Column: The birds almost killed me

​I have been writing about birds lately, not because I’m old, quarantined, and often bored, which I am, but because watching them during the past two plus pandemic years has given me something to do that is usually more entertaining than watching reruns of “The Lone Ranger” or “Wagon Train.” Oh, wait a minute, 90 percent of you won’t relate to that. Let’s try this. Watching these little feathered dinosaur relatives is sometimes more fulfilling than the reruns of “Grey’s Anatomy” or “The Good Place.”

Nick Jacobs
Nick Jacobs

​Much of the time there are at least a dozen different breeds of birds passively and peacefully cohabitating in non-confrontational meandering in the foot deep pile of discarded seed below the feeders. Usually, they are casually pecking food out of their hanging, plastic or wire mesh bird feeders. Other times, however, things get real as they start pecking the heck out of each other with their wings, beaks, and feet to get that next piece of whatever seed is the specialty du jour.

​The violence often escalates to the point where I feel like I’m watching the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. It gets so wild out there around mealtime they often fly full force into our windows to avoid each other, and they knock one another so far off-balance their wings flutter like hummingbirds just to keep from falling on their bird butts.

​The other day, out of nowhere, a hawk flew in, let’s call him Vladimir, and grabbed one of the birds. We later saw him eating it in the yard. Now that is just bad***. It’s like watching a cross between a James Bond movie or the national news.

​Well, Wednesday, the day before my 525th birthday (in dog years), we had decided to drive to State College to have lunch with our oldest grandson. It’s only the second time we had done this in the nearly 28 weeks since he went away to school, but it just felt right.

​Of course, the weather ended up being similar to weather we had experienced in Germany years ago while riding in the back seat of a Citroen station wagon on the Autobahn. It was rain, sleet, snow, sun, rain, sleet, and white knuckle driving at Germany’s no-speed-limit highway at 193.12 kph or 120 mph. In fact, on that day we were in what could have been a life ending accident. But I digress.

​Before embarking on our treacherous journey, I looked out the window and saw a half-dozen little snowbirds, sparrows, and tufted titmice looking back at me in total dismay. The bird feeders had been emptied the afternoon before by flocks of big black and brown birds. I couldn’t leave without depositing what would amount to the financial equivalent of a Starbucks-specialty-drink worth of birdseed into their feeders.

​Anyway, I filled up the two empty, plastic Galliker’s Iced Tea bottles with seeds, grabbed a handful of peanuts, some suet, and headed outside. The concrete was just wet, but as I took one step onto the paving bricks, I flew up into the air like I had been blasted out of a Quaker Oats canon and landed on my side. My shoulder and the space below my hip took the hit.

​Since then, I’ve been iced up, immovable, and unable to even put on socks, but, just like on the Autobahn, it could have been so much worse.

​My doc enumerated the list of what coulda been, and it was somewhat endless. Broken ribs, hips, legs, arms and head all made the top of the list. In fact, one of my friends told me his boss died instantly of a similar slip-n-fall injury a few years ago. ​So, I dodged another bullet. If you’re counting, I only have a few bullets left. I’m gonna buy grippers for next year’s ice follies. I start PT on Monday.

This article originally appeared on The Daily American: Nick Jacobs column about watching birds