  Lying in bed. Warm, asleep, comfortable, dreaming, it's all good. WHAM! WHAM! "What the fuck! " WHAM!
Now sitting bolt upright in bed, confused, scared, disoriented, mostly stupid. And... "What the fuck was that! " It sounded like someone was attempting to punch through the sliding glass doors in our bedroom. Not exactly a thought that is easily processed at 5:27am. In fact my brain easily processes no thought before 8am unless I've been awake for half an hour or have consumed a liter of coffee. I've been awake for 3 seconds; there's no coffee.
I nudge the hamster in my head out of his stupor and begin to come up with plausible explanations for this rude awakening. I look towards the window (genius! thousands of years of evolution are definitely kicking in with this survival level stuff) and in the dim pre-dawn light, through the somewhat translucent blinds, I can't see anyone standing at the window. Well that's good, I guess. I look some more and I continue to see no one. Okay then.
The hamster is getting up to 1/4 speed and has come up with "Maybe you imagined it", the hamster is lazy and really just looking for a way to explain the situation that allows him to go back to sleep but I have to admit that I like the idea. The only problem is that I notice my wife has also awoken and is looking at me with a "deer lying on the road after getting clipped by a Toyota and staring into the headlights of the big rig that is about to finish it off" (read: scared, sleepy and confused) look that convinces the hamster that something did happen. Damn. Well, 10 seconds have elapsed at this point and as there currently appears to be no masked assailant killing me the scared has mostly receded. Confusion is still pretty prevalent and stupid is a definite overriding theme but it is still before 5:30 so I'll give myself a break. I turn to my wife and say...wait for it "What the fuck was that?
" hoping that her comprehension of events has somehow surpassed mine and we can rap up the investigation and go back to sleep. Unfortunately her response was "Hunh? I dunno. " Damn. The hamster, having resigned himself to being awake at this godforsaken hour, decides to rouse the rest of my body and comes up with "You should get up and take a look!". This, unfortunately, seems reasonable so I slip my naked 6'6" 230lb body out of bed with the grace and finesse of a drunken walrus, whip the blinds aside, and peer outside.
The trellis and it's encircling clematis are horrified by the sudden appearance of my naked body gleaming pasty white (give me a break, there's no natural way to get a tan in Vancouver in March) in the window as the sun struggled over the horizon. Besides the traumatized trellis there's nothing unusual - not that I'm an expert on what is usual for this hour of the day but extrapolating based on what the backyard looks like at other hours - it seemed okay. Hmm. There was a noise...there's nothing outside...but there was a noise. "Maybe you imagined it" the hamster can be obstinate. No, we've already decided that two people (especially two night-owl, heavy sleeping, morning haters like us) don't wake up this early for no reason.
Double damn. "Maybe whoever/whatever made the noise is trying to break into some other window or door", I have to admit that I like the imagined it idea better than this new one but I guess I'd better check it out. I mumble to my wife that I'm going to take a look around and she mumbles back something affirmative. A quick look around produces more traumatized plants and garden fixtures but no explanation for the noise. Having exhausted all avenues of enquiry I decide that whatever woke me up has vacated the premises and it's time to go back to sleep. I stumble back to bed, flop in, answer my wife's question, with "I dunno, there's nothing out there" and close my eyes in anticipation of renewing my recent acquaintance with the sandman.
Warm, asleep, comfortable, dreaming, it's all good. WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! "Seriously, what is going on here!
" This time everything happens a bit faster. The look to the window, the glance at my wife, the hopping out of bed, still nothing. The clock now reads 5:51am. Again the house walkabout. Nothing. Nothing.
Nothing. It occurs to me that this is ridiculous but I'm tired and tired wins over pondering the ridiculous. Back to sleep. Or almost, because three minutes later WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!
I bound out of bed and the blinds fly aside and I find myself eye to eye with...nothing. That's it, I've had it! I rummage around on the floor and find some discarded clothes from the night before. I unlock the sliding door and venture out. The birds are chirping, the cement on the patio is cold. The clematis on the trellis is, well, fragrant and beautiful at this hour of the day.
