The Robin's Reflection

I came downstairs Saturday to find my wife and daughter staring out a the back window. Rona was waving at my son who preceded me down the stairs. "Get my camera, Scott. Hurry!"

Now, we've had some interesting wildlife saunter through the yard of this house and our last house--black bear, wild turkey, deer, rabbits, a rabbit slaughtering eagle--so I wasn't jumping up and down. "What is it?" I said. "Another deer?"

The ladies of the house gave their heads a vigorous shake as my son returns with a camera. As far as cameras go in my house, on the desk in the office lay three digital cameras. One is very old, has no batteries, and frankly should've been tossed a long time ago. Another one is a relatively cheap spare camera the kids sometimes use, but doesn't actually have a memory card in it, so it too is useless. Then there's my wife's tidy little camera. My fancy shmancy camera is not on the desk because, well, it's mine!

So, which camera does my son bring? The cheapo with no memory card. My wife sees him carrying the wrong camera and while I wore a bemused look, she shooed him away and told him to get the other camera. Mind you, he knows which camera is hers, but quite often teenage boy brains don't function properly. So he disappears into the office again while Rachel is squealing at the back window.

Despite my lack of coffee, I was about ready to demand to know what was out there, but Scott reappeared with another camera. As I said, teenage boy brains are not wired to actually find things in plain sight. He'd brought the very old and very battery-less camera nobody has touched since we moved into this house nearly five years ago, and that was only because we unpacked it.

At this point, Rona is nearly apoplectic with annoyance at his inability to find the right freakin' camera. Let me now cut to the chase. He finally brings the right camera, and I get a look through the window.

There's this big 'ol robin sitting on my Scott's old pitch-back (for practicing baseball pitching) in the yard. Without warning it takes off, heading straight for the me. It bumps into the window, flaps its wings as it bubbles up and down in front of the glass, then zooms off for a moment and lands again on the pitch back. The bugger kept on with this all morning. At one point, I went outside and shooed the thing away because I thought it might bend its beak on the glass and because the noise was getting annoying already.

But of course it came back. And it's been back every day since. Supposedly, this happens all the time - a bird sees another bird, which is just its own reflection and decides it's mating season. I'm told that the same bird might come back every year as well! It looks like I'm going to have to mount a scarecrow outside the window, otherwise we're going to be living with the daily knocking from the robin's reflection.