Battle Zone May 2009

Our house is under attack. It started a week or two ago with a friendly little tapping at our window. We all thought it was quaint. A bright-red pointy-crested cardinal was tapping his beak on our front picture window. Amazed, we all gathered round to watch, and sure enough he returned to land on the closest branch of the tree out front, and then flutter right up to the window and give it a tap, tap, tap with his beak.
But it didn’t stop at breakfast. In fact, he continued to gather momentum and as the day progressed, his tapping became more of a head banging and his wing flutters more of a thrashing against the window. I realized he was seeing himself in the window and I felt bad for him spending all that energy on his own reflection. So I put the fall scarecrow decoration against the front picture window to scare him away.
It worked for a day or two. But then, his little rapping noises came back. Blatantly ignoring the scarecrow, he moved just one window over. So I hung a shiny metallic-blue streamer next to the scarecrow.
The next morning my son called in from watching TV and said, “Mom, that cardinal is tapping on the sliding door out back!”
From there he discovered the upstairs windows in the front and back of the house.
For weeks now he’s been at it, banging his head on every window of our home from dawn til dusk, relentless. The bird experts say he’s likely to continue this behavior during nesting season and even until the young leave the nest because he’s feeling territorial.
Then it occurs to me, maybe these won’t be his first eggs. Maybe he and his cardinal bride raised a family last year too, laboring to build a home, carefully nurturing the chicks out of infancy, working day and night to keep them fed and dry and warm, building their confidence to stretch their own wings and eventually leave the nest.
Just think if we humans had to go through this parenting process annually. Doesn’t the very thought make you instinctively raise your hands to your head to massage your temples? Doesn’t parenthood make all of us crazy enough from time to time to bang our heads against our own reflection in the futile attempt to make sense of it all.
It seems I have more in common with my accidental comrade than I thought. Now, in the morning I drink my coffee by the window where he’s flinging himself. I’ve given up trying to discourage him. Instead, I encourage him to have patience, that this too will pass, and I try to accept and absorb a tiny bit of the mental fortitude and resolve I see in this delicate little warrior headed down life’s journey through parenthood, just doing the best he can.