well, I got my second Pfizer shot yesterday, and as I suspected, my body is having a total hissy fit about being confronted AGAIN with what it thought it had taken care of. Fever, chills for hours last night, dizzy and a bit nauseated this morning. So I am using one of the spares that Peeps have so graciously supplied in the queue. Thank you, maryalycea!
Here are few not-too-onerous PWB rules
- Do not “Troll” the Pootie Peeps Diaries. If you don’t like animal diaries, there’s no need to tell us about it. Just go find some other diary more to your liking.
- Whatever happens in the outer blog STAYS in the outer blog. This is a place to relax and play; please treat it accordingly.
- If you would like a pic from the comment threads, please ask the poster. He/she may have a copyright to those pics. Many thanks!
- There are some pics we never post: snakes, creepy crawlies, any and all photos that depict or encourage human cruelty toward animals. These are considered “out of bounds” and will not be tolerated.
- If you’re not sure about an issue...please ask. Someone is always glad to help.
Previous Neighborhood Stories
Jack’s Pet
Larsson Helps Out
The Golden Goose
The Diet Contest
A Halloween Story
The Great Bird Feeder War
We Gather Together
That Monday in summer Kemp backed out of the drive as usual, and, as usual, headed the car past Harry’s drive toward the corner. That was when he saw the first pigeon.
It was in the street, about even with the middle of Kemp’s hood, and headed on foot toward Harry’s drive. It was taking its time. While Kemp was watching, another pigeon landed behind the first one and started walking in the same direction. It was just as slow as the first one. Then a couple more landed and then even a few more. They didn’t seem to be coming from any particular direction. They were just dropping out of the sky. They went walking single file with their heads bobbing up and down like the ones on bobble-head dolls. The bobbling kind of explained why they were walking. You can’t think much when your brain keeps getting shook up, Kemp thought. He’d had no idea pigeons were that slow on foot either.
“Come on, move it!” he said.” Sheesh! I’m gonna catch every red light there is going downtown!” The pigeons looked straight ahead and kept on walking. The first ones were moving up Harry’s drive by now, but there were still more landing. Kemp tapped his horn.
It looked to him as though the pigeons hadn’t heard it, but Mrs. Transom was out of her front door in a flash. Since her house was right across from Harry’s, she was up to Kemp’s car door in about one more flash.
“Can’t you keep that noise down?” she said. “Some people like to hear themselves think!”
Kemp was of the opinion that Mrs. Transom could have had ears like a bat’s and not heard herself think, there being not all that much to hear, but he figured he’d keep that private for now, so he just rolled up the car window. By then most of the pigeons had reached Harry’s drive, so Kemp drove on. It the rear-view window he could see Mrs. Transom waving her arms at him and the pigeons launching themselves from the drive onto Harry’s roof.
Tuesday there were half a dozen pigeons in front of Kemp’s car. Wednesday there were four, and Thursday there was just one. Friday there weren’t any, so Kemp figured those last ones had been just the stragglers and there wouldn’t be any more, which was a good thing. There was already a flock on top of Harry’s roof, and Harry wasn’t going to be too happy about that.
Sure enough, that Saturday Harry started to complain.
“Bleepin’ things are wrecking my roof,” he said. “This calls for extreme measures.”
Kemp didn’t know what that meant, so he just tried to look sympathetic. A few days later he had a half day off, and when he got home he saw a van on Harry’s driveway with a sign painted on the side of it. The sign said Rent-a-Raptor. The doors in the back of the van were open and there was someone working inside. For no reason he could think of Kemp had been wondering if extreme measures meant nets and traps, and this just didn’t fit, so he went over to ask about it. Harry was still at work, but Ellie was home.
“It was Harry’s idea,” she said. She pointed to the van. “I don’t like it one bit. “
When Kemp looked again, there was a guy getting out of the back wearing a long heavy leather glove that covered his left hand and arm up to the elbow. Perched on the glove was a red-tailed hawk.
“You see?” Ellie said. “There’s gonna be carnage here.”
