Birds.

I don’t know a lot about birds. I know they fly. I know there are eggs involved. I know they make a chirp, cheep or pip like sound most of the time unless they’re overly musical. Other than that, I don’t know their habits or anything like that.

When I work from home I break up the morning and afternoon by taking a 15 or so minute walk up and down the road. It’s a good way to get a little bit of exercise and it gives me the opportunity to stretch my legs and my brain.

Up the road a few lots is a large meadow. I think it used to be a hay field but it hasn’t been farmed in quite a few years. There’s a lot of wild brush, leafy bushes and the like. When walking along this stretch of the road there are always three black birds with red and a splotch of yellow on their wings watching me very carefully. Over the past several weeks I have noticed that they like to form a perimeter. One goes up on the tallest electric pole near this area, another goes on a tree that’s close by and a third perches on the wires.

When I pass the pole, the third bird then starts to follow me a bit in a very rhythmic pattern. He or she flies out from the wire, circles rather low over my head and lands back on the wire a little farther up my path of travel. He or she does this three times until I pass a thicket of green leafy growth, then they stay on the wire. All the while the three of them are making chirping noises with the one on the wire being the most chatty.

When I come back down the road on my return trip, I am on the other side of the road opposite the meadow and directly under the wire. The birds resume their same position but the one on the wire doesn’t do the trinity circle thing. He or she just watches and dumps little poops on the lawn under the wire. The conversation between the three of them resumes until I am beyond the tree. Then the three of them fly back across the road and into the meadow, assumedly to whatever they’re protecting.

I find this fascinating.