Last August, shortly after the accident, a pigeon (or rock dove, if you will) showed up on the roof of my house. Just appeared there one day and sat gawking at me with its beady little eyes. And never left.
I've always liked birds, especially since that bird-watching class I took in college. At first, I was amused. Bianca and I named him Dante. He'd strut past between two shaded underhangs on my roof depending on the time of day and from where the sun was shining. We liked him.
I thought it, but am not sure if I said it aloud then, that maybe, just maybe, Dante was the spirit of my baby Miranda who had died just weeks before in the aforementioned accident. I shrugged it off mostly, but babied Dante, just in case. I even sometimes left food out on the sidewalk for him to nibble.
I started getting fed up with him weeks later when I noticed he was leaving bird droppings on my porch from the perch where he sat all day. I set a box underneath, to catch the poop, in my lame attempt at keeping the mess to a minimum. And then he brought his girlfriend to our roof to live in peace. Bianca and I promptly named her Dorian and continued to tolerate them.
Two months later. The mess is out of control and my roof is spotted and I have no patience with the birds left. I don't know what to do. I research how to get rid of pigeons on the internet. The most helpful piece of advice I found was to get a peregrine falcon as a pet to demolish them, albeit this advice was not humane.
I didn't get a peregrine falcon. But I did tie some balloons onto the roof to bob in the wind and scare them away, which worked like a charm, for a couple days until the helium of the balloon deflated. I then decided to tie plastic shopping bags on the roof, again to make rustling noises and flap in the wind. Didn't work. My last futile attempt came in the form of a gag gift we'd received once that I found under our bed. It was a motion-sensored toilet that sang "Flush the toilet, flush, flush, flush" to the melody of Rockin' Robin. I climbed onto the ledge and set the plastic toilet squarely on the rain gutters. Then left. It was the perfect plan, but alas, it didn't work either.
Another couple months. Snow on the ground. Dante shows up with his no-good, free-loading cousin DeWayne who moves in with Dante and Dorian. Eric brings a pellet gun home from work. He shoots it a couple times, not truly intending to hit them, and they fly away. A couple days later. All three are back. We're all fed up and Eric aims a little closer and hits DeWayne on the wing. Dante and Dorian fly off, leaving DeWayne who can now not fly. He waddles off down the sidewalk (which was the last time I saw any of them).
Last month, I was reading Bianca "Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens" each night before bed when I was struck sick with the following paragraph (mind you, Dante was not a swallow, but still):
"[Peter Pan] has still a vague memory that he was a human once, and it makes him especially kind to the house-swallows when they visit the island, for house-swallows are the spirits of little children who have died. They always build in the eaves of the houses where they lived when they were humans, and sometimes they try to fly in at a nursery window, and perhaps that is why Peter loves them best of all the birds."
What do you think? Am I crazy or just plain mean? (By the way, animal rights activists are not allowed to have an opinion here.)