Off in the distance I can hear the morning commuter train blowing its whistle. None of these things explains why I'm standing in my backyard with increasingly cold feet. I wander around the house looking for any explanation. No footprints, no rocks or other projectiles laying under the window, nada, zip, diddly. So, I'm standing half naked in the backyard at 6am with cold wet feet investigating what now can only be described as a paranormal phenomenon. Where are Mulder and Scully when you need them?
(Actually probably only 30km west as filming for the X-Files hadn't wrapped for the season at this point, but I suppose Mr. Duchovny and Ms. Anderson wouldn't appreciate the wakeup call for the case of the mysterious suburban window banging incident). I decide to give the area the all purpose, fierce Viking stare that my ancestors perfected a thousands years ago, unfortunately to no avail. Bugger. My wife and I discuss the mystery in monosyllabic grunts for a few minutes and then decide that since there's nothing to do, we'll do nothing and return to our previous default unconscious condition. Sleep is harder to attain this time as the hamster has finally gotten up to cruising speed and having been fooled two times before isn't about to let its guard down without a fight. At 7:30 I'm still lying awake but there've been more "events" and I finally drift back to sleep, only to be awakened ten minutes later by my wife's alarm clock.
Bugger. Bugger. Bugger. That day there were no other paranormal activities and I had a mystery to share with my cohorts at work. Not a very interesting story but then you already knew that having reached this point in my narrative. I went to bed that night having mostly forgotten the whole affair.
Warm, asleep, comfortable, dreaming, it's all good. WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! Pause. WHAM!
Pause. Pause. WHAM! WHAM! "Something is not right!! " All of you who've read, or had read to you, Ludwig Bemelman's Madeline will recognize the very astute words of Miss Clavel.
Okay, I'm awake, not alert, definitely alive (if my pounding heart is any indication), and whole heartedly unenthusiastic about the resumption of the early morning window bombardment, local time 5:24am. Blinds flung open, nothing obvious. A quick reconnoiter for available garb and then directly out into the beautiful pre-dawn light. Stupid early morning happy birds are chirping their fool heads off but beside that...nothing. No explanation to be found. Just to be thorough another quick jaunt around the house to verify that there is indeed, no rational explanation for the WHAM!
WHAM! Damn!! Now I'm a reasonable man (or so I like to think and if you disagree well then you can go and ... I digress) but after two consecutive mornings of being awakened by a mysterious force from another dimension I was beyond bemused...teetering on the edge of befuddlement. I was also tired. I really enjoy sleeping, I most especially enjoy the sleep that occurs between the hours of 3am and 7am.
I'm willing to sacrifice the hours up until 3 for any of a variety of reasons, a good book, any social gathering, a stupid B movie that catches my attention at midnight, idle thoughts and musings. The hours after 7am are pretty much just a bonus, but that crucial 3-7....that's the stuff. I can go weeks with less that 6 hours per day so long as I get those hours. So, this FRICKEN-FRACKEN NOISE was cutting into my sleep. Ahhh!!! Back to the events at hand.
I'm outside in the backyard with cold, wet, dirty feet wearing yesterday's underwear (athletic style boxers if you have to know). So, I head back in, stubbing my toe on the way. I close the door and sit on the bed staring at the window. I wait, and wait, thinking that I'll catch the culprit/ghoul/whatever red handed. I wait. It's only 5:45am.
I wait. By 5:50am I'm thinking that it's more important to sleep than to catch the noise maker. By 5:55am I'm snuggled back down, occasionally peeking at the window. WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!
I move as fast as I've ever moved before 6:00am before. I cross the 4 feet to the window in under a second (that's 2.7 miles/hour!! ) and saw a big giant nothing. Birds chirping, sun rising, trees, trellis, clematis, yada, yada. UNBELIEVABLE! I know because my wife and I discussed it and agreed that it was unbelievable and since we were the only ones there, we had to be correct.
