Crazed Bird Destroying House - Can Anyone Help?

OMG....I was enthralled by your raccoon story...and little did I know about your drug-crazed bird! You are the best and I love your stories! I rarely laugh out loud reading something, but your story and some of the suggestions were hysterical (build a little house with screens and then torment it by tapping on the windows - that killed me).

And an answer to the mystery at last! Now question: are you going to leave that plant there for another unsuspecting birdie to fall prey to? Isn't it enough to have one recovering junkie bird? Do you think he suffers flashbacks?

Truly, I want to move in with you....the fun never ends!!

This message was edited Jul 26, 2006 7:05 PM

Now I know what the song Polk Salat Annie is all about. "Polk Salat Annie....... gators got your grannie" Just imagine Polk Salat in Alaska with the Grizzleys, or with the gators in the swamps of Fla. Yeiks!

ROFLOLOL, Soferdig!!!

Are you going ot let the berries mature to seee if you get the same behavior?
It would be an important experiment to conduct. :-)

Tam

Just don't ingest them yourself, Ms. Cutler. LOL

Oh, the infamouse pokeweed! Our neighbors have moved and there are many dozens of them growing in their yard and along what used to be our fenceline (the fence is down now, hooray!). I've got to get busy and kill those things before they get ripe berries!

Oh, my, thank you, NY, what a nice compliment. : )

"drug-crazed...recovering junkie bird..suffers flashbacks" LOL!

I like the idea about giving him his own little house with screens, too. I also like the one that says (paraphrasing) "why not try this, after all, it's no crazier than some of the things you've already tried." I had to laugh and agree. And Joseph's "think of a happy place" and Mr T. (I had another name for him but let's not go there.) And Equil's geese. And...all of them.

Actually, I think it's the comments from the readers that really make it funny. And to be honest, it is much funnier now that it's over. At the time, esp in the beginning, I was frantic. I think you had to be here to see that the bird very literally never stopped attacking the house from sunrise until sunset day after day after day.And when I tried to stop him he just glared at me so angrily. Like I was the problem!

It really was a crazy time! Yep, I'd better get out there and pull those plants up right away!

Soferdig, let's just be glad doesn't seem to grow in those locations. Aren't you in Big Sky Country? How about intoxicated moose? That should be pretty bad, too?

Hey, about those gators, in spring our local HOA bulletin contained a warning not to play with or feed the gators that come out of the ponds to sun themselves in people's yards. I didn't know we had gators in the ponds! Yikes!

Well, I'm glad your ordeal is over. All's well that ends well. I wonder how your little tormenter fared???

Tam, as much as I do appreciate the importance of research, Nooooo! ; )
I mean, I would do it for the benefit of science and all that, but think about Mr T and all the other little titmice. Even as we speak, T is probably out there somewhere in an NA meeting trying to stay clean for one more day.

And besides, I only have so many windows left!

Hmmm, Joseph, I hadn't thought of that...if I start sounding extra strange online....

gardenwife, do you have titmice in OH? I think it was Joseph who said, "be afraid,be very afraid"

me, too, bivbiv. I think I saw Mr T in spring. He came back to the tree at the window, looked longingly at the window for a long while, and eventually flew away.

He was probably thinking, "Those were the days."

bbinj, I don't know how I missed your post earlier. very good idea! where were you back when the bird was eating the house?!! He hasn't been back in ages, but I could have used the suggestion then. the jail analogy paints the cutest image of the little fella in stripes paying for his crimes. lol

LOL, bivbiv, at the picture of T dreaming of his screen eating days so long, long ago.

I was cringing on the other side of the glass, and saying, "don't get on the window. don't get on the window..."

But didn't a wee part of your mind long for him just to give the window one last little peck...for old times' sake, as it were? :) ...Just a final farewell...Sniff....

He was jones-ing....just one more berry, one more screen.....I'll get sober tomorrow.....

Let me ponder this a minute...no!

I awoke in the mornings to the sound of him destroying the home I can barely afford! I'd go upstairs to my office on the front of the house and still hear him endlessly pecking on windows downstairs on the back of the house - and my HOUSE had been so pristine before he started his work. Everything was so new and untarnished (was), and I'd tried SO hard to keep it that way. sniff, sniff, sniffle. I'd covered the hardwood floors with so many layers of gloss that a friend responded to my concerns one day with, "I don't see how anything COULD scratch it through all that ...". I'd run around getting every little thing fixed pronto so as to keep that "new car smell" as long as possible. I'd obsessed ...

