Love Thy Neighbor? Ha, thats for the birds...

I reside in a charming little neighborhood in NW, bustling with young professionals, new families…aaaand old people. My complex itself may as well be a retirement community, but I can’t complain- the silver set make excellent neighbors. They’re neat, they’re quiet, and save falling and throwing their hip out once in a while, there is very little drama associated with them. Since moving in in October of 2008, I’ve avoided all neighborly conflicts…a welcome change from some of the nut-jobs who lived next door, upstairs, one building over during my collegiate years.

However, my good neighbor streak came to an end just as the last round of snow began to melt. Allow me to introduce you to Bird Lady. Though Bird Lady does not live in my building, she does park next to me in our designated spots. Being that I’ve fully embraced the public transport system here in the area, my little car remains parked for the majority of the time, where it rests beneath the shade of a large tree. The aforementioned tree provides plenty of problems; in the fall- my vehicle is awash in freshly fallen leaves. In warmer months, it becomes the landing pad for bird droppings.

Now I first met Bird Lady while shoveling out my car from this February’s blizzards. While I struggled to remove tons of snow from beside, on top of, around my vehicle…Bird Lady was calmly brooming two inches of white powder from her car’s roof onto the snowy ground beside her car. Two inches, you say? Yes- because she’d already flung the other 46 into the area between our cars and watched as I broke a sweat (something I do not enjoy doing outside the confines of the gym) hauling it away. The other side of Bird Lady’s car was completely plowed/shoveled/scraped down to the asphalt, courtesy of the Georgetown North HOA, as she has the good fortune of parking next to a building entry. On a related note, I have bad fortune of parking next to Bird Lady. As my roommate and I worked furiously to free our cars, Bird Lady retreated to her building and emerged with a bag of bird seed. She immediately dumped the contents of the bag onto a snow drift between our cars and instructed us not to shovel any snow onto the seed. I should’ve spited her blatant lack of snow removal respect, and dumped a huge shovel full on the bird seed, however I suppressed this urge and left the seed unburied- a decision I now regret.

Now, upon my first interaction with Bird Lady, I sensed something was a little off....though she just seemed like a harmless old bat. However, my tune has changed. After successfully freeing my car from its snowy den, I was proud to behold the gleaming reddish paint sparkling against the heaps of white we’d shoveled away- a beauty that has faded with the melting snow. You see, after the birds partook in what I can only assume was a literal feeding frenzy, indulging in the roughly 3 lbs of bird seed left for them- they understandably needed a place to rest. And what better place than the large tree directly above my little car? I think you see the problem…the landing pad thing- yeah, this is like that times about a hundred.

And as for Bird Lady, this is war.