Monster Be Gone!

Do you have one of these living next door to you? A Macaw? The bird is beautiful, but its squawks are startling and jarring to an adult (when I first heard them I honestly thought something was being mauled) and they're downright scary to a small child.

Husband didn't help things when he coined it the Dinosaur Bird and made up this song: "Dinosaur Bird is gonna eat you!" Which he happily sang to Baz ONCE. 

We've been paying for it ever since.

Add to that a new fear of anything even remotely scary (scene not well lit enough in an otherwise mellow movie? TOO SCARY! Someone being snappish? SCARY! Women in a gas mask? SCARY!) and we've had a fun night pattern emerge.

Enter pinterest and co-workers.

It's not revolutionary, but kids are literal and so it's miraculously effective.

We made a sign:

It reads: NO Monsters or Dinosaur Birds ALLOWED!!!

Then we made some spray, just in case the sign isn't enough for the persistent ones: 

 

The California Baby spray bottles are the best. And the Calming Room Spray we already had has the added benefit of combating the Stinky Feet Boy Room smell that has a tendency of hanging around sometimes.

VOILA! So far, so good. Bedtimes are much easier these days. 

Unless the Dinosaur Bird has been squawking, that is. I love/hate that bird.

Whew!

Restoring my faith in nature

So Monday was a holiday and Steve was working from home. All well and good and then we hear a bang and he says "what was that? Did a bird just fly into a window?" And I say "no. Maybe an orange hit the car."

I had one eye on the pictures I was hanging in the hallway (they've been on the floor for two years. I figured it was time) and one eye on Sebastian who has discovered the fun of looking out the window in his room and therefore could not be bothered to investigate.

Steve did. He reported that a bird had, in fact, flown into the window and now appeared to by dying under the back orange tree. This made me very sad. I looked, and confirmed that what we were looking at were likely death throes.

I tore us away from the window with assurances that once he was truly at peace we would bury him in one of the newly dug holes in the backyard.

Steve immediately started instant messaging with my sister. I sent her a picture on my phone (first of the bird and then of the amount of blood.) I chased off the hooligans.

Particularly this one (Helo)

Then I noticed something: the bird (a male woodpecker) was picking up his head. Then he started looking around. I let out a little whoop and informed my sister who gave me instructions on nursing an injured bird back to health. I grabbed a shoebox and some rags and gloves and when I came out again he was sitting up in roughly this position:

Poor little guy probably had a migraine in his entire body. We brought him inside and showed Baz, who thought it was the Best.Thing.EVER. Then we put the box in a spot we were certain could not be reached by the cats and ate lunch - checking on him every few minutes.

There was nothing more to be done at that point. He was either going to recover or he was going to slip away. As long as we kept him safe and warm and away from the cats until he looked well enough to eat we were doing our best.

Luckily, after lunch when we peeked we were greeted with a very confused bird.

Who promptly started to fly:

I donned yet another pair of gloves and carried him outside where he was more than happy to fly as high as possible into the juniper tree at the back of our property.

I haven't seen him since, but I have seen his girlfriend. She was eating seeds out of the few remaining pomegranates on the tree outside the window.

I've set up a feeder for them. Hopefully they'll stick around and become helpful birds who sing and tie ribbons in my hair. That happens, right?

I Was Going to Eat That!

So our property has a good number of fruit bearing trees on it - all right now in various stages of bloom/ripening.

In the middle of the front yard, all by its lonesome (some would say - randomly) is a plum tree. Not to be mistaken with the pretty plum cherry trees in the back this one is gnarled and craggy and in fall it looks downright malicious. Great at halloween.

In the spring it bears more fruit than it can bear. To be repetitive and redundant.

And literal:

Can you see the break? No? It's over there on the right.
Here's a close up:

Yeah.
So how much was lost, you ask?

This much:

There are starving people all over the world and I've got a plum tree that can't manage its own bounty.

Argh. Good thing we weren't relying on that branch for much more than snack food.

Any idea what we should be on the scar to ward off infection?