This morning, The Beast got very excited. Normally he sits on the mouse mat demanding attention, or sits on my making sure I can’t refuse. During the course of this, he was distracted:
The cause was easy to guess. One of the local sparrows had come for a visit.
The Beast reacted by looking very interested and squeaking a bit. After a few minutes, he got bored and sat down.
The Beast is sensible enough to know that leaping through the doors isn’t a good idea, and the birds know this too. So much so I think some of the tits hop onto the balcony just to laugh at him.
Birds, though, can be rather dumb regarding windows:
Bird flies into window over and over again
(can get the jist without sound, well actually just from the title)
I went to a talk where the guy, Kees Moeliker, who reported the first case of homosexual necrophilia in ducks, showed a short video of a blackbird doing a similar thing. Apparently it keeps coming back to repeat the behaviour as desribed in this transcript.
I haven’t had sparrows do anything that dumb. Before The Beast arrived, I had a squirrel visit a few times. It was a hot summer, so I had the balcony door open all night. One night I was disturbed in my sleep by something, so turned over and heard a “skitter skitter skitter THUMP” as the squirrel escaped and ran into my bedroom door.
I never saw it again.