adhering to instructions, drew a grid of precise dimensions on the window.
According to my questionable source, a yellow highlighter, while being quite visible to the bird, is hardly visible to the human eye. I strongly disagree- on both points. Not only did the bird pooh-pooh my efforts, but the window also looked like it belonged
to a daycare provider on crack. That is, after having only just finished defacing the glass, and returned to my book, the blasted bird started up again and I momentarily lost my mind, grabbing the highlighter and rushing back into the living room, completely covering every inch of glass in yellow scribble. Of course, it didn’t work.
Something primordial bubbled to the surface that afternoon and, rather than be concerned for the bird hurting itself, I began to fervently pray that it would.
I continued to resist the idea of covering our windows with paper, considering it a last resort. By now, the bird had not only claimed the front of our home but had been attacking both the window in our on-suite and the window of our half bath. This was war.
My husband, having joined the fight, found a reference about using reflecting disks, so we rummaged around in the basement and found a bunch of unused computer disks. Armed with binder twine, we proceeded to adorn the front porch with a legion of reflecting spheres. The front of our home looked like it had been decorated by drunken Mardi Gras revellers. Which I could have tolerated, had it worked. It did not- like a kamikaze pilot, the bloody bird circumnavigated its way
Woman versus Bird
through our intended deterrent with ease. We continued the battle, not willing to concede defeat. Next, two flat metal owls were hung from the window. When that failed, my husband returned to the hardware store and purchased a small plastic owl, and placed it on the top of the light. At least there was a response, albeit not the one we were hoping for. The robin proceeded to knock it off its perch- repeatedly until it managed to break its head off. Perhaps a larger, more sinister owl would do the trick? Yet another trip to the store and the Frankenstein version of the owl took up residence on a table in front of the window, looking suitably sinister. This too was an epic failure. All we managed to do is frighten the neighbours’ kids, who thought it was real. They were probably traumatized when we decided to hang it by its neck and leave it to dangle uselessly in the wind.
Out of ideas, I capitulated and grabbed a bunch of discarded pages from the novel I was writing, along with a roll of Scotch tape, and proceeded to cover the front window with paper. By the time my husband drove into the driveway later that day to see our house having been transformed from an inviting cottagey feel to early Canadian trailer trash, not only had I successfully obliterated any chance of the healing rays of the sun to illuminate the interior of our abode, I also managed to cover both bathroom windows at the side of the house, selflessly risking life and limb as I balanced atop a ladder. The overall effect was to render the property with a certain kind of je ne sais quoi- not in a good way either. At least our neighbours had a laugh.
In the end, we had both a robin’s nest well hidden in the overgrown trumpet vine at the side of the house and another nest on the front porch, around the corner on a ledge. If we were very quiet, we could peek around to see the babies up close. Despite all the annoyances, I still found this new life enchanting. A few days later, we retired to our basement to veg in front of the TV, and as
Woman versus Bird
I sank into the leather sofa; I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye at the window, followed by the rapid-fire “rat-tat-tat”. Bested by a bird.
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About the author:
This is a short story written by Donna Pearce. I hope you enjoy it.
