Scrubs

A white coyote lopes by. A scrub jay squawks and zips out of the hazelnut tree. A couple tiny finches alight upon a branch of the Asian pear tree, but the two of them together are so gravity-challenged, they barely set the branch to jouncing. A rabbit scampers into the vineyard. Then scampers back out. A robin pokes its beak into the ground. Missing the worm. The scrub jay swoops back into the hazelnut tree.

Ah, September on Spudders Crest. The waning days of summer, closing in on Autumn. Quiet days filled with nature’s wonders, the serenity punctuated only by a maniac sprinting across the yard, shouting and clapping his hands together furiously. The maniac? That would be me. Chasing off that scrub jay. Little bastard.

Time to drag out the talk radio.

I have no idea what is up with scrub (and occasionally the ill-named stellar) jays, but they like to steal my nuts. There’s a lone hazelnut tree in our backyard, visible from my upstairs window, and for some peculiar reason, just as the nuts are about ripe, jays swoop into the tree, steal a pair of nuts (hazelnuts most often come in pairs), fly up into the huge maple tree, and realizing there’s nothing else to do with the nuts, drop them. And then bitter gall, they return to steal more nuts.

I just don’t understand. It took me a while to even realize what was going on. Our first couple years on Spudders Crest, we got very few hazelnuts. I just thought, o well, tough luck. Then one year I noticed them, jays, stealing the nuts. Beatrice informed me, at the base of the maple tree, where she often played, were dozens of scattered hazelnuts. Unripe.

So whenever a jay swooped into our tree, I banged pie tins, clapped hands, screamed, and threw Asian pears at them. Which is not a good idea, as throwing pears just knocks off more nuts.

And then last year, as I realized that shouting was a sufficient deterrent, it occurred to me, I could put a radio beneath the tree, crank it up really loud, scare off the bastards. My first experiment failed, as I tuned the radio to KMHD, jazz. Except for the occasional squalling sax solo, the jays were unperturbed. So then I tried ESPN –sports talk radio. That did the trick. Especially early in the morning, with Colin Cowherd. He scares the bejeebers out of jays. They sit quivering in the maple tree, shielding their beady little eyes behind a wing. The bunch of bozos that follow Cowherd are all full of noise and fury, signifying nothing. And the jays hate them.

Dan Patrick, on the other hand, just bores them to death. I saw one literally fall out of the tree in a stone cold trance.

There is one ill side effect to this cure –I have to listen to that shit all day. I never realized Western Civilization was in such jeopardy until I was forced to listen to this trash. Whining, squawking, bitching, haranguing, boasting, fulminating -all in the name of sports?! You can hear the minds of testosterone charged males all over America turning to mush.

The two local goons who finish off the day are appropriately loathsome, but it’s Cowherd who remains the pinnacle of madness. Which is fine, because he comes on in the morning when the jays, after a couple cups of espresso, are at their most active and annoying. They come swooping down at the hazelnut tree, and Cowherd barks out one of his moronic sputters, and like hitting Sue Storm’s invisible shield, they bounce off and fly away.

All the while, I suffer in silence. Hour after hour, day after day, praying and hoping that the hazelnuts will hurry up and ripen, so I can turn off the radio.

Relax. And wait for the starlings to dip into my vineyard. Little bastards.