Bird

One spring in Ann Arbor I was attacked by a bird while running. I was on a dirt road near the Huron River when I heard the sound of fluttering wings above me, and I thought nothing of it until suddenly the bird swooped down and grabbed my ponytail holder with its talons. I shrieked and swatted at the air and the bird flew away, but he stayed with me for another hundred yards or so. I could see his shadow on the ground and hear his wings beating. This was a terrifying experience.

I don't really like birds much, except at great distances or behind glass at a zoo. And the trend at zoos seems to be to let the birds fly loose around the humans in bird houses, instead of behind glass cages. This is a wonderful development for the birds, I'm sure, and I'm happy for them. But it kind of creeps me out.

This is not a lifelong disaffinity. At some point in my life, I had nothing at all against birds. In fact, one of the first complete stories I ever wrote involved a small bird who had been stricken blind in a freak lightening accident shortly after birth and later sacrificed his life to save the little girl who had once saved him from the ashes of the lightening-felled tree. If you were ever a young storyteller yourself, you know that child writers seldom put an animal through such terrible ordeals without a sense of the creature's ultimate goodness and nobility.

Somewhere along the way I lost this sense of the goodness and nobility of birds. I don't think it was a single experience, but an accumulation. There were the babysitting charges with the pet bird who molted and smelled and whistled the Andy Griffeth theme song ad nauseum unless you covered its cage with a sheet. And there were the fat, rodent-like pigeons in New York City that left the only blight on my impressions of my first visit. And there was the bush in Ann Arbor that, each spring, became the cacophonous nesting place of dozens and dozens (and it sounded like hundreds) of chirping sparrows.

Yesterday I was out for my morning run when a medium-sized-ish black bird swooped down over my head a little too close for comfort and perched in a tree on the right side of the street. My Ann Arbor divebombing bird experience, though never repeated, has left me a little skittish about any juxtaposition of bird encounters and running, and so I inadvertently ducked my head, and then shook it off. Not the bird. The feeling that the bird would attack my ponytail.

Until the bird swooped down again and perched on a new tree on the left side of the street.

By the third swoop, I was sure it wasn't coincidence. I don't know if it was malicious or playful, but the bird followed me for two full blocks, swooping from one side of the street to the other, cawing or chirping or doing whatever that kind of bird does (my bird sounds vocabulary is a bit limited) the whole time, and it was more than a little unnerving.

And then this morning, running along University Avenue, it happened again! Except this time there were no trees on the right, just on the left, so the bird would come rushing above my head, then veer back to the left and alight on a power line. Swoop, veer, repeat. With so many cars passing by, I tried to maintain my composure, and to tell myself that yesterday's bird had eventually gotten bored and stopped, and hadn't ever grabbed my ponytail holder. And just as I was telling myself this, the bird came straight for my ear. He never touched me, but he was close enough that I could feel his wings beating the air. And then he did it again. And then another bird appeared, and I ducked into a subdivision just on time to save myself from the onslaught.

Two mornings in a row, in two different locations, is a little eerie. I kind of dread what tomorrow might bring.