In backyard turf battle, robin could make me a jailbird

Squirrels and I have a long and colorful history punctuated in the past by attempts at violence and threats of legal action. Bunnies and I have been battling since our diametrically opposing views of Beatrix Potter's literary treatise on garden property rights. I surrendered to raccoons the day I stopped growing sweet corn in my suburban garden. And I once told the opossum living in our mulberry tree to drop dead.

But this robin feud is new.

I've got nothing against birds. I've written sympathetically about birds that hit windows. I've gushed about monk parakeets, swallows and finches. I've written odes to crows.

None of those columns mean a thing to this robin.

We came home after a weekend outing to discover her nest on the flat top of our new back door light, inches above the entrance to our house. Straggly pieces of straw littered our porch, and bird droppings and mud caked the door and window. Every time the door opened, we scared the robin and she scared us.

One of us would have to move. I chose the robin.

The next morning as she ducked out for worms she could convert to droppings for our window, I quickly climbed a step ladder and gently nudged the nest from its perch. I was dismayed to see a single egg, a beautiful robin's egg blue, nestled in the straw. Cradling the nest in my hands (gloved so as not to get human stink on it), I carefully tuck it under an awning on my kids' play fort 15 feet away.

I imagined the soon-to-be-mother robin returning home, flying into a full panic, only to be so thankful and relieved after she noticed my subtle head nods pointing her toward her relocated nest in a much safer neighborhood. Gee, thanks, mister.

Instead, the robin was stoic to the point of making me question her commitment to motherhood. No anguished chirps. No frantic fly-abouts searching for her egg. Her robin breast did seem a little flushed, but she didn't seem flustered. She simply flew off to find more straw and began rebuilding. In the same spot above our light.

She'd drop off nest scraps. I'd take them down. After more than a half dozen skirmishes along those lines, I jury-rigged a device from drywall, duct tape and finishing nails to make a pointy platform unfit for perching.

But the robin continues to bring straw and droppings to the site, and I gingerly maneuver through the nails to remove them. In need of professional help, I call David Willard, collections manager of birds at Chicago's Field Museum.

"Robins are protected by the migratory bird treaty," begins Willard, informing me that I violated international law by moving that nest.

"It's not like robins are rare or anything," Willard says, sounding sympathetic to my plight. Then he explains that if the government lets me break the law because a robin is fouling my door, some crackpot will think that gives him a right to shoot down a flock of bald eagles because their cries made him miss Paul's proposal to Nikki on TV's "The Young and the Restless."

Rules are rules. So I could be subject to a $15,000 fine and six months in jail?

"Yep," agrees John D. Rogner, field supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office in Barrington. "The law doesn't discriminate between a robin nesting in your eaves or a bald eagle in the wild."

The very kind, forgiving and (I suspect from his voice on the phone) ruggedly handsome Supervisor Rogner tells me how employees at a park district destroyed some swallows' nests a couple years back but made amends and avoided fines and jail time by educating the public about swallows.

"We certainly want to make people understand what the law is and keep them on the right side of it," Rogner says as I beg forgiveness.

Rogner has had robins nest in eaves at his home near Pingree Grove. While riding on suburban bike paths, Rogner has innocently gotten too close to nesting red-winged blackbirds.

"They'll actually come down and rake their claws over your head," Rogner says. "It's a little frightening really."

Willard and Rogner say such aggressive behavior usually only lasts for a few weeks during the spring breeding season. Once a nest is built, the best solution is "to wait until the robins are finished with their brood," Willard advises.

"A lot of it is modifying our behavior to accommodate these birds," Rogner says.

Now I know. But until another nest is built, perhaps I could dissuade the robin from choosing the spot on our porch light by introducing a fake predator, such as a plastic snake.

"A plastic snake is not a bad idea," Willard says. "Let me know how that works."

I'll tell Willard if the plastic snake I put on the bed of nails above my light tonight keeps the robin at bay. But if I wake up tomorrow and find a dead mongoose impaled above my door with a plastic snake in its mouth, it will be my little secret.