My Porch

This has become my daily battle.  

Robins vs. Adele. 

They are staking claim to my territory.  

I don’t like it. 

If I didn’t have dogs, I would have my yard designated a wildlife sanctuary.  You can do that.  It’s called a Certified Wildlife Habitat.  Create a Certified Wildlife Habitat - National Wildlife Federation

My yard fulfills all of the requirements and I have a great deal of respect for sharing my space with animals whose ancestors were here long before I was.  Rather than kill a snake, I’ll direct my dogs indoors until it moves along.  I’ve wrapped fencing around many a rabbit nest to keep my dogs at bay until they wean and scatter. (I spend a great deal of my summer preventing those nests, however, since my dogs typically find the babies before I do.) Skinks, squirrels, bats, birds, rabbits, skunks, possums, raccoons, turtles, butterflies, and even the rare deer have all passed through or taken up space in our garden.  I have no problem with moles; they hungrily keep our Japanese beetle population at bay by eating the grubs.  Plus they aerate the lawn.  I don’t get why people want to kill moles - they are an asset to my yard. 

However. 

I have boundaries.  

This is the current state of my front porch entry. 

This is the mess I clean up every day.  

Twice, three times a day. 

Robins.  They insist! they are going to grow a family above my front porch light.  

I insist! no, they are not. 

They bring the strands of grass, twigs, and wet mud to build - I take it down, if it doesn’t fall down.  

First it was cute.  The dry grasses fell off the lamptop anyway.  Then it was annoying.  Heaps of grasses were piling up on my porch.  I burn the lamps at night - this is going to be a fire hazard with the dry grasses that remained. They’ll stop.  

No, they just innovated.  The grasses became wet.  They brought mud.  How on earth do they do that?  Do they eat dirt and regurgitate?  Do they roll bits of grass in the mud to collect it?  Fascinating.  Still. Not gonna happen. 

I remove grass; grass returns.  

Now they are weaving the longer grasses they’ve decided they need in and around the globe of the lamp.  And gluing them in with mud.  Don’t ever tell me birds are stupid.  

I think they are quite determined and creative. Still.  It’s been four weeks.  FOUR weeks.  Daily. 

I will share many things with my wildlife neighbors.  I will support them when needed and ignore them mostly.  But I will not give up my territory.  Apparently, they won’t give up what they consider to be their’s, either.  This battle will remain peaceful, but I will win.  

Dear Robins, if you turn around and look about 5 feet away, there is a perfectly good tree, also sheltered by the porch.  What?  You want me to go live in the tree?