The Cardinal

You know that poem "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe? The one where the raven is tapping, tapping at his chamber door? Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was a cardinal, not a raven.

There's a female cardinal here that is either PMSing or has some sort of extreme mental retardation. She is constantly flying into the window, and she has a huge beak so it makes a lot of noise. There are little dust-imprints of her wing all over the place. She must be especially stupid because not only does she fly into the window more than once, she sits on the outside of the window and pecks (loudly) at the window as if it will crack if she just keeps pecking at it. I think she flew into that window a little too hard.

Can birds even be retarded?

Anyways, today she decided to start her annoying at 7 in the morning. That's really early. I can't fall asleep after I'm woken up. It just doesn't happen. I swore revenge. My brother and I decided that we were going to stalk this bird with my cell phone camera and catch her in the act, then expose her to the internet for what she was. It would be easy. She was retarded.

We were wrong.

We caught her pecking a few minutes later. She smashed her face against the window a few times, and then stopped, glaring at me. I raised my camera. She made a retarded-bird sound a flew away before I could click the record button.

It was then we realized that we would need to change our strategy. We hid behind walls, curtains, and beanbags, but she was too quick. She had guessed our plan, and she disappeared. We retreated upstairs, but heard her pecking away within minutes. We sprinted downstairs, but once again we were too late.

We stood in front of the sliding door, stalking the birds from a distance. She was conspiring with her accomplices under a fluffy evergreen. I insulted her from afar, hoping to lure her back to the window a few feet from us, camera at the ready. My brother chose that moment to have a lung spasm/laughing attack and spit a large mouthful of soda all over my foot. He fell over laughing while I yelled at him to clean it up, and the birds flew away.

Somewhere in all this madness, I was able to catch this video:

(Turn your volume all the way up here. You may even want to put your ear to the speakers.)

You can't really see her except when she flew away because it was all over-exposed. I had to zoom in really far to get that shot from the other room, but it's still insanely loud for a bird, if you could hear it. It was all I could get of her.

Retarded birds are sneaky.