The Birds

We have a lovely picture window in our living room with a beautiful view of the mountains to the east of our home.  We don't have any window coverings on it because we love it so much.

This window has become a death trap.

 We have a nice flowering pear tree in our front yard that flowers in the spring, gets nice and leafy and green in the summer and turns yellow, red and orange in the fall.  Once the leaves fall, the tree retains a large volume of berries that are quite popular among birds.  They come in clusters, sometimes dozens at at time, and perch on our tree to eat our berries.

Unfortunately, the birds that fly around, eating berries off this tree, keep flying into our window with a thud.  It's actually quite loud and startling.  They leave little bits of feathers and other bird-related stuff on the window. 

Sometimes they just bounce off.  Sometimes they are stunned for a minute and fly away.  Sometimes the poor things break their necks and die.  This happened twice today.

In case you can't tell, the dark blobs on either side of the picture are dead birds on our porch.  I actually didn't even see the one on the right for a long time, until a neighbor boy came up to inspect the one dead bird I knew about.  I opened the door and told him not to touch it.  His response?  "What about the other one?"  Uh, what other one. 

Yuck. 

I immediately texted Jay to Come Home Right Now!  and get the dead birds off the porch.  He was stuck in a meeting (something unimportant I'm sure) and couldn't leave right then.  So I fretted about it on the phone until my friend Nicole sent her son (who is Henry's age but much more brave about shoveling dead birds off neighborhood porches) to help me out.  It's a good thing, too, because a cat was suspiciously hanging around and the last thing I wanted was to watch that cat eat dead birds on my front porch.

We're not quite sure why these birds keep flinging themselves at our window.  I'm guessing it has to do with the light and the glare and they are in a frenzied state after gorging themselves on the berries off our tree but really?  I wish they'd just knock it off.