Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-06-26 - 10:10 p.m.

Birds

We live in the flight path of the Canada Geese. I thought geese went south to winter, but ours don't. I swear they go Northwest in the fall. They make a lot of noise when they go. It's a good-bye, really, and it's always a little sad and nostalgic for me, because it means the onset of the colder weather. The first group I hear - I guess it's a gaggle, but that doesn't sound dignified enough, somehow - always makes me ache a little.

My youngest called them geeks. "Mommy, Mommy, geeks! Geeks!" So I could always laugh a little, too. Geek migration; what a thought.

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I have a bit of Mommy-guilt around geeks. When Youngest Daughter was about three, we dropped her older sister off at school one day, and I thought I would take my little one to toss some bread to the ducks in the local man-made lake. We hadn't been there in over a year.

What I didn't know, because I don't read the local paper enough, was that the picturesque little band of bread-stuffed ducks at the lake had developed into a marauding pack of outlaw ducks and aggressive white geese. So when we got out of the car and started up the grassy hill, a wave of huge hungry honking birds swept down un us like Custer's Last Stand. Tossing bread was out of the question; protecting your face was the order of the day. I flapped and shouted and slapped my way through to snatch up my sobbing child - all her bread was long gone down the gullet of a bird a foot taller than she was, then they had yanked on her overall straps and hollered in her face, and I'm sure she thought she was next on the menu.

She didn't ever feel like feeding ducks much after that.

I had a small moment of redemption on this last vacation. We ate at a lakeside Mexican restaurant, and there was a band of lake ducks hanging out next to the patio. All three little girls were stealing tortilla chips from the table for them, and they all trooped down onto the beach to feed them, too. Even the youngest daughter, who is now eight.

I wouldn't be shocked if she waited until I wasn't looking and kicked the shit out of one of those ducks, though.

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Years ago, we took a whole group of our preschoolers down to the city zoo. We sat and ate lunch in the open food court. One mother had brought an entire box of Hostess Twinkies, and she shared them out to all the children. Ben, who was about eighteen months at the time, had his Twinkie halfway to his mouth when a kamikaze seagull swooped through, leaving a stunned little boy with no Twinkie AND a bleeding finger.

The seagulls hadn't bothered us through the sandwiches, the chips, and the sodas. We just pushed them too far. I understand - sometimes I feel that way about Twinkies, too.

They tell me Ben, who is now also eight, is not afraid of seagulls any more. But I wonder how he feels about Twinkies.

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Egrets used to be a rare sight, around here. You can tell when something is rare because you freeze when you see it, so you can keep it there a minute to watch. For crows we don't freeze. For egrets we always have.

Something's changed in the local ecology, though, and over the past few years we have had an egret boom. They're odd birds. They're very beautiful standing alone in the waterways, regal, dignified. They're also beautifully graceful when they fly.

I travel a four lane high speed highway to get to work, and it has a wide grass median strip. If I go early in the morning, there will be an egret or two standing in the median strip. Just standing in the middle of the freeway. There's no water there. There's no fish. Why are they there?

A long time ago, did someone toss a fish out the window on Highway 12? On the way back from a fishing trip? "This one's kinda small, what the hell." Do the egrets still tell each other the story of the speeding metal beasts that spit fish? Are they hopeful?

Now I've found another side to them. Although fishing seems to be a solitary activity, their living habits are much different. The egrets have found a stand of eucalyptus in the middle of a downtown thoroughfare, and they've moved in. So much that the city has put up an orange warning fence around the area, and caution signs to ask people not to disturb the birds. It's an egret tenement. You can see multiple white egret asses hanging out of these trees, and the trunks and bases of the tress are white with piled birdshit and eggshell fragments, and the noise is incredible. These regal solitary birds bicker and chat and complain to each other with an odd deep sort of "bluhp bluhp bluhp" noise. A friend suggested that they are only mimicking the sort of low, boat-style modified cars to be found in the area of town they've chosen.

But why are they there at all? When the cars on the highway didn't produce fish, did they decide to try slower-moving vehicles? Are egrets simply comforted by the sound of internal combustion engines? What is the connection between egrets and traffic?

They're not telling. Bluhp bluhp bluhp.

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The other birds we have all over the place are crows. Big, black ten-pound crows. They're not afraid of much, and they have an intimidating way of looking at you when you catch them in the act of standing in the middle of the road trying to yank up a run-over, glued-down Wendy's hamburger wrapper. If these crows could talk, they would not say anything as couth or poetic as, "Nevermore." In fact, I imagine something more like, "Keep lookin' at me and you'll be next, dipshit." If anyone wants to do a Hitchcock remake, ours is the town to choose.

Marauding ducks, egret ghettos, malevolent crows. No wonder our Canada geese get the hell out of here.

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