Early in the morning I kept hearing a tapping sound. I couldn’t figure out what was causing it, until I saw a robin slamming and pecking at the upstairs window. “Oh no,” I thought, “another demented robin.”
This is the third one I have experienced. My first was up in BC, the second was at my mother’s house in Indiana, and now another one in BC.
Here’s what happens. A male robin sees its reflection in a window, then full of male ego, it pursues the reflection to drive the perceived interloper away. Over and over they fly at the glass, banging and pecking in their futile attempt, but of course they can’t drive their own reflection away.
After weeks of battling the window, the first robin ended up finally killing itself by slamming too hard into the glass. I tried to stop it by taping white paper on the inside of the window to lessen the reflection, but I guess the robin could still see himself.
This time I taped some foamy packing material on the outside of the window, and that worked for a day. The next morning, however I was awakened at 5:00 AM by another constant scraping sound. With the reflected robin in the window now gone, the demented robin moved over and started going after its reflection in the door window. It couldn’t really attack its reflection in the glass because of the screen door, but it kept trying by slamming and hanging on the screen. That’s what the above photo shows.
I still had some sheets of plastic that we used to cover up things during our painting, and so I hung some over the door to stop the reflection (Photo below). So far that has been working, and I haven’t seen the robin for a day. I have my fingers crossed that the robin doesn’t notice any of the many other windows we have on our house.
Sometimes I think it would be better just to let the robin keep slamming into the window glass, until it takes itself out of the gene pool, at least then the stupidity would be bred out of future generations.
Check out my paintings: www.davidmarchant.ca
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