KamiKaze Robins

This past Saturday I decided the time had come to do a dirty job...clean my windows. Not all my windows. Just one in particular.

When you look at this picture you must wonder what kind of a housekeeper am I and how long did it take for this window to look this bad! In answer to the first question, I'm an average housekeeper. On any given day there is a fair amount of dust and Maggie's fur coat lying around, but on any other given day, it has been routinely cleaned up. I don't "DO" windows (as the expression goes) very often, but they do get done. In answer to the second question--How long did it take this window to look this bad?--about a week.

Somewhere around mid-May we noticed a robin perched on the railing outside the window. Every minute or so he would fly up at the window. I know some birds have a hard time understanding windows, but I would think after repeatedly flying at it the robin would have come to realize that there was an invisible wall there and he wasn't gonna get through it. He persisted flying at it until after several days he had managed to put mud on every single window pane. We tried leaving the hall light on so he would know it wasn't a tunnel to somewhere, but he just kept flying at that window.  He never hurt himself, mind you. He just kept working at whatever task he had set for himself.

Now that he has left it alone, I decided to take a chance and clean it.

In the end, I had to admit it was a good idea. The railing was beginning to turn green and the robin had left lovely white polka dots all along the black rubber mat on top of the portico. Actually the white polka dots have appeared everywhere from under the grill on the back patio (how???) to marking every step on the front walk. Our blacktop driveway looks like a runway for birds. And since I'm on the subject, can I just add here that robins leave much bigger polka dots than sparrows!

It's a good thing I like the birds. In fact, tune in tomorrow for some more bird brained tales from the nest.