Today is a less-intense reprise of My Sweetie’s and my experience of a few weeks back:
That Robin is flying full speed at our bedroom windows.
This time, Robin is focused on the window near my bed (shade down, by the way) and the glass doors from the office to the garden (no coverings). It’s an intermittent BONK, and an odd sight if you’ve not encountered it before. I had; back when I was working in desktop publishing, I’d have a season where my work would be accompanied by a robin (this Robin?) crashing at either end of the doors.
It’s hard to be Robin in our glassed-over world. Clearly there are Other Robins who are NOT behaving as they ought and slinking away from the nestlings’ territory. They just keep flying back-!?! Though to their credit, Other Robins don’t come any farther than the windows. I think this last may be why Robin is able to move on to other things and not brain itself in ceaseless striving.
But the episode a few weeks ago was the most intense, desperate-seeming thing I’ve encountered.
It was a Saturday; My Sweetie had gotten up and raised the middle panel of the shades over our bedroom’s clerestory windows. It’s about two yards-ish long…the middle section is double the length of the ends. My Sweetie likes to open this one when he’s home for any length of time. I find this bemusing, since he doesn’t tend to open the shades in the living room—the largest room, at the core of the house, which we walk through on our way to anywhere else. Our bedroom’s in kind of a cul-de-sac.
I noticed the BONK first. I walked to a point where I could see but was pretty sure I was out of Robin’s line of sight, and watched Robin fling Robin’s-self at the pane over and over and over. I called My Sweetie from the dining room to watch. Robin had looped away a few times, but quickly returned. BONK. BONK. BONK. We walked further into the bedroom, going in slow stages. BONK. BONK. BONK. We realized the window showed smears of what looked like mucus—that the window is filling up with smears. BONK. BONK. BONK. More smears; continuous flinging. We finally were standing with our chins on the sill, and yet Robin kept coming.
My Sweetie finally decided to close the shade, to change the reflectivity of the glass.
Robin wasn’t convinced. BONK. BONK. BONK. We drifted away. At some point in the afternoon, I realized the sound had stopped some time before. And a few days later My Sweetie washed the window clean again. The evidence of the fight was perturbing, in addition to being messy.
I had thought Robin had moved on to other nestling projects, but evidently not. Though I’m glad Robin didn’t injure itself. We had a cedar waxwing die in a FWI (Flying While Intoxicated) accident back in 2008, and all the witnesses still talk about it.