Tuesday, February 19, 2008

One for the birds

I was at work, wondering what to do after a rather healthy lunch that made me feel like saying “Moo!” when a pigeon landed heavily on the light fixture just outside the window beside which I hack away at my keyboard all day. It peered at me with its beady little eye, first one then the other, and seemed to dismiss me as being not just irrelevant, but unworthy, since it shrugged, settled its feathers and then took off to more interesting and important assignations. For a moment there I was startled, then thought deeply and darkly to myself that since for so many years I have regarded the wretched birds with so much contempt, it was only fitting that I should be seen in a similar light. And pigeons have such expressive eyes that you can read what they are thinking by just looking at one.

Once upon a different lifetime we lived in an apartment that was high up on a hill. Which meant we not only got a fabulous view all around, but also got all manner of fowl wandering into our flat when all the windows and French doors were open. It was, of course, fairly unpredictable, this kind of invasion, since we never knew when it would happen that a bird flew into the house and forgot how to get out again. It often was the case that we had to chase the silly thing all around the apartment, swearing madly and wondering if we would ever get the poo off the brocade cushion covers and the pin feathers out of the Chinese lampshades. All the fans would hastily be switched off and the glass-slatted vents closed, just so that the idiotic creature would not fly into something that would injure it. Every time it headed that way, I would close not just my eyes, but my ears as well – just as I do in the spooky moments in movies and television shows, to avoid seeing anything that would be unwontedly bloody and stick in my rather fragile psyche for the rest of my life.

The incursions were not infrequent. It came to such a pass that we had to put up chicken wire – or bird wire, as would be more appropriate – over all the openings that the pigeons could fly into, from the large windows to the even larger balconies. In a way that sort of solved the problem, for the most part. But the stupid birds (lovers of the pigeon community would instantly censure me for that, saying that the IQ of a pigeon was higher than I believed it to be) managed occasionally to find a way in and flew bashingly into the mesh and got tangled it is, sometimes breaking through into the flat and causing the aforementioned merry - and loud – havoc in the process. We did avert most of these mishaps, but had to replace the netting at regular intervals.

In the apartment we now live in, pigeons are not visitors, though they do peer hopefully in once in a while. As soon as they land on the awnings over the windows, Small Cat takes grave objection and chatters her teeth with a yarring sound, looking glaringly in the general direction of the birds. That is all very well, except that she does that even if the pigeons perch on a rooflet in the next building. She will keep doing this for as long as it takes for me or Father to shoo the fowl away. But she will never make any attempt to attack or jump at the birds, preferring to lie regally like a furry little princess on the carpet or a chair, sounding off. Only rarely, when she is feeling exceptionally hoppity and believes that the pigeons are daring to make inroads on to her turf, will she gallop across the living room, leap onto Father’s large armchair and chatter at the enemy from a more vantage point.

I am still wondering what Small Cat will do if a pigeon actually comes into the house and does its version of testing the chaos theory. But I am not particularly keen to find out.

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