Alfred may have been right..."The Birds"

William Wagner · medicine forum Guru Joined: 29 Apr 2005 Posts: 809

Weird stuff that could raise your BP.

Posted over in Rec.Birds by Jimoran

Bill

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from the June 10, 2005 edition -
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0610/p01s03-usgn.html

Close encounters of the fluttering kind: a rise in bird attacks
By Patrik Jonsson | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
RALEIGH, N.C. - US Postal carrier Keith Cooper is used to dogs sneering
from behind metal gates. He's used to uncivil people who expect to find
something in their mailbox and then don't.

But this week, as he trundled across Boylan Heights in this Southern
city, he ran into a new problem: rambunctious birds. "I was ducking
this way, then ducking that way, trying to get away," Mr. Cooper says,
recalling a few frenzied seconds where beaks flashed like tiny daggers.
"I had no idea what was going on."

It turned out to be an entire Tippi Hedron day. He wasn't divebombed
just once, but three times in three different parts of the city.

Nor is Cooper the only one seemingly in the flight path of B-52 birds
these days. For some inexplicable reason, from Houston to Washington,
it's been the year of aggressive mockingbirds, crows, hawks, and even
woodpeckers.

To a noticeable degree, especially by those getting strafed, it seems
like Alfred Hitchcock, the reality series.

Some of the incidents are, admittedly, a bit scary. One Houston lawyer
this spring found himself getting pecked in the face. Even worse,
police had to close down an entire downtown Houston street in late May
after gang of grackles attacked pedestrians, knocking some of them
down.

"Birds, they're on the sidewalk, but they're usually not attacking
people," says Bea McCann of the Houston Police Department. She notes
that the recent attacks were the first she's ever heard of in the city.

In Washington, bloggers last week were busy cataloguing the adventures
of an aggressive hawk that was buzzing cars.

In upstate New York, a high-strung woodpecker has destroyed dozens of
car mirrors - angered, apparently, by his own image and racking up
insurance premiums.

"There's been an increase in the number of times that people report
incidents like, 'I had this weird thing happen where a bird attacked
me,' " says Alicia Craig, director of the Bird Conservation Alliance in
Indianapolis.

Why you should look up
As it turns out, experts do have an explanation for the increase in
bird-man encounters. The spread of wood-shaded and bird-friendly
suburbs has added to friction between the two species during nesting
season.

For a few weeks in early summer, when eggs crack open and open-mouthed
fledglings chirp and caw toward the sky, parent birds go on the
offensive.

"We're seeing more and more inevitable clashes due to a lack of space,"
says Ms. Craig.

But certain species are definitely more Red Baronesque than others.
Mockingbirds, crows, bluejays, Arctic terns, and even seagulls are
known to divebomb.

And, more often than not, they have good reason to feel secure in their
missions: Humans usually duck and run when ambushed by birds.

Since bird attacks are more of a novelty than a danger, no official
tallies are kept of such confrontations. But ornithologists say that
suburban nesting is certainly on the upswing. Indeed, some species
prefer what may seem like inconvenient, even illogical, places to nest,
close to human activity.

Moreover, though it may be of no comfort to people like Cooper, birds
have good reason to be aggressive. While a mockingbird in the country
may raise its children in relative peace, an urban mockingbird has to
protect the brood from a host of dangers - from cats to redtailed hawks
to curious humans.

"Last time I had mockingbird nests in my backyard, I had to hold an
umbrella over my head to go to the mailbox, I was so afraid of attack,"
says Craig.

Birds in mythology
Birds, of course, are both romanticized and reviled in mythology and
popular culture, from their tiny singsong chirps and eager pecking of
crumbs in "Mary Poppins" to their flapping hordes in Hitchcock's film.

Mythology is full of them. And humans confront their beauty - or their
unsavory parting gifts - in one way or another almost every day.

It's not surprising then, that they've been frequent, even complex,
characters in literature and film. Director Mel Gibson, for one, used
vultures to disturbing effect as they crowded around Jesus on the Cross
in "The Passion of the Christ."

To be sure, the significance of an attacking bird has deep folkloric
roots.

Some cultures see birds as souls occupying the liminal space between
heaven and earth. Others consider them harbingers - often of doom.

"To Taoists, for example, birds indicate the violent uncontrollable
primordial willfulness of the 'barbarians,' " says William Doty, a
religion professor at the University of Alabama and the editor of
Mythosphere magazine.

To Cooper, the point isn't something philosophical about the
barbarians. It's just a matter of delivering the mail free of danger or
.... doo-doo.

He vows that neither snow, nor sleet, nor songbird will keep him from
his appointed duty. And he's developed his own pragmatic way to deal
with any threats from above, through experience.

"My advice if you're attacked is, just take a step back and move slowly
away," he says.

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