'Tis the Season for Drunkin Birds

The first few weeks Dale and I lived here in our current home, we would often hear this really loud Whack! sound. There's really no way to describe this horrible sound besides whack. But when you hear it, it is definitely startling. And loud.

One day we figured out the sound came from birds hitting our living room window. We've never actually seen it, though, because it always happens so fast.

See, our house is kind of oddly shaped. It's long and narrow. In our living room, the north side of the room has a wall of windows, and the south side also has a wall of windows. So, if you are standing in our front yard, you look through the windows into our living room, but then you see through the other windows to the opposite side of our house. It's weird. But birds get confused by this, I guess.

In the fall, it gets really bad. Birds hit the windows almost daily. The reason why is because of this tree in our yard:

We found out from our gardener friend that the birds eat the berries, which are rotting and fermenting. The birds get drunk. Then they are confused and disoriented and fly right into the windows.

I am blogging about this because it JUST happened. I was sitting here at the computer, heard the loud WHACK! (but this time it sounded like the bird hit with enough force to break the window). I ran out there and saw a cloud of little feathers in the sky and saw this on the window:


Then I looked down to see the poor little fellow on the ground down below. ( Please do not call PETA on me for expoiting dead birdies on my blog for the purposes of entertaining my blog readers).

It's really sad!