Outsmarted by a Bird

The latest solution. Note the horizontal owl still strapped to the hand rail.

Every Monday morning the district administrators at my work gather for a cabinet meeting. Those in attendance usually include the superintendent, the assistant superintendent, the Director of Special Education, the district truancy officer, the English as a Second Language Coordinator, the Director of Finance, and myself. Occasionally someone else will join us. We meet first thing Monday morning to discuss the week ahead and coordinate activities, plan budgets, develop professional development activities, things like that. Important stuff.

This past Monday, though, we spent the first twenty minutes of our hour and a half meeting brainstorming ways to outsmart a robin. Yes, a robin.

Let me back up and explain. About two years ago the front entrance of the board of education building was remodeled. The old, creaky front door was replaced with a fancy, mirrored door and windows. It really is a more attractive entrance, and we haven't had any problems with it. Until this spring. This year a robin has nested somewhere nearby (We haven't found the nest yet; if we had, we'd have destroyed it and the problem would most likely be over!), and has apparently decided that his own reflection in the mirrored glass is another robin that is threatening his territory. He spends a good chunk of the day standing in front of the door pecking on the mirrored glass and chirping angrily. The receptionist has trouble concentrating with all of the pounding on the glass, but if that--and the startled looks from visitors who try to enter the building only to find a peeved robin blocking their way--were the only problem, we'd probably learn to ignore the poor creature. But the REAL problem is the unsightly piles of bird poo poo that this robin leaves behind. "You practically need a stepladder to get over it!" the superintendent said in the meeting Monday. "It's so high!"

The office staff has tried several methods to try to get the bird to stay away from the door. For a couple of weeks a wreath made out of aluminum foil was hung on the front of the door, and that SEEMED to work, but after a few days the robin was back. A maintenance worker then went to a home goods store and came back with two, plastic owls that were mounted one on the hand rail of the entrance and the other on the roof of the building. I suppose this was done with the hope that the robin would think that they were real owls out to eat him. That didn't work for a moment, though. The day they were placed outside I stayed late at work. Alone at my desk, I heard a peck, peck, pecking. I walked out of my office and looked at the door. The robin was standing on one of the owls and pecking at the glass.

The office staff then got so frustrated that they covered all of the windows and doors with brown paper. That DID stop the robin from coming up to the door, but it also was incredibly tacky looking. Our superintendent, who was out of the district the day that this solution was tried, came in the next morning and said, "Oh, no! We are NOT doing that!" So the paper came down and the robin came back.

Next someone suggested that maybe the robin wasn't responding to the owls because the robin couldn't SEE the owls. The robin's nest was probably up high while the owls were down low. So someone strapped an owl lying on his back onto the hand rail so that the owl was facing up and the robin could see him from anywhere. Our receptionist thought that maybe this was making a little bit of a difference (though not a complete solution, as the robin did still come around from time to time), so that owl was left there.

And that brings us back to last Monday. Our superintendent rehashed all of the above for those in our cabinet whose offices aren't in our building (About half of them have offices in the annex on the other side of the district campus, past the high school and the middle school, and the first thing they said Monday morning when they walked into the meeting was, "Why is there an owl strapped to the hand rail?"). Afterwards, we spent time coming up with solutions. Mine was simple: give me a high powered BB gun and let me take a shot at the bird. One of two things would happen: Either I'd hit the bird and kill it (Problem solved!), or I'd miss the bird and hit the door, breaking the glass, which would have to be replaced and could be replaced with clear glass (Again, problem solved!). Our receptionist is a pretty strong animal lover, though, so that idea was thrown out.

The next solution that was tried was to take a bunch of decals of butterflies and plants and stick them all over the windows and doors. I'm not sure what the rationale was here. Maybe the idea was that the robin would be terrified of giant butterflies, or maybe the idea was that the robin would be struck by the unbelievable tackiness of the decals and would be too embarrassed to come anywhere near the building. In any event, this plan was set into motion towards the middle of the week, and the robin did, indeed, seem to stay away from the doors. Everyone thought the problem was solved. I came to work briefly this evening, though, and there was again a fairly large pile of droppings at the entrance. And as I worked in my office I heard the tapping, as of some bird gently rapping at my office door.

I'm out of the district for the first two days of this week, so I'm going to miss the Monday cabinet meeting, but I'm anxious to hear what the next plan will be...