TW Column by Steven Lewis
When the Red Red Robin Keeps Bob Bob Bobbin’ Along
In April each year, a few weeks after sighting the first robin in our backyard, it’s time to strap on the domestic camo wear, review the intel, and begin counter-terrorism operations.
I know, I know: It’s really bad form to wage war against cute little red-breasted harbingers of spring. And the truth is that all robins are not my enemies. In fact, it’s just the one (or is it another? … they all look alike) that returns each spring and proceeds to use my windows for dive-bombing runs.
Thwunk … thwunk … thwunk … dawn to dusk.
Of course, I should be more worried about the neurological and olfactory trauma the poor gal suffers from repeated blows to the beak than about my peace and quiet. But how many insults must a wingless mortal absorb while some assault bird keeps attack-tack-tackin’ windows around his house, shattering the double-paned sanctity of the once-civilized living room, and, by and by, leaving splatters of presents on the rockers and floor of the front porch?
When this avian insurgency began several years ago, I tried various homespun remedies, including, I’m sorry to admit, crouching beneath the sill and going tap for tap with our nemesis. As you might have already guessed, that strategy and all others to follow proved futile; the robin, like Hitchcock’s birds, returned just as soon as I stopped the tactic du jour. And then, like the crazed Tippy Hedren, I would leap up and go bursting through the front door, screaming and flapping my arms.
Last year, after staving off the urge to fly into a window myself, I visited several websites to learn what I didn’t know about the origins of robin attacks around the home.
I found first that there’s an actual term for our problem, “robin aggression,” and it’s as common and predictable as, well, the return of robins each spring. After perusing 10 or 12 of the 170,000 links with head-bangingly similar information, I learned that robins are territorial creatures. And so it follows that when one territorial bird sees another of the same species in its breeding or feeding area, it instinctively attacks the other bird, even if the interloper is no more than a reflection in a window.
Thus armed with the knowledge of why we were being assaulted each year, I canceled the appointment with a therapist to discuss my ornithological paranoia and consulted my new BFFs at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. They suggested placing silhouettes of falcons or owls in the offending windows in order blunt the reflection and frighten away the avian enemy. But then they added the ominous caveat that many robins lose their fear of a silhouette because it covers only a small area of the pane—and, as we soon found out, it has little or no effect on keeping the birds from heading to other windows around the house.
Thwunk … thwunk … thwunk.
Next we went three-dimensional, deploying a big plastic owl purchased at the local garden store in order to scare the orange-bellied flying bully into submission. Unfortunately, that only worked for two days and only at one window. On the third day, at 5:15 in the morning, the Red Baroness resumed her regular three-pronged bombing runs.
That’s all in the past, though.
This year, my wife and I are prepared for the attacks. After receiving a tweet (of sorts) from the Audubon Society, I’m confident that the solution is disarmingly simple, if completely lacking in aesthetics or charm. We will cut down on all window reflection around the house: pulling down shades, drawing curtains, installing sun shields, applying black netting, hanging strips of Mylar tape, or rubbing soap on all windows vulnerable to attack. Once that happens, we have been assured, the insurgents will quickly find new territories to invade.
The trade-off, of course, is that after such a long and dark winter—and in the midst of the promise of such luxuriously long and sunny days—we will have to live behind dark or dirtied windows long enough to get the job done.
Such are the kinds of sacrifices this avian warrior is willing to make. As that old bird W. H. Auden wrote:
Noises at dawn will bring
Freedom for some, but not this peace
No bird can contradict…
Art Information
- “American Robin” © Jean; Creative Commons license
- “Under Attack” © Donna Sullivan Thomson; Creative Commons license
Steven Lewis is a contributing writer and columnist at Talking Writing.
“With seven kids spanning a generation-wide 19 years, the logistics of any July–August escape from civilization proved to be as complicated and unrealistic as my preadolescent hallucinations about playing shortstop for the Brooklyn Dodgers.” — The Road We Never Traveled
