Crazy Robins

For nearly three weeks, we’ve had a robin tapping on our windows. It was puzzling at first, but then I saw the Portland Audubon Society’s page on the subject… it’s just a male robin, protecting his nest during mating season from the robin he sees in the window. Robins, I guess, don’t share our ability to recognize ourselves in a mirror. This isn’t surprising given that robins don’t have mirrors.

We’ve devised strategies for making the robin stop. The first one was putting up some brightly colored decorations in the windows he was tapping. That just made him switch to tapping at other windows that were not so easy to reach. We then discovered that the robin is afraid of our white poofy duster (one of those extending models). By waving that around as he flies toward the window, he’ll fly away and give us a few minutes of silence. Thankfully, his window tapping is starting to ebb. The past couple of days, he’s started tapping on our bathroom window. I snapped a picture of him on my cell phone this morning, but it came out badly. I’ll try again later.