I live in a little town in a mountain valley. It’s very lovely here, I tell you. Mountains out every window. At this moment, everything’s green and perfect — trees and plants and lawns sort of glimmer, and the hills have managed to keep enough of the scant water they got this winter to be stunning. And we have birds. One thing I missed when we moved here, lo these dozen years ago, was the bird noise. We moved into a new house with no landscaping in a neighborhood full of the same. But in the last years, our little stick trees have grown up into lovely yards, and we now have birds to populate them. Not all the birds are friendly — in fact, I wrote demon magpies into my last novel for a reason. (*Shudder*)
But what I’m finding more and more of, here in rural paradise, is pigeons. I’m told that across the valley there are old-timers who have kept pigeons for decades, training them to carry messages during wars or something. Which I guess might be illegal in some places. But these pigeons that hang out in my neighborhood are plentiful. Copious. And new-ish. A few years ago, I remember seeing a pigeon and thinking, “Huh, would you look at that. City birds. Wonder what they’re doing here?” Similar to the way that I thought about seagulls when I first migrated to Utah: “Seriously? Seagulls in Target parking lots? Where do they think they are? No ocean for hours and hours.” But now, the pigeons are EVERYWHERE. Ubiquitous pigeons. (Excellent band name, if anyone’s looking — feel free.) And they appear to have a plan.
The Pigeon Hostile Takeover plan seems to revolve around some awesome scare tactics, namely ghosting. See, the dove-like, owlish quality of the coo-ing sounds very spooky when it floats through an open window. But even better than that, these little birds, possibly too dumb to move off the sidewalk for a kid on a trike, are clever enough to waddle across a roofline until they come to the air intake pipe, the laundry vent, or the chimney. Then they put their twitchy little heads inside and moan.
For real.
They wail this forlorn little song into the home openings, waiting, I imagine, for the family to freak out to the extent that they give up and drive away, leaving a door open as an invitation to roost inside and please, please not follow them out of the valley.
If I see one of these abandoned neighbor houses, covered in guano and feathers, glowing with an eerie green light, I just might move out, too.