featuring "birds" or i am a terrible person

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posted by tom / June 03, 2004 /

The unexpected germination of the seeds presents a dire situation, but I was determined to continue, recklessly discarding both tense and the second person voice. And, it should be noted, blithely ignoring the fact that I was poised to grow several times my yearly consumption of zucchini. Taking some small satisfaction in defying my econ professor's admonition to "ignore sunk costs," I considered my next steps. The squirrels. Those furry motherfuckers were going to be a problem.

I had watched my grandfather fight the squirrels for much of my childhood. His birdfeeder went from a window to a tree, a tree to a metal pole, and from that pole to a different, better metal pole that featured what looked like a medical dog collar attached to it. And while he must have been somewhat pleased to see the resulting rain of furry lumps that occasionally launched themselves from the branches above and carromed off the feeder, it was clear that his was a losing battle. Shortly thereafter, he and my grandmother moved into a nursing home. I guess I was too young to make the connection at the time.

I resolved to avenge my grandfather. But how? A stroll through Ayer's hardware and I had it: a net! I purchased a black plastic one and stretched it over the still-small plants. It worked well -- although in retrospect there was really nothing for the squirrels to eat underneath it at that early stage. And they still dug up the spinach, presumably just as a matter of principle. But still, I felt the net had been a success.

But it would be hard to grow everything so close together, so I eventually transplanted all the vegetables and moved on to a more exciting squirrel repellant: dried blood. Apparently the scent of the stuff -- which is pretty much undetectable to humans -- makes animals think that some Very Bad Shit has recently gone down in your garden. Plus, it works as a fertilizer. I like to think of it as "pagan-sacrifice-in-a-bag," warding off evil spirits and ensuring a plentiful harvest. Anyway, I'm always on board for anything even tangentially related to vampires, so I went and bought a bag. So far, it seems to be working.

However, in the frenzy of repotting and dried-blood-sprinkling, I guess I forgot to properly dispose of the plastic netting. Today I found it bunched under some azaleas, ten feet or so from where it was originally used. Disturbingly, there was a dead bird tangled in it, reduced to little more than feather and bone. Confusingly, there were also three other dead birds tangled in it.

I'm not sure what the moral of this story could possibly be, except maybe "bird are really dumb."