Birds on the brain set the stage for birdbrained plots

There is a difference between having birds on the brain and being a bird brain. You can make the call into which category this column should be filed.

In a May column that drew more suburban reader response than most, I confessed to removing a robin's nest from the porch light inches above our back door, jury-rigging a bird deterrent out of nails, discovering it is illegal to mess with robins, and apologizing to wildlife authorities.

Before reaching the point where I unleashed whatever goo was packed into my father-in-law's tube of "bird repellent," I taped a scary and realistic photo of a snake above the light before the robin could rebuild the nest. The bird relocated to an ease outside our bedroom window and the snake photo made me jump every time I walked up the back steps, but I was still feeling smart by using nature to defeat nature.

Until yesterday, when I discovered another robin (one that bears an eerie resemblance to my earlier foe) had constructed a new nest on our porch light. The nest actually makes physical contact with the snake photo.

What kind of sick, twisted mother bird does that to her chicks? Building a nest next to a snake photograph is the equivalent of a human mom moving her baby's crib under the wanted poster of the neighborhood pedophile.

Having learned my lesson, I'm leaving the nest, and its accompanying filth, where it is. But I fear the chicks growing up in that nest will harbor warm and fuzzy feelings about snakes, and will be swallowed whole the first time they fly down to renew ties with any slithering predator they see in the wild.

Sadly, those fatalities would not be the first bird deaths for which I'm responsible.

As 13-year-olds struggling to find a passable project for the junior high science fair, my lab partner and I came up with a bird-deterrent experiment perfect for our rural, agriculturally minded school. Trying to build a better scarecrow, we decided to record the distress calls of starlings and see if playing those sounds back into the wild would repel other starlings.

The theory was scientifically sound. It was our method that invited madness. We (my glove-clad partner bravely capturing the flappy birds in an enclosed shed while I held the flashlight) caged two starlings. We planned to record their heartbeats at rest and then see if their beats per minute increased when we played back their alarm calls.

We soon discovered that bird heartbeats increase whenever you grab them and hold a stethoscope to their chests, regardless of whether the sounds coming at them are distress calls, Burt Bacharach's "Close to You," or seventh-grade lab partners wondering if it was too late to abandon this project in favor of simply dropping a human tooth in a bottle of Coke.

Whatever weak anecdotal evidence we had to support our premise was further diminished when our birds responded to being locked in the school science lab the weekend before the science fair by dying. Judges asked about the lack of birds in our empty cage.

"We freed them from the cage when our experiment was over," my lab partner explained truthfully, without adding the detail about opening the cage door and shaking their stinking carcasses into the trash. "The Effect of Distress Calls on Starlings" did not advance past the first round of the science fair competition, and our names probably were added to a list of potential serial killers alongside the boy whose science project could have been titled "The Very Predictable Effect of an Electric Train Transformer on a Rat in a Metal Cage."

My sister, Sally, would have been thrilled with any science project that cut into the bird population. She suffers from ornithophobia, a fear of birds. An ambling city pigeon makes her recoil. A bird in flight elicits screams. As a child, she was scared of swooping purple martins. To cure her, Cousin Bob tied Sally to the "bird pole" in our yard, on top of which perched a giant birdhouse with dozens of birds.

As a science fair project titled "The Effect of Swooping Birds on a Hysterical Girl," the experiment would have beaten my starling effort. But instead of curing Sally, it made the problem worse.

I bring this up because Sally and our mom are visiting us this weekend. As they walk toward our back door, Sally will feel the feathery wrath of the robin guarding her nest. Mom, 82 and afraid of snakes, will zero in on the reptilian photograph above the nest.

I'm hoping their reactions are nothing that compel another follow-up column.