Attack of the pain-in-the-glass cardinal
In his iconic poem, “The Raven,” Edgar Alan Poe laments that “While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping. As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.” After a few stanzas of conjecture as to the identity of the rapper, Poe reveals that the source of the rapping and tapping is, indeed, an enigmatic raven on a cryptic mission to disrupt the narrator’s life.
So last week I found Poe’s words more than a little haunting when I, too, was awakened in a similar fashion last week. In my instance “suddenly there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping” not at my chamber door but at my bedroom window. The clatter commenced at dawn each morning for over a week and wouldn’t stop until I got up and ambled over to the window.
My appearance alarmed the perpetrator, not a raven but another species of bird -namely a female cardinal. She immediately flew off at my approach but returned shortly thereafter to reengage her attack on the window. Her fluttering aerobatics carried her up and down, back and forth, all across the window glass, repeatedly chasing her reflection top to bottom and end to end as her reflected image battled back with equal resolve.
After all, this was Lady Cardinal’s chosen nesting site and intruders, both real and imagined, were not to be tolerated. Nonsensically, the foolish,
feathery conflict went on for days. This bird’s territorial persistence was remarkable as she battled the presumed interloper for hours on end, not only at the bedroom window but, later in the day, at a garage window at the side of the house as well. Maybe the changing angle of sunlight had something to do with that, at some point shifting stronger reflective properties from the morning’s bedroom window to the afternoon’s garage window.
One thing these window battlegrounds have in common is the presence of evergreens planted a little too close to the house twenty years ago. A few branches actually brush up against both windows, giving the cardinal a resting place to take a quick respite between rounds. At some point, I assumed, the bird would finally realize that the image in the window was not a threat, the frenzied skirmishes would cease, and nesting season would settle back down into incubating eggs and hatching chicks.
Of course, large picture windows like the ones that adorn our country home can pose a deadly hazard to inattentive birds. The bird feeders on our back deck may entice songbirds to collide with our kitchen windows. Fortunately, the sounds of our feathered friends bouncing off our casements and bays is fairly rare. When I hear the thud of bird on pane, I, of course, go out and investigate. More often than not I’ll find a junco, finch, or sparrow staggered by the impact, dazed but not dead, and destined to make a full recovery. The louder the thud, the more likely I’ll find the victim.
Unfortunately, sometimes the impact is too severe for the bird to survive. A number of years ago the sound of two successive collisions into our front windows drew my undivided attention. My investigation revealed two beautiful (but freshly deceased) male indigo buntings lying a few feet apart on our front deck. There’s no bird feeder there and what had caused their mutual miscalculation remained a mystery. Maybe they were fleeing the talons of a sharp shinned hawk or some other winged predator. I’ll never know, but what makes it more tragic is the fact that those are the only indigo buntings I’ve ever seen around our house in the two decades we’ve lived here.
Happily, attacks on windows and mirrors by cardinals and other territorial birds seldom result in fatalities. The combatants eventually lose interest or accept that their reflected image is harmless. Unfortunately there are some exceptions to this depending on extenuating circumstances. The distracted avian could be more vulnerable to predators or moving vehicles.
One example of this occurred some thirty years ago when we lived in West Bradford. It also involved a cardinal, this time a male. The bird persisted in attacking the rearview mirror on the driver’s side of our Toyota Tercel. Whenever we went out to the driveway, there he was, fluttering around the car’s mirror while pecking at his own image. It was spring nesting season, of course, and this male was doing what nesting cardinals do -- defending his turf. Regrettably, this fracas would not end well for the cardinal. One morning I walked out to the car and was surprised not to find him hovering around, as had become his daily routine.
Days passed and he failed to ever reappear. I eventually discovered the reason when I happened to notice something bright and red lying on the Toyota’s back seat: Mr. Cardinal’s lifeless body. He had somehow slipped through the partially open car window and gotten trapped inside. I’m unable to cite the precise cause of death having never notified the cardinal coroner.
Of course northern cardinals aren’t the only breed of territorial bird that will attack their reflected images. Robins are also well known for it and, to a lesser extent, so are mockingbirds and goldfinches. We have plenty of nesting boxes on our five acre Northbrook property. While some are vacant, we currently have chickadees, nuthatches, tree swallows, screech owls, wood ducks, and Carolina wrens inhabiting these bird houses. In any case, I’ve never noticed any of these species smacking up against mirrors or windowpanes while chasing their own reflections.
As for avian species who think outside the (nesting) box, we’ll likely have a few robin nests built on the pine limbs and ledges around the house and a phoebe (flycatcher) nest under the back deck. No doubt the cardinal nest is out there somewhere or, perhaps, still under construction. In any case, it’s been two weeks now and the crazy cardinal is still at the window.
But as for the raven? Nevermore.
TROUT STOCKINGS SCHEDULED
Our area’s trout streams slated to get fresh trout this week include Berks County’s Mantawny Creek (4/26), Northkill Creek (4/26), and Perkiomen Creek (4/24); Chester County’s Beaver Creek (4/24), French Creek (4/25), Middle Branch White Clay Creek (4/23), and White Clay Creek (4/23); and Montgomery County’s East Branch Perkiomen Creek (4/24), Manatawny Creek (4/26), Perkiomen Creek (4/24), Skippack Creek (4/23) and Pennypack Creek (4/26).