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Black Snake vs Robin
Tuesday, June 7 2016
This morning Gretchen had to leave early to give one of her ethical choices lectures at Onteora High School, so it was my job to take the dogs for a walk. I grabbed my big battery-powered chainsaw and took the dogs down the mountain bike path that used to lead to the vicinity of the bus turnaround on Dug Hill Road. Since Hurricane Irene, it's been blocked by several masses of fallen trees, some of which I have been able to cut away. Today I focused on opening the trail through the worst of these tree falls (which had recently been augmented by a large fallen Sugar Maple). I love my battery-powered chainsaws, but when there are large trees to cut through, I can't typically make more than ten cuts. Near the end there, I was running on the battery equivalent of "fumes," only able to cut for a few seconds before the saw would complain. After a brief refractory period, it would be able to cut for another few seconds, but that's no way to work. Still, I managed to clear everything at this big (and somewhat dangerous) treefall except for the recently-fallen maple.
Back at the house as I began my workday, I kept hearing a disturbance in the local birdlife. I kept thinking I should investigate, but I never did. As the time of the IT team's daily video chat approached, though, I was down in the dining room with a laptop and I could see some sort of commotion happening off the east deck. I went out there and saw that a Black Snake had made its way up small (~20 foot) White Pine to a Robin's nest about 13 feet above the ground. I hadn't known Robins were actively nesting in that tree, but now it was clear that they were, since both mother and father were there doing their best to drive the snake away. They kept barking at it (in short staccato Robin calls), flying at it, and pecking it. But none of this did any good; the snake was too large for Robin-sized birds to have much effect against. Interestingly, these two Robins weren't the only birds concerned about the snake; a male House Finch also showed up and even seemed to attack the snake at one point and then stuck around to observe the terrible scene and occasionally shout warnings.
Not long after I began watching, I could see the snake had managed to grab a baby Robin (one I hadn't even known was there) head first and was in the process of swallowing it while it flapped its little wings helplessly. Those wings were fully populated with flight feathers, suggesting it hadn't been long before the poor victim would have left the doomed nest. Seeing something so horrifying caused me to try to do something, even though interfering with such natural processes isn't really something I believe in. I grabbed a tilling hoe (a hoe with tines instead of a blade) and ran down to the base of the tree with the hope of somehow dislodging the snake from the tree. But when I got there, I could see the snake was well out of reach and had probably already eaten all of the baby Robins. Had any of those cursed birds chosen to leap, Celeste the Cat was waiting patiently at the bottom of the tree. Evidently she had an intuitive sense that commotions in trees sometimes lead to killing opportunities on the ground below.
The snake lingered for awhile in the nest after eating the baby Robins, and occasionally the parents returned to yell at it. But eventually it slithered out of the tree and disappeared into the bushes, after which an unusual quiet descended on the day.
The vision of that poor baby Robin haunted my day, which wouldn't have been a good one in any case. I was trying to build out a new API for a third-party donation provider for The Organization, but the documentation was terrible, and the error messages non-existent. All I ever got on my end was empty JSON objects. It's hard to find much satisfaction with your work when you spend four hours on something and all you ever see is a pair of curly quotes with nothing between them. My dissatisfaction gradually turned to sleepiness, but it wasn't like I could go take a nap; when I'm at work, it's pretty much the same thing as being at work, except I didn't have to drive to get there.
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