And there was that tiny little bird just ripping the screens out of the windows day after day after... And worse, I couldn't do anything about it. I began to feel amazingly helpless in the face of such an itsy bitsy creature. When I finally got frustrated enough to consider shooting him, I realized even that wasn't a realistic option. It was a study in humility.

HOWEVER, the one thing I did miss and the only positive thing to come out of all that - aside from the end of my obsession with keeping the house perfect - was the opportunity to get so close to a wild bird. If you look at some of the early photos, especially the one where he is hanging upside down, you can see that I was only inches from him. I was able to see and study aspects of his physiology like how his beak fit together with his head that I had never been able to see before. And I was able to see the expressions (of hostility) on his little face, to see his unique (albeit crazy) little personality. That opportunity to get up close and interact with the creature I DID miss.

But not the pecking and screen cutting!

...thankfully he remembered the promise he'd since made to Ms T to STAY clean!

No I'm not too concerned about the moose in Montana cause I'm..... get away from that bush you pesky bear!...... I'm loading my rifle to go to work today up here in Alaska. I have googled Poke Salat for Alaska and there were no hits. But...... how do they know if if if maybe..... SOMEONE hasn't planted it. I know that there are millions of plants up here, what if there IS JUST ONE....... we are all doomed! Lions and tigers and bears OH MY! Wait..... what was that! Oh I don't know.

This message was edited Jul 27, 2006 8:33 PM

PrairieMoon2, I hope that you are still here. I seem to have somehow missed your post also. (I need to go back and see what else I've missed!) I'm very glad to hear that you are enjoying Garden Foes (agree the Title doesn't reveal the humor of the Forum), and I sure am sorry it took me so long to respond. I have to go and look for the thread about the toothpicks. That sounds hilarious.

I can see the humor NOW, since it's over, and my house is mostly still in tact. At the time, I was pretty stressed out, but even then I could step back and realize how ludicrous my situation was. And I thoroughly enjoyed the sense of community I derived from all the DG'ers who saw me through it: the help, the support, and the humor.

I never actually had a feeder near the house. My feeder was about 1/2 between the house and the forest. I'd found that putting it too close to the forest virtually ensured its quick destruction. The only thing that was up against the house was the crepe myrtle tree (the one he's in in many of the pics). There was a roosting pocket in the crepe myrtle. It was only big enough for a chickadee or wren. Maybe that's what you're thinking of. Lots of small birds roost in the small trees at the foundation anyhow. And the hummingbird feeder was up near the house, but I've never had any problems with the hummers. However, since the T experience, I cringe everytime I'm flipping through a catalog and see one of those feeders that attaches to the window - and they usually put a titmouse on them in the photos!!!

That's a hoot about the sparrow and your house. It must have been very frustrating. Glad to hear that you've (hopefully) evicted them.

Uh oh. I have pokeweed in my gardens. I actually let it grow on purpose because it is one of the few wild things that my birds have to eat that late in the summer. And my birds seem to love the beries - I haven't had any crazed ones yet though, so maybe my pokeweed berries don't ferment?

But then again, my screens are on the inside of my windows (double paned windows at that), so they can only do damage if the windows are open... but then again I do leave my windows open a lot, at least in the front of the house. Hopefully they will not be tempted as the windows facing pokeberry-ward are on the back of the house - where the windows stay closed when we aren't at home. So they'd have to go around to the front of the house to do any screen pecking without me noticing.

I also have a feeling that at my house, a bird in the same spot for long, and with predicatble patterns would quickly become a hawk hors d'oeuvre.

So far the only crazed pecking bird I had was a red-bellied woodpecker who for some reason decided the hole in one of my bird houses wasn't big enough, so it started pecking all around it, hopping inside, then popping out and pecking more. He/she might've dropped seeds in there too. I found it amusing for a moment - he/she kept looking in my direction and making that trill they do before pecking again - but finally I booted him out and he found something else to get his attention, bird house forgotten.

This message was edited Jul 28, 2006 6:02 AM

Here is what I don't understand .......the stats at the top of this thread ........the ones that say

Replies: 222, Views: 202

How can one reply more often than one looks at the thread???? LOL

Replies and views evidently are counted separately. You can lurk without replying.

Also, I think the "Views" counter just recently started working correctly. This is an older thread and for a long time I believe it said Views: 0. From what I noticed, when the Views started to work or increment recently, they started at 0 even though the Replies had already been incrementing for weeks or months. It appeared that any prior Views went unrecorded, and were not included in the total.

