What Is The Sound of One Bird Flapping?

This is about two birds flapping, not one, but I needed a title.

So the other day I was sitting at my outdoor table, minding my own business, when two birds came sailing around the house and nearly took my head off.

I don’t know what the issue was – trespassing, lovers’ quarrel, uneven division of parental duty – but one was out to get the other. They were songbirds, approximately the same size, and sort of brownish. That’s all I can tell you, because I saw them out of the corner of my eye, heard a bunch of mad flapping, and then – before I could get a bead on them – they were circling my face.

They only flew one lap before taking off into hyperspace, but it was enough to provoke a knee-jerk reaction.

“Stop it!” I cried. “What are you doing, you bad birds?”

I reacted that way because I’m a wildlife rehabilitator. I’m used to entering a songbird flight filled with young Blue Jays and having one of them bang into the side of my head by mistake, or entering a raptor flight and having a Great Horned Owl deliberately try to scalp me. I’m used to trying to be helpful, and in return getting smacked in the face by a wing.

I’m used to doggedly trying to restore some kind of order, no matter how slim the chance.

This was the case when these two wild blurs decided to use me as a live maypole. But by the time I’d reached  the second sentence they’d disappeared into the foliage, so it’s not like they even heard me, much less paid any attention to me.

And such was the sound of two birds flapping.

Photos by www.cs.dartmouth.edu and flyingpackman.blogspot.com