At this point a new plan was required. Daring, unconventional, bold. I opened the blinds, and left them open. (You didn't see that coming did you. ) Then, I lay back down in bed and watched the, now completely visible, window. And watched, and watched, and waited, and waited, and waited and then it was 6:45am and still nothing.
Now I've only got 55 more minutes to sleep before the alarm and I give up and close my eyes and go back to sleep. Fitful, unhappy, tense, non-restorative sleep until WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! By the time I groggily opened my eyes there was, of course, nothing to see. Then the alarm went.
My story at work that day was delivered with far less enthusiasm than the day before. "Once is funny" and all that. That evening my wife and I collapsed into bed early. We left the blinds open so that either the phantasm would be able to satisfy its voyeuristic tendencies without bothering to wake us up, or so that we'd have a better chance of catching the blighter in the act...opinions vary. Either way, the blinds were open. We hunkered down for sleep hoping that we'd wake the next morning at 7:40am.
But it never happened again. The end. No, I wouldn't drag you this far into a story and then leave you hanging like that. Rather it was, 5:20am with the sleeping and dreaming and the what-have-you, then the WHAM! and the WHAM! and still more WHAM!
My eyelids opened and I thought I briefly saw something at the window. I sprang out of bed but after that brief glimpse it was gone. A dark shape about the size of a volleyball (or that was the hamster's assessment anyway). I told my wife this and she didn't seem as impressed with my manly "seeing something" as I thought she should be. In her defense it was kind of difficult to explain why a volleyball would be attacking our window. But, now having seen something I was bound and determined to figure out what that something was.
And, as luck would have it, as I was staring at the window a robin landed on the trellis and then swooped beak first into the window, hovered there and repeatedly smashed its face into the glass and then about faced and flew back into a nearby tree. Moments later that same robin begin singing a most energetic song. A robin?? We'd been woken up early three days running by a robin? Little robin redbreast? No, I don't think so.
But then a few minutes later there he was again bashing his fool skull into our window. Many thoughts occurred to me at this point. One was how was the damned thing surviving these multiple cranial impacts, these weren't love taps, he was whacking the glass with gusto. The Big Horned Sheep and Woodpecker union reps would have been most displeased to see Mr. Robin horning in on their areas of expertise. My second thought was why the hell had the robin chosen our window. I know that my wife and I are fine people and our house was esthetically pleasing but to be honest there were several more picturesque places the robin could have chosen.
Third I pondered whether our little friend was developmentally challenged and just didn't understand that if he wanted to go north from where he was, he just needed to make a slight west or east diversion on his flight path, or adjust his altitude from 4 to say, 34 feet. So, now the mystery was solved, sort of, but I felt that I needed to try and dissuade our little robin visitor from killing himself against our window. This wasn't exactly an altruistic endeavor as I mostly just wanted to be able to sleep. So, I went outside, completely naked this time - I figured that if robin dude wanted to see the goods I'd satisfy his curiosity and maybe he could move to the next thing on his "30 things to do before I visit the big nest in the sky" list. I'm outside. The robin is up in a tree, still singing what appears to be a merry little tune - nice for listening to but nothing you could dance to.
I look at him, he remains aloof. I realize that there really isn't really anything that I can say to convince the robin to modify his behavior...but even robins must fear the intensity of the fierce Viking stare. I affixed the aforementioned expression to my face and waited for it to take effect. The effect was that the robin sang a slightly less merry tune and looks slightly chagrined (or at least I choose to think he looks as chagrined as a robin can look). Anyway, things are getting cold so I head back in. That oughta do it.
I figure that no robin can smash his face into my window after that. Eyes closed, attempting to sleep. Of course, WHAM! WHAM! Flutter, flutter. WHAM!
FRICKEN-FRACKEN RETARD ROBIN!! What is up with this bird? I jump up and outside again and apply the third degree Viking death stare (pretty much the worst stare that anyone give). All I get in return is a dismissive "tweat" from the beaked basher. My wife and I attempted sleep for the rest of the morning, trying our best to ignore the reverberating window. Three days of interrupted sleep.
