Once upon a morning eerie, while we slept still weak and weary,
Under covers, asleep, the silence unbroken by even a snore,
While we lay there, clearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one loudly rapping, rapping at our mud room door…
It was around 6 a.m. on Saturday morning when we heard a tapping coming from the mud room downstairs. Faithful Reader grabbed his weapon of choice, a small keepsake PawSox bat, and crept down the stairs to surprise our intruder, whoever or whatever it might turn out to be. When he came back upstairs, he mumbled something about fluttering wings and went back to sleep.
Around 8 a.m., I was awakened again by the same noise. I sneaked downstairs and slowly opened the mud room door. There was no one there. I was looking directly out the back-door window when all of the sudden a robin fluttered up and rat-a-tat-tatted on the glass, only to disappear again seconds later. As I stood there wondering if I had really seen a robin knocking on the door, he did again. And then again. I went to the door and peered outside, and there was the robin sitting on a pile of wood, looking perfectly innocent. He saw me and flew away, but he had left evidence behind. There were smudgy beak marks all over the window and poops aplenty on the wood pile.
We probably would already have forgotten about this Hitchcockian episode were it not for our running robin joke. You see, Faithful Reader has been insisting for weeks that the robins are watching him. They hang around our house all the time, and if they notice that you’re watching them, they stare right back at you. It is strangely unnerving to gawked at by birds. Now that the robins have gone from surveillance to harassment, Faithful Reader must be wondering, will it escalate?
Quoth the robin, “This is war.”