Literally, on the first day of Spring, a robin came to our bedroom window at sunrise and tapped, three pecks at a time as if to say, “Hello! Hello in there! It’s spring! Time to come out and play!” She looked like she was about to burst—ready to lay eggs.
Tap, tap, tap. It was so cute.
Until day three.
By day five she was joined by a couple of other sisters (or brothers?). By day fifteen they were tapping on all the bedroom windows, outside the mudroom door as well as the living room window.
I started seriously thinking about how to humanely trap and relocate them.
Ok. That’s not really what I was thinking. My thoughts were much darker. Because I know that would do no good. They can fly right back. And I happened to hear on a local radio show devoted to birders, that robins will migrate thousands of miles, then return to the exact place where they were born to lay their eggs.
That’s wonderful. But why the pecking?
Of course I would never harm them. But being awakened fifteen days in a row by a manic bird pecking on the glass at sunrise can cause one’s fantasies to turn to the dark side.
Finn was not fazed. A couple of times he woke up early and just giggled, watching them peck at the glass. “It’s like I have my own nature TV!” he said.
I have noticed a couple of robin’s nests around the house in years past. There’s a hole in the eaves where birds were nested last year. Maybe the ones that were born there remembered being inside the house and now they wanted back in.
They just sit there at the window after pecking a million times, peering in with their beady little eyes.
Did you ever notice robins eyes have dark circles around them?
They look a little sunken. And evil.
As soon as we would walk toward the window they would fly away.
Then when we were occupied with something else…
“Peck-peck-peck!!!”
Today Finn and I were reading the book, There’s a Bird on My Head.
In it, Elephant is at his wits’ end because two birds have made a nest on his head and have laid eggs there.
Piggie says to a very frustrated Elephant, “Why not ask them to go somewhere else?”
That hasn’t occurred to Elephant. So he does. And the birds do go somewhere else—to Piggie’s head.
I didn’t think of politely asking the robins to peck somewhere else. It might as well have been on our heads.
The pecking has now finally subsided and has been replaced by adorable muffled cheeping sounds in the eaves and the bushes beside the house.
Little babies that will soon fly a thousand miles away.
Only to return for our own Hitchcock Spring.