Now, I recognize that there are few times, if ever, in your life that you might be in the market for a fake snake.However. If you are, you might like to know that a website called Fake Rubber Snakes exists. Yes. And these are the category of snake from which you can choose: Giant Fake Snakes; Straight Fake Snakes; Coiled Fake Snakes; Small Fake Snakes; Guttzie Buddy Snakes. So ya know.
Because, you see, we have this ancient row house that we've spent the last three years pouring our time, money, energy, caulk (oh, the caulk!), etc into.
And Nick has worked incredibly hard in his scant free time, and he is very house proud. (And what's that expression about pride before a fall while backing up to admire one's handiwork?)
But, now we have this galling bird problem.
They like to sit in the sun outside my mom's front window. And drop feathers and kick dirt off the sill and poop on the stoop. Last weekend Nick cleaned out the remnants of two old nests.
You know how sometimes one little thing is a final straw? No pun, but with those nests, Nick reached his patience limits with the birds. He decided that what we really need are fake snakes.
Fake snakes! Fake snakes would fix this!
First he called around to places like Lowes and Cold Home Hippo and Target and our local hardware store.
Ever tried calling somewhere out of the blue and asking for a fake snake? Once you make it clear that you're serious, and then you explain - bird problem, want to scare them away, fake snake...then people on the other end are all, "Hey, that's a good idea! No, we don't have those. We have owls."
Apparently everyone has owls. Nick wanted snakes, because they're subtler. He didn't want a big old fake owl on his house.
Which is how Nick discovered FakeRubberSnakes.com - for all your fake snake needs. Ultimately, however, he ordered from Amazon because of the Prime two-day shipping. He needed those birds gone yesterday.
I suggested he get a copperhead, mainly because it's the only snake from this area that I know. But he did a little research - not quite as extensive as the Top Ten Deadliest Animals in Africa - and chose a rattlesnake and a coral snake, which we don't have in DC but apparently looks just like some other snake we do have. Of which the birds should be petrified.
Also - coral snakes? Very deadly poisonous. If you see one, run!
The birds? Not only not scared, but seemingly completely unimpressed. They were up there this morning, chit-chatting in the sun, with the scary rattlesnake (with a head that actually rattles!) peering down behind them.
Winged bastards.
Next, we get an owl.
Something tells me that birds are probably not often at the mercy of snakes - their eggs, maybe, but don't birds usually do the attacking of snakes, not the other way around?
ReplyDeleteI say you find a neighbor you don't like very much and put a cutout of Tippi Hedren in their yard.
According to our, ahem, reading research, some birds are: http://www.ehow.com/how_2314093_scare-birds-fake-snakes.html, but not all. Clearly not ours. According to our real-life data.
DeleteI like the Tippi Hedren idea. We only have one actual yard on our whole street, and they seem like nice people. Plus they have a wall and a gate. Which Betty and Jordan got stuck inside one day for an hour, but that's a whole nother story.
We had owls when I worked at the Carolina Inn. Occasionally they would fall off the roof. So we'd dress them up as various staff members and put them up around the office.
ReplyDeleteI like that idea very much! I'm looking forward to having an owl.
DeleteI'm quite sure that once Nick has scoured them, my mom and Jordan are going to quite enjoy the fake snakes. We'll see how the owls go.
A couple of years ago a bird dropped a snake on my front door mat as I was walking out of the house. True story. I barely survived the heart attack, I believe the snake fared no better than I, but he slithered off into the bushes before I could finish screeching so, you know...
ReplyDeleteI would have fallen over dead. Right then and there. What a scare!
DeleteAnd this does add fuel to Jessica's position that birds are more threatening to snakes.
I can't decide if Fakesnakes.com is a credit to capitalism or the internet or both. I wonder what their annual revenue is? I think it's a question without an interesting answer, so nevermind (file it with root cause of diseases of Downton characters). I applaud your research.
ReplyDeleteI like how you use the term Cold Home Hippo effortlessly in a sentence. Which in turn made perfect sense to me.
I imagine the birds in DC are more resilient than birds in, say, Georgia. I hope the owl works!
Hmm. Both? I imagine there was demand, and then the internet makes it all so easy. I assume they're all made by children in China, so even though they're cheap, the markup is decent. And why am I spending my brain time on this? As you said, much like diseases of Downton characters!
DeleteUnrelated to nothing but your comment above, I once got locked inside a Charleston graveyard in the dark with Esme. A group of men helped us scale the 8 foot wall. They even lifted the stroller over.
ReplyDeleteDana, I'd have been so scared I would have sat down and cried. Even after reading The Graveyard Book, which utterly charmed me, I would lose my shit locked in a graveyard. Wow.
DeleteHey, Graveyard Book! Two Neil Gaiman references in an hour (although I may have been the one who mentioned it to Dana). WooHoo!
DeleteSo the trick my dad always used is mirrors. Birds aren't smart enough to be self-aware. They see the reflection and thinkt it's another bird. They won't build nests because someone else is already there. It's always worked back home.
ReplyDeleteMirrors! I wonder if Nick would go for that or if the idea of mirrors on the front of our house would bother him. One friend suggested bird spikes, and we're considering that. But maybe a mirror in the hole above, where we can't put spikes.
DeleteWe had birds that liked to sit outside our bedroom window and sing VERY LOUDLY at 4am. They also liked to build nests on our porch, which was fun for a while, except they turned out to be VERY territorial and would dive bomb anyone who approached the porch (or the front yard) during the time there were eggs or babies in the nest.
ReplyDeleteSo, we decided they had to relocate.
We looked into owls, but couldn't find one with consistently good reviews. (We were amused by one owl that had a review in which the reviewer said the birds were now nesting in the fake owl, so it was clearly not fooling them.)
We covered the crevice they were nesting in with netting.
We also bought some carpet tacking (the strip of wood with the nails sticking up in it?) and lined the gutter that they liked to sit on with it.
It seems to have worked -- good luck!
Aaaaagh! At least we don't have a 4 am problem, which would incense me. As would the dive bombing.
DeleteI love this sentence: "We looked into owls, but couldn't find one with consistently good reviews." And before last weekend wouldn't have understood it.
Carpet tacking is along the lines of the spikes we're looking at. Glad they worked!
We used to use fake snakes in South Africa to keep the monkeys out of the vegetable patch. Worked a treat! But you have to move them around every day so the monkeys/birds don't get suspicious.....
ReplyDeleteJust remember, when it comes to coral snakes, "Red next to black is a friend of Jack. Red next to yellow can kill a fellow." Yes, I was a Boy Scout.
ReplyDelete