Adventures At Home

I was supposed to go to Middle Eastern Dance class last night. I really was. I just didn't have the energy or the emotional fortitude to make it - class is challenging for me, and it doesn't always match my learning style, so since I was already worn out and upset from a long and arduous work week, I decided not to push it, and came straight home instead. Thank goodness I did.

I got home early enough that it wasn't quite sunset yet, and while it was still raining halfheartedly, I still took a minute to pause outside and look at my garden. It's really taking off now, and it felt good to take it all in and appreciate what I had made. I glanced over the tangled vines of cucumbers and tomatoes and peas, and the row of zucchini and squash (at least half devoured by rabbits, alas, but such is life), then paused as I checked out the blueberry bushes. My husband had just set up nets around them to keep the birds away, and I thought I saw a leaf fluttering at the bottom of the net. I went to pick up my bag and head into the house, then I saw it again. And none of the other leaves were moving.....

I hustled into my house, informed my better half to grab a pair of scissors while I found my climbing gloves, then ran back out into the yard. Sure enough, a rather angry and bedraggled robin had managed to get caught in the netting. By the sheer mass of plastic strands that he had managed to tangle around himself, he had been thrashing around there for quite some time, and was stressed, soaked from the rain, and running out of fight. I had figured on cutting a strand or two and setting him free, but the mesh was snarled around his neck, wings, legs, and body in a hideous mess that I couldn't even begin to figure out. I cupped him in my hands while my better half just cut an entire window of the netting out, then hustled bird, husband, and the spare bandage scissors from my doctor bag into our downstairs bathroom.

The next half hour was a slow, gradual puzzle of figuring out how to hold an angry, struggling bird in one hand and cut tiny strands of plastic with the other. Husband helped mightily, slowly pulling away the netting one strand at a time, and I did my best to avoid either cutting his feathers with the scissors or sawing across his skin with the taut netting. At one point, once I had managed to free his wings, the robin did manage to get away from me, leading to the glamorous scene of me standing with one foot on the radiator and the other on the commode, trying to coax him off the curtain rod so we could finish freeing his neck, but eventually we managed to free him completely. And, much to our amazement, he was otherwise unharmed. He made it through our less-than-tender ministrations without having a heart attack, and somehow the netting had failed to cut or scrape him at all. Other than some bent and soggy tail feathers, he was.... fine.

I carried him out to the porch and tried to set him down on the railing to rest, but before I could let go all the way he took one last halfhearted peck at my thumb and took to the air, flying across the street to my neighbor's lawn. Alas, I've already seen him back in our yard, eyeing the berries again, but at least he's alive to try that stupidity again.

Needless to say, the current garden project for the very next non-miserable day is 'figure out how to anchor netting so that stupid robins can't try to sneak under it.' I feel like a heel for having such a horrid bird trap in my yard. Even so, as sad as it was to come home to find a live bird trapped in our berry bush, it would have been so much worse to find him the next morning.....