Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Attack of the birds

BART was 6 minutes late today and caused me to miss my shuttle pick-up. I had the wonderful opportunity to "sightsee" in the lovely Civic Center BART vicinity today.

First thing I saw was a homeless man peeing in the corner. Apparently he missed, peed on part of his sweats, and was cussing and screaming into the sky.

Second thing I saw was frightening. I don't like birds, especially if there are many of them together. I also don't like them to be too close to me (had a bad aviary incident in a zoo about 7 years ago). Someone dropped a large, whole chocolate chip cookie on the ground. This cookie was huge, about 4.5 inches wide, with lots of chocolate chips! This cookie probably fell 3 feet in front of me! Suddenly, pigeons and other birds from all over the area flew right in front of me and started fighting for the cookie. There were at least 50-60 birds of all sizes. They were all trying to get a piece of it. Those who couldn't get close enough to the cookie decided to peck each other to fight their way in. It was vicious and ruthless. They were pecking at each others' heads, wings...anything...just to get an inch or two closer to the cookie. After all that pecking, the cookie broke into 2 pieces. The birds then fought for positioning all over again.

I took a few steps back and just watched these birds feasting on this cookie. FINALLY, one bus pulled over to park...the birds realized they had to move, and all 50-60 of them just flew up, over my head. Yes...my fear...I let out a quick squeal from the shock, but pretended nothing had happened to save face since there were several people near me.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Be careful with those birds. They are BART's backup communication system. They cost $950,000 apiece (we save money, they are commercial-grade, not Mil-Spec). We get them from Halliburton.