My conversations at work concerning my feathered, flying alarm clock were much appreciated by co-workers. I was having a harder time seeing the humor. Someone suggested that small birds are scared of owls and that I should get an owl decoy to scare the robin away. Genius!! That evening on my way home I stopped off at Canadian Tire (because if anyone is going to have an owl decoy it would obviously be Crappy Tire. ) Low and behold the tire store did have a two-foot tall, hollow, plastic owl, only $14.95!
To be honest I would have paid 10 times as much for some uninterrupted sleep. I brought my wise, new, plastic friend home and set about finding a perch for him. I rummaged around in the garage and found a hockey stick with a broken blade that was the perfect size. I jammed the hockey stick in the garden outside the window and impaled the owl on the stick. The window was now guarded, our undisturbed sleep ensured, the sun was shining, and a beer was consumed in recognition of the great victory. In the battle of man versus nature score one for man.
I was rudely awakened at 5:18am the next morning by what I believe was the robin tapping out "score one for nature" in Morse code. I looked out and saw the robin flying from the trellis, to the head of the owl, and then on to deliver a particularly harsh beak bash to the window, then the infernal creature alighted on the head of the owl, gathered his breath and renewed the attack. Nice. Apparently robins aren't the least bit afraid of plastic owls from Canadian Tire. I smacked my hand against the window and scared the damn bird away, I also managed to scare the crap out of my wife in the process - in war it's always the innocents who suffer. And, the war was now on.
No 8-ounce creature was going to make a fool of me and my owl! Stupid useless owl. The morning went much like all the previous with the robin attacking at random intervals and us waking up to scream invective. Four days running, not enough sleep. (In reality this was excellent training for being the parents of a newborn but that was still years off and you often don't really appreciate lessons while you're receiving them. ) Thus far doing nothing had failed to stop the robin.
The owl was a dismal failure - in fact it made the problem worse as it gave the little tweeter a place to rest and allowed for more frequent and vehement attacks. What next? And still the more puzzling question was why the robin insisted in beating his face against our house. At this point we were convinced that he was utterly retarded, possibly from brain damage sustained while smashing his head against other immovable objects. I decided that hanging stuff in front of the window might prevent him from flying in, sort of the same theory as the barrage balloons that Allied ships towed during the WWII Normandy invasion. As barrage balloons are in short supply these days I settled on a rake, a shovel, a hoe and the hockey stick - after removing it from the anus of the plastic owl.
I hung them from the trellis setting up quite an obstacle course for Mr Smashy Face, carefully not creating a perch along the way. We were positively bleary eyed and grumpy when we rolled into bed with a few grunts hoping that the solution had been found and that the score would be leveled at Man 1 Nature 1, after all a tie isn't a loss. The night went well and then with the rising of the sun, robin swoops in, he deaks right, he deaks left, he SCORES! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!
And the score stands at Nature 2 Man 0. There may have been some crying at this point. I then stumbled outside and, okay not a proud day in my life in terms of rationality, unleashed a torrent of verbal abuse at the robin. I'm sure many of my neighbors were awakened by this childish outburst and I would have apologized if called on it but at the time is seemed like a reasonable thing to do. My wife disagreed on principal but I think she got some vicarious satisfaction out of it. In the moment of post eruption quiet, when all of the plants in the garden were feeling slightly embarrassed for me, I had an epiphany.
Okay epiphany is probably too strong a word; I had a thought. "You can't hit what you can't see" (Something my father told my in the context of baseball after noticing I tended to squeeze my eyes shut just before the bat should have contacted the bat. You'll note "the should have contacted the ball" as my eyes closing generally had a deleterious effect on my batting average, go figure. ) Anyway, if I could just get the bird to close its eyes then it couldn't very well make contact with my house. Maybe I could get the bird to wear those welding goggles. Or, sort of in the realm of the possible, how about I cover up the window with something.
