Scenes from a local version of 'The Birds'

A few people close to me have a great appreciation for birds that I don't quite understand.

My dad started dabbling in bird watching in Colorado years ago. One of my oldest friends, who has taken many stunning bird photos for this paper, knows birds inside and out and can solve about any question of bird identity by sight or sound.

Meanwhile, my house is haunted by a robin that for weeks has been trying to bust through a window in the TV room.

It has chosen one particular window for this strange activity, and you'll be sitting alone in the kitchen and occasionally hear a dull thud in the next room, and you walk in there and see a bird flitting around pointlessly outside the window, which has been marked, only in the upper half of the window, with streaks from this bird's collisions.

Then you don't see the robin for a few days, and just when you think it's gone for good, you hear the telltale thud.

Birds are like this: They develop crazy notions and they don't want to let go.

Growing up in the suburbs of Denver, my family acquired a duck. I suppose it was supposed to be a pet, meant to wander around meekly in the back yard.

Instead the duck became so uncontrollable we had to tether it to a stake and a long leash. Then it developed a cold hatred of one of my sisters, who was probably around 9 at the time.

She couldn't go into the backyard without being attacked, so we finally ditched the duck at a local lake. Things probably didn't work out for him there, but the options were limited - there are few people willing to take an insane duck off your hands.

Though they seem to have all disappeared in the last year, we used to have loads of wild turkeys at our house. There would be literal parades of turkeys by the dozens marching single-file across the front lawn, up the driveway and into the woods.

Once a co-worker of my husband's raised some domesticated turkeys who had gotten aggressive enough to cause his neighbor to call law enforcement. So he brought the turkeys to our house, thinking the turkeys would be grateful for their freedom and waddle off to live happily ever after with their wild companions like the lions in "Born Free."

Instead, they huddled near the house all the time. The hens were just nuisances, but the tom was a vicious stalker that would run at you in attack mode. I remember him attacking my husband from behind when he was out working in the yard.

We enlisted the family dogs to send them scattering more than once, but they persisted in coming back.

My children were small, one still a baby in a car seat, the other a toddler. To leave, I had to lead my oldest boy past the tom, secure him in the car, then go back in, grab the baby in the car seat and make a run for it.

One time the tom even trapped the children and myself in the car when we arrived home. I don't remember how we escaped that day; and we can't even seem to remember what happened to those turkeys, whether we did something deliberate to dispatch them or if they disappeared of their own volition.

Their spirit might have entered the magpie that attacked myself and the boys while we were walking through the woods next to the house. My youngest was in a backpack, my other son a toddler walking beside me, when the bird came swooping out of nowhere from behind, cruising perilously close to my son's head, then turned around and made another pass at us and followed us all the way to the house.

We made it inside, but the bird then hung around the house, jumping around the rails on the deck, acting as if it had a desperate need to break in and cause us harm.

Other incidents: A small wild bird has on occasion made its way into the house, which is certifiably creepy, and once one of our chickens got inside, made its way upstairs and created a little hideout for itself in the master bedroom closet.

I suppose a study of the psychology of birds might be interesting, but their scientific names, calls, mating habits and migration patterns don't carry much interest for me.

All I care about is that they behave.

Reporter Heidi Gaiser may be reached at 758-4431 or by e-mail at hgaiser@dailyinterlake.com