“Caw, caw, caw.” I haven’t heard that sound for a while.
“Oh look, Lucy,” I said to my adorable little puppy, my 10-pound Shiba-Chi (Shiba Inu Chihuahua) rescue, who is actually about 11 years old but will always be a puppy to me.
“It’s a crow. We haven’t seen many of those lately.”
Well, Lucy wasn’t a bit interested. After all, it wasn’t a bunny or one of those many cute little lizards we have around here, or her very favorite, squirrels. Darn those squirrels. If you have a dog, you know exactly what I mean.
Poor crows. They’re kind of ugly, at least in my eyes. Maybe that’s because I was fortunate enough to live in the suburbs of Canberra, Australia, in the 1980s, and there were absolutely beautiful birds flying free like our crows.
There were galahs (rose-breasted and gray cockatoos), lorikeets, parrots and very colorful wrens. It was kind of like living in an aviary. I loved my walks because of these beautiful birds.
One day, when I was out walking, I felt something hit my head. Teenagers, I thought. Probably throwing their trash (wadded up paper or a paper cup or such) from a passing car at the poor, unsuspecting and completely oblivious pedestrian. Yikes, it happened again. Hey! There can’t be two cars with rogue teenagers in them!
It was then that I looked up and noticed a sign that cautioned all to “Beware of magpies” or something like that. And then I noticed a black and white bird zeroing in on my head, like a kamikaze pilot.
But unlike kamikaze pilots, those magpies were not suicidal. They were anything but, because they were about to have babies. They had a lot to look forward to in life. This was their nesting time, and they didn’t want us big old humans anywhere near them.
So anyhoo, there I was running down the street trying to get into parked cars with magpies in pursuit. I was quite unsuccessful because the cars were all locked.
What the heck! Haven’t all those Aussies been telling me how safe it was to live there? That it wasn’t like the Wild West of America?
Well, I probably wasn’t running that far because those magpies wouldn’t leave their nests unguarded for too long – or too far – but it sure seemed like it. Sort of reminiscent of Hitchcock’s “The Birds.”
Oh no … the birds … Tippi Hedren … poor Tippi Hedren … Run! Run! Run! … They’re coming for you.
Diane Duray is a Laguna Woods Village resident. Contact her at dduray47@gmail.com.
