Birds and Air Conditioners

As we pass out of winter, which has its own stark beauty, we start to look for signs of spring.

For some it is the greening of the weeping willows, for some it is the first crocus struggling to break through the snow, for some it is the first honeybee.

For my husband and me, it is the first bird’s nest in our bedroom air conditioner.

We live in an old house and inherited a behemoth  air conditioner in our bedroom, which stopped working shortly after we moved in.

It is too heavy and bulky to move safely so we simply let it alone.

But for the last few summers, starlings, we think, have decided to make their nest in it and raise their young.

The plastic extenders on the side of the air conditioner have long since crumbled to pieces.    

So in order to stop the birds from entering our home, we have stuffed towels and duct taped these openings closed.

(If the adhesiveness of all duct tape were suddenly magically to disappear from earth, our house would crumble to the ground.)

The birds are noisy neighbors. They seem to fight a lot and bang on the walls as  if they are remodeling their homes.

Occasionally, my husband or I will knock on the wall to tell them to be quiet. 

I always think of the old television  show The Honeymooners and Ralph (aka Jackie Gleason) pounding on his neighbor’s wall for silence.

And when the birds are fledglings and start taking short flights  from the nest, they actually seem to squawk "I can fly” as Mary Martin did in her yearly Peter Pan special that I used to watch as a child.

 At least that’s what it sounds like to me.

I would not exchange these birds for anything even though they wake us up early each morning.

I feel as if I am a princess sleeping under a canopy in the woods, rather like Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.