Sometimes life really IS for the birds

Published May 28, 2007

A fashionable socialite is standing near a school in Bodega Bay when all of a sudden, she looks up and the sky is filled with fluttering, squawking, dive-bombing birds.
They swoop down and start pecking and grabbing at Tippi Hedren in "The Birds."
Well, in my story, the fashionable socialite is my husband and our Bodega Bay is our backyard pool.
The birds here aren't vicious seagulls, they are blackbirds and they don't get in my husband's hair - they just get on his nerves.
One day last week, when my husband was lying next to the pool with his hand down in the filter he was trying to fix, he watched as one bird after another came from the front of the house, swooped down over the deck, released droppings, pulled back up and flew away. Bird after bird, swooping and dropping over the same 10-foot runway on the deck.
The next day, when my husband was again next to the pool, this time on his hands and knees, one arm in the still-broken filter up to his elbow, he looked up to see the same irritating little airshow taking place. Like little feathered airplanes, the birds would zoom in, dip and drop.
The deck was turning into a sea of white bird-droppings.
Why were they doing this? It was as much of a mystery as in the Alfred Hitchcock movie. Were they aiming for the pool and missing? Who was drawing up the flight plan for these winged creatures?
"What's with all those birds?" he asked me. "I hate birds. They sit up in those trees watching me. It's kind of creepy."
Me? I'll take the blackbirds and their white droppings any old day. The blackbirds only threaten my husband and he can take care of himself - and the deck. But the hawk that hung around our old house threatened everybody. He terrorized the other birds because he stole their eggs or their babies, and when he swooped down, it wasn't to drop something; it was to pick up something - like a baby squirrel.
Now, those are the kind of birds I hate.
But anyway, a bird problem is a bird problem, and we had to figure out how to solve it before an unsuspecting sunbather got pelted with little white bird bombs.
The third day my husband spent a couple hours with his arm down the pool filter, he watched how the birds swooped underneath the Japanese maple just beyond the deck in the side yard before hitting their favorite dropping place on the deck. He had an idea. He yanked his arm out of the filter, walked over and closed the gate into the side yard.
Voila. Runway interrupted.
He got the filter fixed shortly after that, probably because he was able to concentrate on the matter at hand instead of the matter overhead.
So, the next day he was in the flower garden, pulling weeds when he heard a loud splash.
He turned around, and there bobbing around in the pool as if he owned it was a mallard duck with a bright green head.
"Hey, get out of there," my husband yelled.
With that, the duck stuck its webbed feet deeper into the water and paddled around a little faster.
"Hey!" my husband said again, this time a little louder.
The duck flapped its wings, splashing before taking off over - except in the opposite direction - the same runway the blackbirds had used.
My husband watched it fly away.
"Geez, I do hate birds," he muttered.