Monday, May 04, 2009

You know its spring...

...when you are repeatedly threatened by small feathered creatures who
suspect you of threatening their young.

We have a robin in our backyard who was not happy with us yesterday.
I'd seen the start of a nest up under the deck last week. There must be
eggs now, because she was quite insistent in her displeasure. And very
close. I think at one point, she cheeped at Trystan from a distance of
about 3 feet, maybe 2. Little did she know that 1) Of all the bipedal
mammals in her territory, he is the most likely to hurt her (he's a
toddler, and a boy, and exceedingly curious about the "duck" as he
called her), and 2) As his momma, there is no way on God's green
earth that she would have attacked my baby and lived to cheep
about it.

The funny thing was, during most of this confrontation, I was grilling
chicken. If she only knew what we did to birds in our house, perhaps
she would have hunkered down in that nest and tried to keep a low
profile.

Then today, during my lunchtime walk at work, I passed two separate
goose families. Each had 2 parents, and 2 or 3 goslings, pecking at the
grass for food. One parent in each group stood guard while the others
ate. The goslings were cute. I kept my distance.

The tricky part was that they were on opposite sides of the same street,
and I had to walk between them. And it was lunchtime, so there was
traffic (it's a street connecting buildings and parking lots, and the
people were hungry also). I had to explain to one nice gentleman in a
car who was trying to wait for me to cross the road that I really didn't
care to be attacked by an overprotective goose. Those things are big,
and I was unarmed.

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