Bird Wars
You read that right. In the midst of coronavirus, which is worse than avian flu, the winged citizens of my backyard had declared war on each other. It was all my fault.
I have a bit of extra income at the moment. As a counselor, I have been in part-time practice for awhile with sporadic access to a friend's office. More recently, though, I have taken to an online platform. Since the pandemic, the client load has doubled. The extra income won't get me a plane ticket to Europe when travel is ok again, but it allows me some unusual splurges: a movie rental from Amazon twice in one week, Tide for the laundry, extra coffee pods, and fruit & nut blend for the bird feeder.
The fruit & nut blend turned out to be ambrosia for the birds.
At first glance, my backyard looked like it always does--2 acres of gently rolling green grass, a clump of trees here and there (mostly popcorn trees and other volunteers) a tall poplar with the yellow flowers that have made their debut this year. Several yards away from the full-length back windows in my kitchen is a cedar bird feeder at the top of a post about 6 feet high. I can see it perfectly from the brim of my coffee mug.
Today I saw a battlefield.
A woodpecker has been hanging around the yard for the last couple of weeks. I don't know how it knew that I was going to buy fruit & nut mix, but it must have known, because it doesn't really like the bird feeder all that much. Today it was clinging to the edges that supported its considerable weight, munching without pause. I noted that a grosbeak with splashy red markings had joined it. The woodpecker paid the grosbeak no mind, and both gobbled as if they hadn't both been eating bugs all along. Then it happened-- A crow the size of a C-130 came screaming out of the wooded area way in back, approached the feeder at full speed, and gave chase to the grosbeak, which high-tailed it into a bottle-brush tree. Panicky fluttering ensued among the bottle brushes, and the crow wheeled around to approach the feeder, which it now owned, having scared the living daylights out of the woodpecker. But before the crow could fix its unwieldy body on the edge of the feeder, out of nowhere came an enraged mockingbird.
I should add at this point, that it takes very little to enrage a mockingbird. If she has a nest nearby, just the appearance of a happy Labrador retriever will set off her aerial acrobatics, and she will squawk until the hapless dog curls up on the porch. I once saw an annoyed mama mocker harass a chicken snake until it slithered into a blackberry thicket. We never saw that snake again, even though it had hung around for 2 summers, working cheap by keeping mice away.
At any rate, today's annoyed mockingbird was no different. It flew over, under, and around the crow, making the crow's flight unbalanced and stupid-looking. I don't know if mockingbirds are the natural advocates for grosbeaks, but they don't compete for birdseed, because they generally don't feed at bird feeders. Maybe they just don't like crows.
The crow, humiliated, retreated to the back of the yard, from whence it had come. It did not stay back there long. In less than a minute it returned accompanied by not one, but 2 of its closest friends and allies. They fluttered and flapped all around the bird feeder in a kind of drunken victory dance. The mockingbird thought that was funny. It flew out of the woodpecker's home tree, and weaved in and out of the crows' carousing. The English ships must have appeared equally as nimble to sailors aboard the Spanish Armada. And like the Armada, the three crows retreated, in no formation whatsoever, to the unprestigious thicket down by the pond. After about an hour, I noted that the grosbeak and the woodpecker had returned to the buffet for lunch.
The mockingbird was nowhere to be seen.
Such is the routine around here during lockdown. I am extremely grateful not to be sick today, and I'll be profoundly happy to return to work some hot July day when the grocery stores are deemed safe and nothing at the gas station needs to be wiped down. For now, I will keep TV off and social media at a distance while I keep tabs on the mini-drama happening in the world where coronavirus is not a problem. My money is on the mockingbirds.
