Photo by Fuzail Ahmad on Pexels.com
I have been having some run-ins with animals lately. It’s starting to become unnerving. Over the next few days, I would like to share with you some of the intense experiences I have been having with animals over the past few weeks.
Pigeon Story
The pigeon story happened on a Friday about two weeks ago. It was the day that we left for our last camping trip of the summer before the school year started. I was trying to be more organized than I usually am because I have been a bit of a slacker when it comes to camping preparation this summer. I was trying to be proactive and I was working on putting camping supplies on the porch before my husband got home from his planned half-day at work. I had some tasks ahead of me including picking up a Target order, putting gas in our car, and buying ice at the gas station.
I had just gotten the cooler we would take camping out of the basement and moved it to our front porch, where I stopped on the way to my vehicle . I was engrossed in what I was doing and I was not paying very much attention until I noticed that a bird landed on the railing of the front porch and I was hanging out at a distance that I perceived as too close to me.
That is to say, I am afraid of birds and our front porch is not large so any distance a bird could be away from me on the front porch would be too close for me. I made a loud screaming noise to make the bird understand that I wanted it to go away. I might even have yelled “Go away” but it seems the bird did not get the memo about me being afraid of birds and it did not go away.
Because my yelling/ screaming tactic did not work I now evacuated the porch.
I ran to my car with the cooler and my purse and opened my trunk to put the cooler inside. My young sons must have been on the porch with me when this all happened because they seemed to be with me when I got the car. I think at this point I told them to get into the car.
Then something unprecedented happened.
The bird followed me in the air and landed on the roof of my car, not far from the back of my stationwagon’s hatch where the cooler was and where I now put my body. I cowered inside in fear. I am almost certain I yelled at the bird, “GO AWAY”. It didn’t go away.
So then I did what any rational person would do and I pulled the hatch of my car down around me and told the boys very firmly to get into the car and close their doors because up until this point they were watching me in interest I think and weren’t understanding the stress of the situation. I am pretty sure that I was crying by this time.
Bravely, I knew I had to make sure the boys were safe, so once the bird flew off the car, I opened the hatch of my stationwagon and exited the car. I quickly got out of the trunk and ran to the driver’s seat. I hadn’t been planning to make the trip to Target to pick up my online order quite at that moment, but after that ordeal, I didn’t think I could allow myself to put more items on the front porch without a cool down period. So we left the house for a while. I was still worked up five miles later when we reached Target. Eventually, I texted my husband to tell him my crazy story and ask him when he would be coming home. I ended up arriving back at our house before he returned but luckily I had calmed down enough by then and the bird was nowhere in sight that I felt it was safe to return to our front entrance on the porch.
Not long after my husband returned home, my elderly neighbor across the street saw me and my family and told me that she saw me screaming at a bird. I would have been embarrassed but then she told us an even crazier story about how not long after she saw me, the same bird landed on her daughter’s front stoop, one street away, and when it wouldn’t leave she opened her door to go inside and the bird tried to get inside her house. Then she took a picture of the bird attacking her screen trying to get inside.
After hearing that, I stopped feeling so crazy about my little incident. Eventually, in the hours after the incident I googled “Bird visiting you” on the internet and I learned that some people believe that bird visits are symbolic of a change or a message that will be coming.
It is funny too because I told my next door neighbor, who is a nature lover and a little kookie, about the bird incident the following Monday and she told me the same thing.
I do not know if I believe that, but lately I have been having some strange run-ins with wildlife so maybe there is some message that nature is trying to tell me.
Stay tuned for more nature stories.
Cheers,
Katie
