"When you seriously thought of buying a gun"
Bear,
We loved the story in your email about the bird that annoyed you back in Los Angeles with an array of mimicry sounds to the point where you “seriously thought of buying a gun.”
We had a Mockingbird in the tree outside of our house in Los Angeles. It would do an endlessly changing series of calls in sequences of four, some of which mimicked human sounds. Usually, in the early morning when we were trying to sleep. I'm paraphrasing, but...
Woo, woo, woo, woo,
chicha, chicha, chicha, chicha,
oy, oy, oy, oy,
yah, yah, yah, yah...
I really thought about buying a gun.
When we were all living on Grey Farms Road in Stamford, we had an early morning bird that drove us to distraction. Not with mimicry, but with a well-known habit of male red-headed woodpeckers seeking a mate in the Spring. The male finds the loudest thing he can repetitively peck on to broadcast his strength, stamina, and attractiveness to females. Lacking a suitable hollow tree, our bird discovered the metal gutter at the back corner of our roof. Wow …. What a racket he could make standing in the gutter right over a window and wailing away at the thin metal.
At many sunrises, I leaped out of bed and pounded on the wall near that window or opened it to shout at the maddeningly persistent bird. That is when I seriously thought of using a gun. It turned out I had a bee-bee gun rifle left over from my own childhood.
So …. The next time we were awakened at sunrise by pounding in the gutter, I was ready. Grabbing my trusty rifle, I hurried out the front door and ran outside along the wall to the far corner, where I had a good look at the gutter right above the window where our woodpecker was hard at work. Of course, when he was hammering, he was down in the gutter, protected by a metal wall. When he wasn’t, I could only rarely see the bright red of his head. And he moved around. When I sighted on where I had seen him last, the sound came from farther up the gutter.
Finally, I came to my senses. I didn’t really want to kill him and I probably had a zero chance of hitting him anyway. So I shouted out and he burst up into flight at least three feet from where I had guessed he was waiting.
Ok …. If a gun isn’t the answer, science might be. It turned out I had a two old fashioned magnesium flash bulbs in my rather extensive photography kit. I’m guessing here, but you might not know what a "flash bulb” is. Well, it’s a small glass bulb filled with magnesium filaments which explode into brilliant light when energized and ignited by a battery. It is one time use device. I only had two chances at my plan.
First, I soldered an old lamp cord to the flash bulb and poked it out the window. A ladder got me high enough to place the bulb in the gutter about where the wood pecker was signaling for a mate. I attached one wire in the cord to a battery and taped the other wire to the side of the battery where I could easily grab it in the dim light of dawn.
It rained for two days and I had to get the ladder out and make sure my quite buoyant flash bulb had not been flushed into the downspout.
Dawn of the third day, we were once again awakened by the repetitive din of pecking. I tiptoed to my battery and holding the loose wire, awaited the next round of banging. When it came, I touched the wire to the other terminal. I didn’t see a flash, these bulbs make no noise, but the pecking stopped immediately and we were not bothered ever again.
True story, Paw, Dad, Robbie
