Golden Bat Sorcery At Work

It's pretty good to be alive lately.
Springtime is springing here springily. It's eighty degrees-unseasonably hot, for those of you thinking in celsius. Everything has opened into bloom at the same time instead of in its' usual monthly procession, which is quite pretty to see. The starlings are reproducing as though they were living on a diet of viagra and raw oysters. I am sitting next to my kitchen window at Command Central and I can hear them in their multitudes shrilling their strange, buzzy flock identity song...just as I wrote that, a barn swallow flew into my kitchen and fluttered around in circles! I guess I don't pass muster; he flew back outside.

This is a very, very old home and has been added to many times, and that has left lots of inviting nooks and crannies for bee nests and bird nests and plant seeds to grow. The starlings have staked out our attic and defend it against all comers. Now I like birds and I encourage them, but dammit, starlings are kind of a nuisance after awhile. They crap three-quarters again the amount they actually eat, and they do it on our cars. They shrill and shrill and shrill to the point you want to run around outside yelling 'Shut up already!' At least if it ever comes to that point I won't have to worry about what the neibors will think being they're nuttier than a goddamn family of crack squirrels theirownselves. Maybe we can get together and make an outing of it.

With an eye towards rousting them out, (the starlings) I've been up in the attic to have a look at the situation. The access door is in the 1800's section, from back when this was a single room cabin, and you have to clamber through each decade up to the sixties to get to the part where the starlings are. Unfortunately as it turns out the nest is a mat of hay and chicken feathers about the size of a crib mattress, with one small baseball-sized cup in the middle of it. This is added to enthusiastically every year. The starlings regularly fledge from four to six not-very-bright young from this conglomeration of crap. The ones who don't quite meet the demands of nature are scattered between the rafters in little mummified piles. So aside from busting a hole through one of the outside walls, theres no way thing's thing is going to be shifted. Looks like we have upstairs neibors. Neibors whose children regularly become lost and wander around in my attic and die.

Now that sounds rather sad, I know, but the hard reality is that a young starling is the dumbest damn animal on Gods' green earth...putting aside Fundamentalists, farm turkeys and Republicans for the moment. This is kind of a shame because they are also rather endearing little chickens, walking awkwardly around on the lawn bumping into each other and getting lost in the grass, playing with cigarette butts and following after mom in a tripping, bumbling crowd. That they are also more attractive then the stumpy, greasy looking adults is probably what keeps them fed.

While I was watering the beds yesterday I accidentally watered a starling child who had become lost in the vinca. He fluttered awkwardly away for all the world like Woodstock the yellow birdie from the Peanuts cartoon. He wandered under the garbage can; he wandered under the car. He tried to eat a rock out of the driveway. He wandered into the field next door, tripping and waddling, and I'm pretty certain he made one of the neibors' cats a nice lunch.

Another young couple new to the neiborhood are the ravens who took over an old crows nest in an alder. Not crows, now, but ravens. The wedge shaped tail, in flight, and the cornute beak with the nose whiskers are diagnostic...and I had to put in the time watching carefully to make this out because the two of them are on the small side. This is probably their first year.
The husband, the larger of the two, is terribly curious about everything that goes on over here and lurks around keeping an eye on me as I garden. Sometimes he'll perch in a tree near me and say 'mom? mom! mo-om...' in a soft, conversational tone, or just whistle a few soft notes. He has a lot to say, too. Now, I mean this in a very literal sense. It sounds like a human voice. Like a person, one with a bad, bad cold, is speaking to you in a confidential tone. Then you look up startled and there's this bird the size of a banty rooster looking at you in frank curiosity from a nearby limb, and it's really disconcerting.

They are not good neibors, by the reckoning of the other birds. They steal the unfledged young from the nests and leave them to bake like ugly dumplings on the roof of my metal garden shed. In the evening the young couple alight to dine at their leisure atop Chez Garden Shed, audibly pulling apart the now- tenderized wad of goop and feeding each other romantically, making low whistles and soft, hollow clacking noises to each other as they watch me puttering around in the backyard . Yes, I am the floor show... the sweaty broad turning compost into her raised beds. I guess that's fine. Better that than dinner.