The Wild Outdoors

I'm not a particularly outdoorsy type person. I appreciate wildlife where it belongs - "out there" or behind the glass and bars of the zoo. :-) Even so, I was pleased to find a harmless and beautiful bird nesting in the trees behind our house. He's a wild red cardinal and we first saw him the week we closed on the house. Actually, we heard him before we saw him. It wasn't his beautiful song that we heard first, but the sound of his very hard beak banging into the glass of our living room's upper windows as he flung himself into them time after time after time. He was there day after day at all times and we bought a bird feeder and gave him a name, Bonkers. It was endearing at first. Surely he'd figure out that his flight path had been obstructed by brick and glass and he'd find a new path around the house in a few days. Unfortunately, it wasn't just the windows in the living room, but also the one in our master bedroom. He favored it at dawn...while we were sleeping. We chuckled the first few mornings, groaned the next few and then got downright irritated after that. A little research told us that cardinals are extremely territorial and he was attacking his reflection in the window. He wasn't looking for a direct path to the front of our house; Bonkers has a bit of a rage problem. Still, he's pretty and "out there" so I didn't want any harm to come to him. We tried a few different things, but they failed. Doug's next move was a BB gun, but I had one more idea. I went to the store to find a cheap rubber snake for the window ledge. The summer, creepy-crawly season was over though and there was only one option left in the toy section. A 12-inch long blue cobra, ready to strike. Doug laughed when he saw it. I ever so gingerly, trying to avoid pulling out the ladder to reach the ledge, flung it granny style up to the ledge. I'm pretty unskilled at flinging rubber snakes, even as grannies go, so it took a few tries until it finally landed on the ledge - belly-up, its open mouth craned awkwardly upside down, but the next morning we slept peacefully. Bonkers had encountered an intruder to his territory worse than his own reflection. It's been a couple of weeks since the blue, rubber cobra saved our sleep and as snakes go, the blue, rubber kind is definitely my favorite. Not only is it "out there," but there is absolutely no risk of it coming "in here."

This was SO not the reason I started this post, but I got off on my own little tangent, so I've retitled and you'll have to read the subsequent posts to get the scoop on what's really happening with the wildlife around our house.