I pondered this for a moment and remembered that I live in B.C. and like to camp, which means that I must own a big blue tarp that measures 40' x 30'. (How do you know it's a long weekend in B.C.? You're getting soaked camping in the rain. ) So, I headed down into the crawlspace and dragged the camping gear out a few months early. Then I grabbed some nails and a hammer and affixed a 1200 square foot tarp to an 80 square foot sliding glass door.
Needless to say the neighbors that didn't wake up for me screaming at the bird woke up either when I started hammering nails into the side of the house or when I attempted to flatten my thumb. Mission accomplished, the back of the house was now a tragic eyesore, the garden and the window completely obscured by a tarp that was threatening to become "The Tarp That Ate Vancouver". I dragged my sorry ass back inside, threw the hammer in the bathroom (yeah, I don't know why either) and the flopped back into bed. The room glowed an eerie blue but it was still before 6am so I didn't give a crap. Nighty, night. I woke up at 7:40 when the alarm went off.
The next day I also woke up at 7:40. The day after, you guessed it 7:40am. After a few weeks of explaining the big ass tarp to visitors and neighbors alike, I removed it, not without some trepidation. But, our little feathered friend had either moved on, given up, or finally succeeded in braining himself and didn't return to ruin any more early mornings. Sadly, the saga continues. Flash forward 360 days, more or less.
Lying in bed. Warm, asleep, comfortable, dreaming, it's all good. WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! "Hunh!
" The hamster was much quicker to figure it out this year, "OH NO! Not again! " Then it took him a few moments to remember the solution...something about an owl? No, the owl was now at work busily serving as a mascot for a doomed project. Something about a stick? Nope.
Tarp! Tarp, yes, get the tarp. So, I got up and re-affixed the tarp, luckily I'd had the foresight to leave the nails in place last spring so it was ready to hang. Then, back to bed. A few years later I was retelling this story to a friend at a new job, after the doomed project finally ran its course and cost us all our jobs. I happened to have Google open in front of me so I punched in "spring robin window" and discovered that I'm not the only person to have had this experience.
Apparently robins all over North America are pulling off this stunt and the only way to stop it is, as I discovered by trial and error, to cover up the window. I thought the best way to explain this phenomenon would be from the point of view of the robin so here goes. The Spring world according to male robins: It's spring. I need a female (we'll call them robinettes). Robinettes only like robins that have big territories. I have a big territory.
I'll just sing for a bit and let all the females know where I am. What a stud I am. Tweet, tweet. Come here you saucy robinettes, I am the robin for you. Tweet, tweet. Now I'll just fly around a little and show them my stuff.
Oh yeah, I am an inferno of robin loving. Hey, what's that? Over by that house, another male robin? What is he doing in my territory? Is he stupid? Can he not hear my manly robin song?
Why has he not flown off to his own territory? This is vexing. I will now strut around aggressively so he can see I am not to be trifled with. What is this? He is also strutting around. I will now sing the "go away you twit" song.
Oh my, he is also singing! I must deal with this impertinent interloper. I will fly at him and drive him away. I'm flying at him and the imbecile is flying at me! I will swerve right. He is also swerving right, the cad!
Now I will dive right into his face and he will surely fly away and leave me to mate with all the honeys. WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! Ouch! Damn!
The jerk flew right into my head! Ow! I'm going to go back and sing some more and see if he'll go away. He won't go away! How am I going to be able to make sweet, sweet love with all the robinettes if he won't go away? I must attack again...Ow!
And again...Ouch, ouch, OW! And now back to our story. So, it turns out the robin wasn't the complete moron that I thought he was, he just didn't realize that the robin in the window/mirror was him. Okay, that is kind of stupid but robins have been evolving for many thousands of years and windows are a relatively recent invention. And really it was stupidity caused by horniness and who can't relate to that. The next spring I made a pre-emptive strike and covered the window the first of March. 
