Birds

Is there anything more ugly than a newly hatched baby bird? They just look like ..... mutant ..... things ...... bleeeccccchh.

I've been thinking about birds because I was in my living room the other night and I kept hearing a skritch .. skritch ... skritch noise coming from the vicinity of my air conditioner, which was not on at the time. I looked out one of the windows and there was a bird, with a twig in its mouth (um - beak?), who kept flying from a nearby tree to the back (outside) of my air conditioner. He/she was trying to build a nest in the outside fins.

Well, I couldn't remember how far apart those fins were spaced, and I had no idea if the bird could actually fit between them, and at that point I was mildly alarmed (freaked out) at the prospect that a bird could possibly build a nest inside my air conditioner, and then baby birds would hatch, and then my cat would be trying to take the air conditioner apart from the inside to get at the birds, and what if one of the birds died inside the air conditioner and then it would smell like crazy inside my apartment, and I live on the second floor so I wouldn't even be able to get to the outside of the air conditioner to get the mess out, and wait, maybe I could call the building super and she could send one of the guys over and ........... well, you get the picture.

So I went outside and took a look, and those fins are so closely spaced the bird would have to flatten itself to the width (depth?) of a sheet of newspaper to fit in between. I don't know what that bird was thinking.

Birds will nest in some pretty weird places. They used to nest up under the eaves of one corner of my building, but there weren't any real close trees for the babies to hop to while they were learning to fly, so every spring I would come home from work one day to find the Carnage of the Birds. The babies would try to fly, fail, fall to the driveway below, and pretty soon every cat in the neighborhood would be feasting. Yuck. Finally the landlord covered up the bottom of the eaves, so that got solved.

Up at the lake, birds nested one year in somebody's old charcoal grill. They flew in and out through the air holes on the side. So you could walk up to the grill, open the lid, and ..... voila! Baby birds!

Back when I lived in the trailer park (I know, I know), birds nested up under the awning over the front porch of trailer (gah! I know!) I lived in. I could go into the hallway, get up on a chair, look out this weird funky little window that was way up on the wall, and look directly into the nest. That was pretty cool.

Well, I guess I've gone on long enough about that. Anybody else have any weird-bird-nest-location stories?