Which plague was it?

I'm not quite ready to paint blood over the threshold, but, y'all, this has got to stop.

You know all about our dirty laundry. . . errrr attic now, but the story gets better. Earl is back.

Now, I'm sure you don't recognize Earl's name, but he's been here before. In fact, he's the reason we even have a blog here at The House. Earl is The Bird. We named him last week, when it became apparent that he wasn't leaving anytime soon.

For more than a week now, Earl's been at his post, pecking -- hard -- against the bay window in our living room. If you catch him mid-peck, it looks something like this:

From about 6:30 a.m. until 5:45 p.m. (give or take a few minutes), he's tending to a window about every 5 minutes. Every. Five. Minutes. Pecking. Hard enough to scratch the glass. There are a lot of things that I enjoy discussing with our insurance agent, but I'm not yet ready to explain how a bird happened to shatter our window. I'm still holding out for a new roof, y'know.

The first couple hours, it was just a curiousity. Then it got annoying, so we started getting creative. Foil inside the window! Nope.

Foil on the outside of the window! Worked for a while, then he figured out how to perch on the foil and keep pecking. Which is when I recognized him: Georgia Brown Thrasher. Stupid. Dogged determination. Yep, I'm pretty sure it's the same bird that wouldn't get off my window sill back in June. He remembers how lovely the sofa was and wants to get at it again.

Fishing line strung every which way so he can't get at the window! Maybe if we'd had nails in the siding or better places to attach it closer to the window. Pie tin hung in front of the window! Didn't even last 10 minutes. However, Boy #1 almost perfected a hawk-like screech that kept him away for 20 minutes or so.

And then, the aha! moment: trash bags on the outside of the window! Oh, glorious quietude. For 2 full days, we'd vexed Earl. Also the neighbors, because it looked so, so good.

You can see the big, purple city trash bags on the center window of the bay and the small, white kitchen trash bags on the right. Pie tin added for good measure. Surprisingly enough, even though these were up for 3 days, we didn't hear from the home owners' association. Cul-de-sac living is goooooood.

So now we've taken down all the fine window dressing and The Husband has installed (I use that term loosely) bird netting over the whole shebang. It's quite subtle -- especially compared to the purple trash bags -- but not yet particularly effective. The Husband says he's trying to lull Earl into a sense of complacency before trapping him. Let's hope it all ends soon.

I'm not sure about any of my boys, but at the first sign of one locust or frog too many, I am outta here.

-ma'am