The guy with the hawk grinned. “If you mean Rufus here is efficient,” he said, “you’re right.” Kemp could believe it. That hawk had one heck of a gleam in his eye. Hope that guy has control, he thought. Then he noticed that the hawk wasn’t tethered.
“You just sic him on the pigeons?” Kemp said.
“That’s right,” the guy said.
Kemp gulped. “Big, isn’t he.” he said.
“Yep,” the guy said. “Got a big appetite too. And he works fast.” He threw his left arm up and Rufus gave a scream and took off toward the roof of the house. The guy watched for a minute, still grinning. Then he turned back to the van.
“Well, Ma’am,” he said. “You just call again when your problem’s gone and Rufus and me will be on our way.”
Ellie scooted back into the house. Kemp decided he didn’t want to watch either and went home.
That Saturday Kemp and Mitzie were in the kitchen admiring their new goldfinch-yellow paint when the phone rang. It was Harry.
“Kemp, can you come get me down?” Harry said. “I’m up on my roof.”
“Right,” Kemp said. “So how are you calling me?”
“Ah—on my cell phone,” Harry said.
“Oh,” Kemp said. “That the cell phone your kids gave you that you told ‘em you didn’t need?”
“Never mind,” Harry said. “Just come and get me down, huh? The ladder fell over.”
Kemp managed to hang up before he started laughing.
“That was nice of you, Kemp,” said Mitzie. “You’re a person of tact.”
Once Harry was on the ground again, Kemp looked up at the roof. Perched along the center line were four black-plastic owls the size of a Great Horned. The last one in the row was maybe forty degrees off of vertical.
“Rent-a-Raptor didn’t quite work out,” said Harry.
“Surprise,” said Kemp. Then he remembered Mitzie saying it was no use to get sarcastic with Harry. Sure enough, Harry just looked blank.
“The idea was,” said Harry, “that the hawk is trained to eat all the pigeons and then just wait to get picked up. It actually did eat a couple of ‘em, but Ellie saw the feathers in her rhubarb patch, and well—you can imagine. “
Kemp could. “I never could stand rhubarb myself,” he said. “Takes the skin off the roof of my mouth.”
“I told her hawks don’t eat rhubarb,” Harry said, “but she swore it would eat all her feeder birds and then start landing on our heads, so I had to get the owner to take it back.”
“How the heck did he do that if the pigeons weren’t gone?” Kemp said.
“Big honking cage baited with rat,” Harry said. “Anyway, problem solved. A guy at the plant told me these owls will scare ‘em good. He said they worked like a charm for him.”
“Well, good luck with that,” said Kemp. “But you don’t think they look a little weird?”
“Heck,” Harry said. “I can just tell people I got the drop on Halloween.“
That night Kemp called Harry. “All those dratted pigeons are over here now,” he said.
“You need some owls,” Harry said.
That weekend Kemp put owls on his own roof. Harry said, “Told you the owls would work. Now they’re landing on Horace and Frieda’s roof.”
Kemp looked. Actually they were flying over in a wave. He hoped Horace and Frieda wouldn’t guess why. But Horace was pretty quick getting some owls up himself, so it didn’t really matter. The new people on the other side of Horace got some owls after the police cited them for firing a shotgun in the city. Horace said he heard that actually the judge had been pretty sympathetic because of what some pigeons had done to his car, but the law is the law. One or two folks up the block tried blasting the pigeons with John Cage tapes, but they came up against the noise ordinance. The ten o’ clock news had a whole fifteen seconds about the spike in sales of plastic owls.
One Monday morning Kemp was about to leave for work when Mitzie reminded him that it was probably his turn to bring donuts, since he’d been eating other people’s for months. “You better go to the supermarket on your way,” she said.
So Kemp backed out of the driveway as usual but he turned toward the opposite end of the block, and right away he saw something was wrong.
