Monday, February 19th, 2018

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I like animals but there’s this mockingbird that wakes me up in the middle of the night, just going nonstop with a strange amount of chirps, it sounds psychotic. The other birds, even grackles, are less annoying because they pause between chirps and there is plenty of quiet between their chirping sessions. This mockingbird just goes on for hours and hours. 

There are even other parts of my neighborhood that I’ve seen and heard mockingbirds that don’t have this bizarre frantic energy that the mockingbirds in front of my townhomes have. Perhaps the electromagnetic energy from the electrical devices nearby affects them crazy? Maybe the street lamps outside throw off their natural sense of day and night and this also…somehow…makes them psychotic chirpers? 

It’s strange how aggressively they go at it. So I decided, fuck this, I have to do something about it. I bought a wrist rocket sling shot on eBay.

It reminds me of my Dennis the Menace days as a rebellious youth, or memories of watching the Sandlot movie. I started shooting rocks at the mockingbirds to get them to go away. 

But it didn’t work. No matter how close I get to hitting them, no matter how many times I sling rocks at these loud non stop noise making birds, they keep flying back to the same places on the telephone wires, stop signs, and trees in the front parkinglot, where my townhome is. 

The irony is there is a whole neighborhood with creeks and plush trees to fly to that is so much more of a suitable habitat than a parkinglot made of concrete -yet these little bastards keep coming back. I’m a vegetarian, supporter of animal rights (though not PETA they go too far hurting animals in their videos to try to gain attention), an environmentalist, love me some sustainable permaculture versus a forced agriculture approach. But these mockingbirds won’t shut up!

It bears mentioning that I work from home, as a tech for Facebook, so I spend a lot of time at home. This leads to a lot of times I have to hear these mockingbirds. I think they are kind of pretty with the patterned design on their wings, but they are also aggressive af. 

Before I bought the wrist rocket slingshot I ended up running outside in my boxers, in the parkinglot, throwing bottled water into the trees, brooms, anything I could find to get them to STFU at 3am in the morning when I was trying to sleep. There’s no cause for that. 3am? WTF!! I found an article from 1987 on the Los Angeles Times website where the biologist who wrote the piece suffered as I do from the nonstop night noise:

http://articles.latimes.com/1987-01-25/magazine/tm-5613_1_mockingbird-sings

I found it interesting that I wasn’t alone in experiencing this (even back in the 80s these mofos were interrupting sleep with their racket). Also, I found it interesting that mockingbirds don’t sing like other birds, for joy, often they chirp because they are pissed off little shit heads and chirping isn’t a song as it is a filibuster of complaints in bird language. Somehow, I’m not surprised. 

Now, I sometimes go out into the parkinglot shooting up at the trees, trying to scare the mockingbirds away. What the hell happened to a sense of survival??? I’m trying to establish a perimeter, to keep them away from the front of the parkinglot since they have an entire neighborhood, including several parks. But the loud bastards won’t take a hint.

Fast forward 6 months, I drove most of the mockingbirds off, and they don’t wake me up at 3am anymore, sitting outside my 2nd story window with their wretched chirping. For the past 3 months or so I’ve had relative peace and quiet from the mockingbirds who moved on to somewhere else. 

I spoke too soon! Now there are THREE mockingbirds that have come back to harass me. I think my aim is getting better now. The whole thing doesn’t make any sense. Why come back to a place where you’re going to get shot at? The mailman yesterday saw me trying to shoot the mockingbirds out of the tree and stopped to ask me if I’d had much luck. I explained my reasons why I was trying to drive them off and we had a good laugh. Even if it sucks to have to deal with it’s still a funny story.

To be continued…