They’re Just Birds, After All

We’ve had some problems around here, over the months and years, with birds. City birds. Grackles. For several years, they’ve been congregating, especially in the evenings, around intersections where there’s lots of traffic and lots of people, especially in places where people are having fast food and leaving crumbs. And dropped French fries. And crusts of buns. Etc.

I think all the instinctive behavior of eating, like finding worms and bugs, has given way to the easy route of people food. I don’t know what the biological issues are. Maybe they’re just as healthy, living on a diet of food from McDonald’s and Wendy’s and Jack in the Box. It seems like not, but they’re thriving, from a population standpoint. This is not a phenomenon I recall from my childhood, or even my kids’ childhoods. But, it’s certainly part of Peter’s childhood.

My local grocery store, years ago, planted attractive trees at the ends of the rows of parking spaces closest to the store’s doors. They didn’t provide much shade, but they looked nice, and, in time, they might have made some shade. But, after a few years, the grocery store folks cut them down. There was a whitewash of bird poop under all the trees, and also on cars that had parked at the ends of the rows. Messy and unattractive. There are some trees growing at the farthest ends of some of the rows. And, I do park there, in the heat of the summer. It’s an acceptable trade-off for me. I have to walk through the heat, and I might have to clean off the windows, but at least the car’s not scorching hot, May through September, when I get in with my groceries.

Lack of lots of trees doesn’t mean that the birds have left the area. Nope. They have not conceded.

Here’s what those annoying, pesky birds do instead. As soon as the sun gets close to the horizon, they gather themselves up, from whatever fast food restaurants they’ve been hanging around, and arrange themselves on the utility wires. And they sit there. Until the sun goes down. If you watch them for a while, you’ll see that a few of them fly away, or swoop around, and then settle back into place. If there is an empty space, a bird will drop down into it. If a bird tries to land in a space that’s not really big enough (from the birds’ reckoning), the other birds won’t give up their place. The interloping bird will have to fly away, swoop around, and find a new settling place. But, for the most part, they just sit there. Staring down at the humankind, driving, walking, jogging down below. It’s been like this for years, but it still seems creepy to me. Many years ago, I was driving my dad home after a dinner together. I commented on the precise spacing between the birds. (And, my dad passed away more than ten years ago, so, again, not a new thing the birds are doing.) Daddy looked at them carefully and said, “I suppose it’s the amount of space that they need to take off.” That does seem right, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, when Peter was here a month or so ago, I was driving him to the Baylor area to meet David for their Thursday evening “Late Night at the Mayborn” museum rendezvous. We drove through Chick-fil-a to get them some dinner, and there are many fast food places in the area. So, of course, birds were gathering on the wires for their eveningtime meet-and-greet.

“Look, Mimi,” Peter said, calling my attention to the CVS pharmacy sign. “There are so many birds, I think they’re going to fall off.”

Indeed. Pharmacy birds apparently do not need the same amount of space for perching as do the other birds. Or, maybe, as Peter suggested to me, it’s just warmer up on that lighted sign than it is on the wires.

And I guess I’m also supposed to consider what it means that I am worth so much more than a whole flock of sparrows. If I’m worth that much, then so are each and every one of my brothers and sisters who are walking in this world.