This morning, I was taking my youngest daughter to school, carrying her on my shoulders.
As it was the first really sunny morning of the year, we decided to take an alternative route through what we call " the forest" but which actually a dirt track (for pedestrians and cyclists only) lined with trees. The sunlight in the leaves was a very pleasant sight, the temperature was mild. Yeah, seemed like a good choice. After about 5 minutes, I heard branches cracking above my head, immediately followed by the very unwelcome feeling of something falling on my hair and my belly. A quick glance down confirmed what I’d feared: two white spots on my sweater.
I put my daughter down and examined her. Since she was on my shoulders, I thought she’d been hit, too but I didn’t see anything neither on her jacket nor on her balaclava. I didn’t check her pants, though. There was just a tiny spot on her boot.
I rubbed the stains with my gloves, stepped back a little bit and I noticed something strange: the ground were we had just walked was covered with smallish white spots. They didn’t look like regular droppings and the culprit was nowhere to be seen. It seemed as if the bird had deliberately “sprayed” in our direction then fled stealthily! Are birds undergoing commando training?
Eons ago, when I was a skinny little kid, I was sitting in front of my grandmother’s house. She lived in the city, and I was on the sidewalk with my back against her house, legs stretched out. A pigeon flew by, unleashing a dropping that left white stripes across both of my scrawny, tanned legs. Naturally, my reaction was to scream “EEEEEEEWWWWWWWWW!” in disgust.
The last time a bird dropped a bomb on me was about 10 years ago when a friend and I were on our lunch break. It landed smack dab on the top of my head. She (my friend, not the bird) laughed her ass off, which, in retrospect it *is *funny, but it really ticked me off at the time.
Come to think of it, and while I’m still pretty much convinced taht it was bird poop, some elements are odd. First, I didn’t see any bird. Second, as I said earlier, it didn’t look like typical bird poop. It was milky white and a little bit, shall I say, sticky but there was no brown or geen bits. And the way it looked on the ground was also weird: white stains, none bigger than a fingernail arranged in a circular pattern. It really looked as if some fluid had been sprayed. Perhaps it was sap?
Or perhaps it’s my dignity refusing to come to terms with the idea of a bird pooping on me :D.
Our African Grey likes to be with us and is fully flighted. We’ve gotten good at reading his body language and taking him to his cage when he looks like he needs to go. He has reached the stage where he flies to his cage, eliminates, then flies back to the living room to hang out.
Every once in a while you get lucky
A few years back I was in Huntington Beach. I had just closed my sunroof when I see Seacil the seasick seagull headed my way at low altitude. He let go and carpet bombed my station wagon from front bumper to rear bumper. Right down the center of the car. The sunroof had quite a bit on it.