Yesterday morning, I took the dog out for a walk (Quanah, our family Beagle) . . . when I passed the bridge and started down the hill towards the neighborhood shrine, a bird dived bombed me swooshing very low and very fast over my head, so close that the wing clipped my head. I couldn’t see very clearly what sort of bird it was as it all happened so fast, just this huge shape flying away in an immelman sort of move. Well, I figured it was an isolated incident with some bird not paying close attention to what he was doing. I was wrong. Just after the shrine, I feel a tap tap as a bird (presumably the same one) crashes down onto my head. This time the claws graze my skull and needless to say it was more than a whole lot unsettling. When I picked up the dog lead (which I dropped in my manly panic) I looked up and there was one of those huge bluish black birds with an incredibly long tailfeather doing his turn in the sky. Those things are endangered and on the protected animals list – actually, there’s a movement to adopt them as the Official Taiwan Bird – so even if I had a gun I couldn’t blow the bastard from the sky in a fit of panic-induced-fearful-bird-rage. When I got home and told Lorraine she made light of it that the bird was probably looking for nesting materials and my hair looks like a nest. Since Kaye also has long hair of similar (but not quite) texture to mine I told her to watch out. I told Lorraine to call Animal Control or the Environmental Bureau as a crazy dive bombing bird in a residential district is a public health and safety danger. She wasn’t too worried. Well, when they went downstairs to get the car for our trip (went to Taichung for a day-return with Lorraine’s family visiting from Hong Kong), Lorraine and Kaye ran into our nextdoor neighbor who was also attacked by the one assumes is the same bird. The Animal Control folks can’t just kill it as it’s protected (and probably protecting its nest which is in a tree right smack dab next to a newly opened apartment complex – not going to do those folks any good for their business if the mad bomber decides to do an end-run on prospective buyers) but hopefully they can find a way to capture and relocate to more hospitable enviornments away from humans (we live next to a running stream/creek/river depending upon the flood run with clean water and fish and we do have a lot of water birds in the area). Well, while I like to pretend to pride myself on my manly manliness – pretend is the operative word – that was so unexpected and came out of nowhere. In all the years we’ve lived here, those long-tails have not been very noticeable in this area but recently in the past few months there has suddenly been a resurgence and we seem them larger and stronger and much more numerous than before. It seems as if they’re taking over the local environment and displacing the other birds but at least they are an indiginous Taiwan bird (we also have some exotic white parrots that are now roaming wild and breeding causing all sorts of problems which are obviously descendants of a mated pair that either escaped capitivity or were set free when the owners realized how big and mean and LOUD the things were).

All the best,
Brian