With the dog sickness and the draft completing, I forgot to tell you all the strangest thing. I had visitors yesterday. My front yard neighbors. The dog was out in the yard, pooping, of course and the orange cat was lounging on the front porch and over came the two mocking birds that live in the front yard. One sat on the porch railing right by the cat and tweeted angrily at the cat and then the other came up to the door, where I was standing, and tweeted at me.
I know they’re just birds and that one shouldn’t anthropomorphize too much.
But I swear, it was as if they’d come to the door to complain about the cat. Who, I will note, they also weren’t that afraid of, since one was on the ground not 4 feet from him and the other was hectoring him from the railing right above him.
And this blows my mind. I mean, hell, maybe they weren’t complaining. I don’t know. But I am a mammal. A big old clumsy ape. They are tiny birds. They have bodies that do things mine never will. I do things they never will. And yet, they, who are supposedly the bigger idiots, stopped by to tell me something about the cat. A complaint might be reading too much into it. But definitely they were saying “we have an opinion about this animal right here and we want you to know it.”
Just at the level of that, of me trying to not read anything into what their opinion of the cat might be (though I think we have to guess, considering he’s the one who brought a bird into the house, that it’s not good), we have two birds working together. Two birds who acted with enough forethought to watch for me to show up at the front door so that they could address an ongoing concern. And two birds who are somehow able to understand that this animal (me) has an effect on the behavior of that animal (the cat) and I might influence the cat in some fashion.
That seems like a lot for a bird to put together. And yet, I don’t know how else to explain it.
Tiny Cat Pants 