Who has need for a falcon?

There is a predator bird in the area right now, and the window is open, even though it’s a little cold, because I want to hear the air and feel it pass across me. I’m risking the screen with holes and the screen that’s not there, and all bugs which could follow for the cross breeze of calls.

A moment ago, a loud starling was hissing outside my window. Food! Eat! Feed! Just now, another sparrow and finch carried their own residual chirp. Food! Eat! Danger! Feed! Looking out, I can see the blackbirds and grackles swarming one side with the finches on the poles across, blockaded by the larger birds. Both dive away, as I thrash the window.

When I heard the invasive shirll crier alerting his flock, I came down to the door and yelled out to him too, because even starlings deserve to have a chance. I don’t want my backyard to become some murderer stomping ground, where of course nature plays out its tongue. One entrapment on the altar of another’s plunder. To have the birds be where feeding results in the bloody, tossed vision? I don’t want that responsibility. Is it fair for us to disrupt their struggling scavenge to simply see them?

******* told me she’s started to scare the invasives away anyway, and that to me makes sense. They destroyed the suet we had just bought for the woodpeckers, a favorite of mine who were here one day, then gone the next. So now, as I write this, every few minutes for their salvation and their slaughter I am here - bashing the window.

However, I think they’re starting to learn that this is just window bashing. That the items do not swerve outward from the panes. That still, they have been laid to bait here and are following the order of things. These human tracts lack real threat and these selfish shrieking soothsayers see only the seed.

The finches are at the feeders now. And I can see the distance of their bullies encroaching. I’ll have to go out and unstick my trap I suppose.