I think both are true: (1) Views indicate only non-replying views and (2) Views means Views which occurred after the recent activation of the View counter, anything prior having been lost.

Is my explanation sufficiently confusing? ; )

bivbiv - I know you can view w/o replying - but I was asking how one could reply without viewing - that seemed somehow to make no sense.......soooooooo

scutler - your "confusing answer " IS quite clear and makes all kinds of sense. Thank you!!!!

Silly me, explaining the obvious! I should have just said I thought they were counted separately. :) (I get a little ditzy after several nights of insomnia.) Yep, SCutler, your explanation wasn't confusing at all. I didn't realize the view counter wasn't working previously.

Whew! Good. When I was writing that I thought, "wonder if I could get the words 'Views' and 'view' in that sentence just a few more times. lol

UhOh. I was going to suggest a very unscientific experiment - that you could view, check count, view again, see if it incremented (of course, others could be viewing at the same time so not a perfect experiment). Then I found that apparently I can increment the counter by hitting "refresh". Hmm. Oops. Again, not scientific, but seems to support our theory.

Views actually also include replying-views. It is the number of times anyone has looked at a thread, whether or not they reply. But, as scutler said, it has only been back on for a couple of weeks, so it has only counted the people who have come back for their titmouse fix after Dave turned the view counts back on. :-)

Oh, so Scratch item 1 of my explanation then.

"fix" - who knew we might actually miss the little fella!

We might miss him, but I'm sure you don't - and I don't blame you!! LOL

ROTFLMBO!!! I think it's WAY funnier NOW!

Just spotted this thread, read it all the way through. Stopped to dry off chair seat. Omigod!!! If that bird ever falls off the Poke Salat wagon, we are done for!!! I haven't laughed this hard since we couldn't find the dog!!!

Thank you, meezersfive. Glad to have you join us.

So, what happened to the dog?

BTW, One day I went back and read most of the thread again. I was surprised to see something I had missed before, and since no one ever mentioned it, I'm gathering maybe all/most of us missed it. So here it is:

This photo was from a post around Halloween, and it says something to the effect that here is my house decorated (with the scarey faces) for the season. But when I looked at it again, on a different monitor, I was amazed to see that even though I thought I was alone when I took that picture, there near the center and just to the left of the tree is -- Mr T -- I didn't even know he was there!
http://davesgarden.com/forums/fp.php?pid=1818372

Hey, I don't think the views count includes replies (posts). I was reading another thread and I noticed it had a count for 5 posts and only 1 view. Wouldn't it have had at least as many views if it was including posts? Interesting. I bet if this thread had that counter up at the top from when it was first started that the views would be well over 1000. Maybe even higher.

Yes, Meezers! Please retell what happened with the dog. If that is the story I think it is, that's another depends read.

Also too, for anyone interested in another good read-
http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/632878/

Yesterday I saw my first titmouse at the back feeder.....and I, a city girl with very little knowledge of birds, can tell you I KNOW it was a titmouse ONLY because of this thread and the close up photos. Entertaining AND educational!!

(Don't think I didn't keep a VERY close eye on him....knowing now how they can turn on you! :-)

This message was edited Aug 23, 2006 6:18 PM

Hi, NY2CA,

Aren't they such tiny, almost fragile looking creatures - I mean to have behaved SO badly? I really don't think Mr T is the poster child for Tufted Titmouse behavior though. I have never heard of one acting this way before or since. Just make sure you aren't accidentally growing any Poke Salet nearby!

Have you heard that scientists currently think that birds may actually be descendants of the dinasaurs? For some time they believed that dinasaurs and birds shared a common family tree, each having branched in its own direction a long, long time ago. Around 2003 they found a nearly complete fossil of a small (about the size of a chicken I think) dinosaur with feathers/wings. At that point they began to reconsider the possibility that birds may actually have descended FROM dinosaurs.

That has really given me a fresh perspective on my little feathered friends. I look at them in a whole new light these days, thinking that although they are tiny now and seem frail, they or their ancesters may once have ruled the earth. Anyhow, I think perhaps Mr T did not get the memo that his species has been reassigned to a position a bit lower on the food chain.

Funny! I have noticed this little guy is no 'shrinking violet', but then the chickadees and hummingbirds are pretty assertive too. So much more so than the finches and robins that hang around.

I named my first hummingbird buddy Napoleon, since he had such a 'complex' and chases off all the other little hummingbirds and lately he even gets a little pushy with me!

Perhaps when it comes to birds the amount of 'tuff' is inversely proportional to size?