Every morning now when I sit by the fire reading after meditating, Jedi casually saunters over, sits down right next to my chair, and plops his enormous fuzzy head in my lap, flopping his droopy (but thankfully not slobbery or drooling) jowls across my leg. It’s morning petting time, a place that until this winter, was occupied by my longtime companion, my cat Sassy, for years. But since she passed away last spring, Jedi quickly realized this winter that this spot was open for the taking, and take it he did.

His attention was a bit split this morning, though, by the sudden and rather dramatic return of a huge flock of robins that showed up yesterday en masse to gather for a feeding in the crabapple trees in my yard. I don’t know where they went, but they’re already back from their winter grounds, and they’re hungry. They peck and flock and flutter about in the trees, fluffing themselves up to buffer their little bodies from this morning’s cold and snow.

Only a few hours after first noting their return, I heard a familiar and resounding “thunk” as I sat up here late in the afternoon.

“Oh, no!” I thought. “Not again! Not another suicidal bird.”

I had at least two of them last year—birds who must have extremely poor eyesight or flight navigation systems, because the front windows of my house, while large, are anything but clean. Nonetheless, this didn’t keep these two birds from repeatedly flying into the window at full tilt, over and over again, until they must have gotten brain damage. This only made it worse, for in the end, they met their sorry ends from the window. Selection of the fittest, I guess, but still sad.

The day before the birds showed up this year (luckily for them), my yard hosted another kind of animal gathering—a dog party. The other climbers brought their dogs (three of them) along with them for a play date during our bouldering session, and then the neighbor’s dog came over to join in, and a veritable ruckus of dog mayhem ensued, with dogs tearing around the yard chasing each other, wrestling, yelping, and growling, and of course, peeing all over everything.

At one point, I was reduced to speechless laughter, after going outside the gym for a peek to check up on them…Jedi was camped under the porch by this point, standing there rather droopily as if a reluctant witness to the scene at hand. The youngest dog, a nine-month-old female Labrador puppy, was much closer to the current action, staring curiously as if mesmerized and not quite able to make sense of it. The older dog, a Rottweiler mutt of some sort, was blissfully air-thrusting in the proximity of the bowed head of the other black lab. I took it all in with a single glance and came back into the gym doubled over with laughter, mostly due to the different expressions on all of the dogs’ faces, which just added that indefinable element of je ne sais quoi to the overall ridiculousness of this scene.

Windows into the animal world continually delight me, from humorous scenes like the dog party to just witnessing the robins in my yard, feeding and preparing for springtime. I wonder if another nest will be built in the tree by my balcony, allowing me to observe yet again a close-up hatching and growing of baby birds, like last year? I take a passive interest in birds; I don’t need to know the names of their species if I don’t already know it. I simply enjoy their presence and like knowing that in my yard, they find a place of respite and refueling, just as I like knowing that for dogs, my yard is a playground of plenty, with trees to pee on and toys scattered about to discover (even though my own dog spurns them as stupid). It’s a small way to bond with the rest of the animal planet, beyond humanity.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Dog Stories, Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.