This isn’t exactly blogging in the classic ‘humorous’ style that is rightly beloved, but there is an incident of chickadee hooliganism that just went down in my backyard that I’d like to record here anyhow. So… there is always a fair amount of chirping and cheeping emanating from the bird population out there but about 10 minutes ago I became aware of a louder and more insistent than usual CHEEP-CHEEPEDYCHEEPEDYCHEEPEDY-CHEEP and got up from the powerpointing to see what in holy hell the ruckus was all about. It was coming from the upper part of one of the trees in our yard, and though I couldn’t actually see any birds there was some violent rustling in the leaves around the area that the loud CHEEPs were coming from. Then another chickadee (I’m just guessing as to the species of these birds, but they were tiny and had some black & white on them) flew up into the tree from the yard and joined in the struggle, and then 3 more chickadees swooped in from the yard next door, and then 4 more came over our house and descended into the melee. Again, I couldn’t see what the now extremely loud commotion was all about, it was kinda like one of those dust cloud fights which occur with some frequency in the cartoons, with a stray chickadee occasionally popping out from behind the leaves and then flying back in… slowly the struggle seemed to move down through the tree until some of the birds became visible on a lower branch, looking highly agitated. And THEN from out of nowhere a big robin came and perched in the lower reaches of the tree too, like he was some sorta cop, though a pretty ineffectual cop as he just sat there and watched the hubbub along with me. His arrival did startle one of the chickadees down to the ground, however, and when he turned to fly back up into the tree two other birds descended upon him and with one standing guard the other one repeatedly flew straight into him over and over again until the first bird flew out of the yard to the south, at which point all of the chickadees came down out of the tree to mingle with the attackers. The banished chickadee then tried once more to come back and join the group, as though nothing had happened, but the group was having none of this and went for him en masse, driving him away for good. Then they just sat there for about a minute, quietly hopping about a little and checking out the grass, before they suddenly all took off at once and headed westward. At which point the robin took his leave as well, heading back toward the northeast where he had come from. And that is my boring backyard tale! Oh, if only there were some way to make my trees a little more interesting, in a whimsical, nightmare-inducing way… especially with Memorial Day right around the corner with Independence Day close at its heels… hmmm…