Birds can always spot a plastic owl
By Mark W. Mayfield
As I write these words, hundreds of militant birds are raiding my precious fruit trees. The feathered pillagers are brazen, persistent and shameless, like hideous little telemarketers. I know they're God's creatures, but I hate them. They think they're so cool just because they can fly.
Last year our cats, Lucy, Jet and Sylvester, valiantly tried to keep the birds away, but they were hopelessly mismatched, like a crazy despot's ill-equipped army shooting wildly at vastly superior squadrons of NATO aircraft. This year I decided to take the conflict to a new and dangerous level. It was time to make my airworthy adversaries pay for their annual misdeeds. It was time to end their arrogance and force them into an unconditional surrender. It was time to unleash Hootie the Plastic Owl. (Because of the top-secret nature of his mission, I'm not allowed to divulge Hootie's actual name.)
According to Hootie's manufacturer, other birds don't like owls. When fruit-eating birds see an owl, they react the same way that humans react when we see Rosie O'Donnell or Minnesota gov. Jesse Ventura. In other words, they lose their appetites. The instructions suggest mounting Hootie on top of a tall pole and positioning him near victimized fruit trees.
Unfortunately, I had to insert the pole in the owl's only available orifice, which is near a very private sector of his anatomy.
Hootie didn't like impalement. He looked at me with the same facial expression of trepidation and hatred that I display while the doctor performs my least favorite part of a physical examination (the part that involves a latex glove). The awkwardness of the procedure was compounded by my deep-seated fear of certain inanimate objects, including dolls, stuffed animals, statues and Al Gore.
This fear has plagued me since childhood, when I had a ventriloquist dummy named Jerry Mahoney. He was my favorite toy, and I loved making him talk without moving my lips, a trick I did quite well by avoiding words that include the letters B, F, M, P, V and W.
"Hi, this is Jerry!" I made him say during an imaginary phone call to Shelly, a beautiful imaginary girl dummy. "I really like you, Shelly. Do you like Jerry, Shelly? I think you're really sexy, Shelly! Do you think Jerry's really sexy, too? See ya' later, sexy Shelly!" ("Sexy" was one of those adult words I enjoyed saying in the privacy of my own room. I didn't fully understand its meaning, but I DID know that whenever Dad told Mom that she looked sexy, my brother and I had to go to bed early, sometimes at three in the afternoon.)
The dummy-to-dummy conversation always ended abruptly when I tried to ad-lib additional dialogue. A bothersome consonant invariably popped up, causing unwanted lip movement. I would then throw Jerry's detachable wooden head across my bedroom in a fit of frustration.
During daylight, Jerry and I were inseparable, but when darkness came, our relationship changed considerably. I firmly believed that if I didn't lock Jerry in my metal footlocker before bedtime, he would become alive during the night and strangle me for repeatedly detaching his head. Then he would use my lifeless body as HIS dummy, making me say terrible words that I would never say while I was alive.
(My dad assured me that dummies can't become alive under ANY circumstances, but I know he was lying. He wasn't very fond of me because I usually couldn't fall asleep at three in the afternoon. I think dad wanted Jerry to rub me out so he could tell Mom that she looked sexy whenever he wanted to.)
I've never outgrown that horrible fear. I'm afraid that Hootie, like Jerry, will become alive during the night, and do unspeakable things to me in retaliation for the ugly pole-insertion incident. Nevertheless, I bravely accepted the risk and placed a very angry plastic owl among my fruit trees.
I soon discovered that Hootie didn't frighten the birds at all. They're apparently smart enough to know that real owls aren't equipped with long poles protruding from their tail feathers. Amazingly, my trees still have a dozen or more salvageable fruits, which I will eagerly harvest as soon as somebody locks Hootie in my footlocker.
After writing this essay, Mark W. Mayfield was viciously attacked during the night by unseen assailants. Local authorities are now searching for two suspects, Jerry Mahoney and Hootie the plastic owl.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
