If life is for the birds, who is it against?
Hello, Starling by Tom Hoisington
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The starlings had started to
irritate me even before they began their aggression against me. It was spring
and the males were making nests to attract females; this made them defensive.
They’d team up on hawks and eagles, chasing them in behavior an ornithologist
would call “mobbing.”
I’ve always loved raptors. While an
undergraduate in Eugene, Ore., I used to get stoned or drop acid and walk
around the Cascade Raptor Center, having long conversations with bald eagles
too injured to be re-released into the wild or California condors convalescing
until they could be safely reintroduced.
Seeing these glorified pigeons team
up to bully such beautiful creatures pissed me off. The hawks and eagles must
have been full already, or else they’d have turned around and snatched a
starling out of the sky to make a quick meal of it.
The breaking point came when, after
two weeks of watching this go on from the comfort of my car, I wrecked it
driving home from the Westside Station Bar & Grill. The DUI that went with
it, not my first, meant that I now had to walk the two miles to the bar if I
wanted a drink with company, and then another quarter mile after that if I
wanted to get to the liquor store for what I’d need at home.
The starlings, having sensed my
contempt as I drove past them, took this opportunity to stop defending their
nests from hawks and start defending them from me. As I approached the spot where they built their nests, I’d hear
their screeches and call out, “I don’t care about your fucking nests! I’m
walking to the bar!” Then the dive bombing would start.
I’d seen this kind of behavior
before. In high school I’d run along the deserted roads surrounding my
one-horse hometown as part of my weight-cutting routine for wrestling.
Starlings would build nests on power poles and get aggravated when I came near.
First the screeching, then the dive bombing. I was in a bad mood back then,
too, although it was from the sauna suit on top of my sweats rather than from
shakes and withdrawal symptoms.
After a week of walking past them,
I was pretty fed up with the starlings. One day I woke up, had the vodka that
was left in the house to stop my hands’ shaking, and headed to Westside
Station.
The starlings were waiting for me.
This time I got one who was especially persistent. He followed me for about two
blocks, chirping and dive bombing. I saw people in their cars pointing and
laughing as I flailed my arms to protect my face and neck.
I stewed over it while sipping
drinks at Westside Station, then made my way to the liquor store. On the way
home, I got mobbed again, now with only one hand free to defend myself,
clutching my half gallon of vodka in the other.
I arrived home and poured myself a
drink, plopped into my chair, and felt my brain relax. I thought about the
beauty of the raptors and the small, self-interested pettiness of the
starlings. I thought of the people in the cars making light of a man just
trying to perform his tasks for the day.
I finished the drink, went into the
bedroom and dug a duffel bag out of the closet. It was green and had my late
uncle’s name stenciled on it. The name, along with the eagle and anchor
stenciled below it, were fading. It had several smaller cloth bags inside it. I
took out the smallest one, poured two drinks into my thermos, and walked back
down to the poles where the starlings made their nests.
*
After I sat down on the bus station
bench and remained motionless for a while, the starlings accepted my presence
and stopped pestering me. I drank from the thermos lid as they made
half-hearted passes at bicyclists.
The people passing by in their cars
continued to irritate me, although they were all ignoring me now. Moms in
minivans with kids. Who needs three
fucking kids?
I had been angry when I walked to
the bus stop, but now the waste of it all just exhausted me. I drained the rest
of my drink and prepared to trudge home.
However, as I stood up, the
especially aggressive starling from earlier that morning began to pester me. He
circled around my head, chirping, going up and down, back and forth. Drivers
and passengers again began to notice and point and laugh. My ire rose anew.
Fuck it, I thought. Enough.
I reached into the cloth bag and
drew out my uncle’s old .410 shotgun. I exposed the breech and slid in two
ancient shells, praying they would still work.
The starling dove again, but this
time I did not flinch. I tracked him as he came in and waited for him to fly
away. He seemed confused by my lack of flailing this time, and so flew away
more slowly. This made him easier to track and blow out of the sky.
Which I did.
A .410 is not a large bore, but a
starling is not a large bird. There wasn’t much left of him when I walked over
to poke him with the barrel of the gun. He had become a lump of bone and gristle,
no longer hell-bent on protecting everything so dearly his.
“Look at you now,” I said, and spat
vodka-saturated saliva on his body.
I realized that motorists were
still looking at me, but now with very different expressions. Some had pulled
over and were filming me with their cell phones. I waved to those people.
I had two barrels, and had already
loaded both. It seemed a waste to just unchamber the other. With traffic
stopped anyway, I hustled across the street. On reaching the other side, I took
aim at the high part of the pole where the now-dead starling had built his
nest, where his mate was tending their eggs.
I fired on that, too.
The body of the mate fell, along
with shards of starling egg and their gooey contents. Wood chips and shrapnel showered
down from the crater I had blown in the top of the pole. I lowered my head and
covered my face with my forearm, not wanting to get anything jagged in my eyes.
