I think I’m doing birds wrong – The Bloggess

I have always been lightly obsessed with birds, and it’s gotten worse as I’ve gotten older, which I can only assume is another sign of perimenopause that no one warned me about. (Seriously, a friend of mine told me that some women’s labias can just go missing in menopause. What in the actual fuck??) Sorry. This is supposed to be about birds…not labias. I am out of my ADD meds, as you can probably tell.

Anyway, recently Victor bought me one of those bird buddy feeder cameras and I love it so much, but it has a number of problems, including an AI robot identifier that seems to have never seen birds before:

“No, buddy…pretty sure that’s not a pelican perched on the hummingbird feeder.”

More concerning though was when I would see birds at the feeder but the bird buddy wouldn’t turn on to record them. I told Victor that it was faulty because I’d just stuck my whole head in the feeder and it didn’t turn on or give me a notification that anyone was there, but Victor was like, “That’s because it’s smart enough to weed out anything that isn’t birds” and I was like, “WELL, HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THIS THEN?”

And he just sighed deeply, which I took as an acknowledgement that I was doing trouble-shooting much better than he thought I could. But it still wasn’t working properly so I got an old taxidermied bird from my shelf and waved it in front of the cameras to see how long it would take to set the cameras off and after about 20 minutes my arm was falling off but it finally triggered and Victor texted me a picture and was like, “See, it’s totally working. There’s a bird out there now.”

And then I sort of questioned if he was paying attention at all because how often do you see a raggedy-ass bird carrying a branch and a human hand (not often, hopefully?) and so I brought it back inside and sent this picture from the kitchen:

“I CAUGHT HIM AND HE LIVES WITH US NOW. WELCOME HOME, FLAPPY GILMORE!”

Then Victor did another deep sigh and moved the wifi thingie closer to the bird feeders and that seems to have fixed the problem, although Victor pointed out that the new problem was that I’d been maniacally waving a dead bird around in the backyard for 20 minutes and that I’d probably freaked the fuck out of every bird in our neighborhood, and that’s fair but also I’m pretty sure pelicans are unflappable. (No pun intended.)

And then a few minutes later this series regular landed and it gave me almost the exact same wtf look that Victor gives me and that’s probably pretty fair all things considered.

And I did feel a little bad, but then I saw this:

That is a terrible picture of a hawk standing at my curb and staring at me. Then he saw that I was looking and he refused to make eye contact and was like, “I’m just waiting for my uber, lady” and I’d like to think that me swinging a large dead bird around in my yard for 20 minutes convinced him it was not worth the effort to stalk my little finches and Squirrelly Jackson. I mean, it can’t hurt.