Killing Sparrows
For years now I've said "there's a book in this place" meaning the place I live.....which shall go nameless for fear of my neighbors showing up with numerous firearms and shooting my home to the ground akin to the scene in the Clint Eastwood film "The Gauntlet".
I'm afraid I'm going native, this also akin to the anecdotal stories you hear about Roman Legionaries stationed on the Rhine, taking local German wives, and going completely native....which led to numerous incursions over the Rhine by said the said wife's family.
When we moved here 8 years ago, the dottering old couple who lived across the street (she had been in the house since she was 6 and I think she was 70 at the time of our appearance here) had these oddball looking cages in their back yard that looked like bird cages. One day, maybe after we'd been here a year, he calls my mother over to tell him what kind of bird is in one of these mystery cages. She identified it as a prothonotory warbler. He grunted something about "oh, well then I'll need to set it free". Upon closer examination of the "cage", me mum found out that it was designed to CAPTURE birds. Come to find out, the dottering old fart used it to capture sparrows and then, of course, execute them. You see, people here are soooooooooooo cheap, that while they'll feed birds, they don't want to feed "boring birds" so the way to make their bird seed last longer is to kill the "boring birds". Mom and I always wondered why, in a place that is a treasure trove of birds, that we never saw sparrows. Now we knew.
Okay, the old bastard had a stroke about a year later but insisted on coming and living at home, depending on his 73 year old wife to take care of him. Over the next year, we proceeded to watch her age about 10 years trying to take care of the selfish SOB until their kids finally convinced him to move into a home. While they were selling their house (they'd already moved out), we bided our time until one afternoon when our nosey neighbors were gone for the day, we went over and pulled down both sparrow traps since we figured the next set of owners of the house could maybe be actually worse (they are).
So, the sparrow population has rebounded. But now I've got a large family of them living in the attic of one of our old houses. There are a number of openings in the wood behind the rain gutter so now they poop all over the front porch. So I need to go out and get some of that spray foamy stuff that expands so I can fill in the gaps and get the damned birds out of there. Suddenly I have that "I'm going native" feeling. Well, at least I'm gonna wait until they're thru raising the most recent batch of birds and then evict them with foam.
I'm afraid I'm going native, this also akin to the anecdotal stories you hear about Roman Legionaries stationed on the Rhine, taking local German wives, and going completely native....which led to numerous incursions over the Rhine by said the said wife's family.
When we moved here 8 years ago, the dottering old couple who lived across the street (she had been in the house since she was 6 and I think she was 70 at the time of our appearance here) had these oddball looking cages in their back yard that looked like bird cages. One day, maybe after we'd been here a year, he calls my mother over to tell him what kind of bird is in one of these mystery cages. She identified it as a prothonotory warbler. He grunted something about "oh, well then I'll need to set it free". Upon closer examination of the "cage", me mum found out that it was designed to CAPTURE birds. Come to find out, the dottering old fart used it to capture sparrows and then, of course, execute them. You see, people here are soooooooooooo cheap, that while they'll feed birds, they don't want to feed "boring birds" so the way to make their bird seed last longer is to kill the "boring birds". Mom and I always wondered why, in a place that is a treasure trove of birds, that we never saw sparrows. Now we knew.
Okay, the old bastard had a stroke about a year later but insisted on coming and living at home, depending on his 73 year old wife to take care of him. Over the next year, we proceeded to watch her age about 10 years trying to take care of the selfish SOB until their kids finally convinced him to move into a home. While they were selling their house (they'd already moved out), we bided our time until one afternoon when our nosey neighbors were gone for the day, we went over and pulled down both sparrow traps since we figured the next set of owners of the house could maybe be actually worse (they are).
So, the sparrow population has rebounded. But now I've got a large family of them living in the attic of one of our old houses. There are a number of openings in the wood behind the rain gutter so now they poop all over the front porch. So I need to go out and get some of that spray foamy stuff that expands so I can fill in the gaps and get the damned birds out of there. Suddenly I have that "I'm going native" feeling. Well, at least I'm gonna wait until they're thru raising the most recent batch of birds and then evict them with foam.