In front of the end house on his side of the block was a pigeon, just standing on the curb and looking around. Kemp drove up dead slow. The pigeon stayed put. It seemed to be looking up at the end house across the street. A couple more pigeons dropped down next to it, then three or four more, and then they started coming down in clouds. Kemp had no idea how many there were. But a few minutes they stopped landing and just all mobbed together in the street, looking up at that house. Then the whole squadron lifted off and headed for the roof of the house they’d been staring at. Now that, Kemp thought, is possibly a bit spooky.
Sunday there were owls on top of that house. As Kemp drove by on Monday, he saw what looked like a dark cloud settling on the house next door to it.
By the end of August every house on Kemp’s side of the block and almost every one across the street had owls. Some of the houses had some new shingles too. Mrs. Transom’s was the only house that didn’t have any owls.
The next Saturday morning Kemp was raking leaves when he heard the yelling from Harry’s yard and went over to check. Mrs. Transom was there, jumping and waving. Harry was standing with his back up against the garage. He was holding a rake out in front of him, but he didn’t look like he knew what to do with it. Ellie was peeking out between the curtains inside the kitchen window. Kemp tried to back off, but Mrs. Transom had spotted him.
“You!” she said. “You were directing those pigeons!”
“Whoa,” said Kemp. “All I did was watch ‘em. Besides, they’re just moving away from the owls.”
“Right into my yard!” said Mrs. Transom. “And now they’re all on my roof. I hear them cooing and
scratching at night. Every day I have to hose down the walk.”
“Hey, it hasn’t even been a week,” said Harry.
Mrs. Transom glared. “My husband says — “
“You got him to come back?” Kemp said, before he could stop himself. Mrs. Transom glared again. “My husband says they’re a health hazard.”
And he should know one of those when he sees one, Kemp thought; he’s got a big enough one right in the living room. But all he said was, “Then they’re probably the city’s problem.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw Harry ducking into the house, so he beat it back home before she could think of an answer.
When Kemp got home on Monday Mitzie told him there had been a car around that afternoon with a city seal on the door, and it was going up and down the block. The guy in the car had stopped at each house and looked up at the roof.
“He didn’t ring any door bells?” said Kemp.
“No,” said Mitzie, “but I think Cora went out and talked to him. I’ll call her.”
Cora said somebody had called the building inspector and complained about the owls. The inspector said they were legal but cross your fingers about lightning. She also said the Humane Society had been there looking at the pigeons on Mrs. Transom’s roof, but they said they couldn’t rescue animals that weren’t in any danger. “Guess they don’t know Mrs. Transom,” Mitzie said.
Tuesday evening Mitzie said, “I wonder if waving things at wildlife puts it in danger.”
“Huh?” said Kemp.
“Take a look at the Transoms’ house,” said Mitzie.
Kemp looked. Mitzie came out with him. While they were looking Harry and Ellie came out too. Mrs. Transom was moving from window to window on the second floor of her house. At each window, she reached out with what looked like a long streamer of cloth, waved it, and slapped it against the upper window frame. Each time she slapped the streamer she yelled, “Shoo!” She shouted some other things too.
“Son of a gun,” Kemp said.
“I would never have pictured her having that kind of nightgown,” Mitzie said. “Or knowing that kind of words.”
“She started with a pair of pajamas,” Ellie said. “But they tore. It was after that he charged out of there with a suitcase and drove away. He was yelling something about only crazy people going up on the roof. Pretty rich comments. Maybe that was how she got the new words.”
Mrs. Transom disappeared from the front window and reappeared at the window in the attic. She waved the nightgown and yelled a few more times.
“I think it’s working though,” said Harry. “You see any pigeons?”
They all looked around. There wasn’t a pigeon in sight. “You’re right,” Mitzie said.
“Well,” Kemp said, “I hope they fly all the way to Madison and land on the Capitol. That’d be some
pro-wildlife demonstration.”
The neighborhood was pretty quiet for the rest of the week. Then on Sunday Mitzie said,” Kemp, what’s that perched on top of the street light?”
Kemp looked. “It’s a seagull,” he said.