Bird Poop and Car Mirror Adversaries

For a few weeks the car has been parked outside because of issues with the garage door opener. Almost every day of that time period there have been bird droppings on the front passenger door of the car. I began to wonder if there was a bird dropping target on the door that only birds could see.

I asked my wife where she was parking the car at work. I thought that she might be parking under a tree for shade from the Florida sun. Another possibility was a wire overhead. Even if she wasn't parking right under the wire a breeze could carry bird droppings for a distance off of plumb-straight to the ground.

The uncanny thing about the droppings is that they were always in the exact same place on the car. One day while the car was home I saw bird droppings on the driveway beneath what was on the car door so that clearly eliminated the problem while the car was parked elsewhere. This was unless, of course, my target theory was correct and there was a county-wide bird conspiracy against us.

The other day, after leaving the house for work, my wife came back into the house all excited because she saw a male cardinal sitting on the right side mirror above where the droppings were hitting car door. He flew away as she came up to the car. With that in mind, I also remembered seeing a female cardinal fluttering about the palmetto in the empty lot south of us.

When I first saw the female, I only wondered if there might be a nest nearby and we’d see fledgling cardinals, in a few weeks, taking their first flight lessons from mom and dad. Then it came to me that there may be connection. For all that I knew it might be part of a cardinal’s mating ritual to poop on a car door. Maybe biggest and baddest pooper gets the babe (or would that be chick?).

In this information age, you can find just about anything on the internet. What someone is willing to write about, there is someone else who will search for and read about it. It just comes down to what you’re willing to believe of what you find on the internet. Considering the number of people who hold Rush Limbaugh's rantings as gospel, that's pretty scary.

I tried several word combinations for searching. After half of a dozen different searches, I have accepted the theory that some birds spar with their reflection in the paint, windows and mirrors of cars. After pecking at their reflection, for a time, they poop on the car.

I was even able to find a well done You Tube video that showed a robin fighting with his reflection in a sunroof. Then the video speed was slowed to show the bird defecating on the car. The bird then moved to the mirror for another round of reflection pecking and finished by defecating on the car door as he perched on top of the mirror.

Allowing that birds have a cloaca instead of a separate urinary orifice and anus, this gives a whole new meaning to a human phrase sometimes spoken in anger. “Piss on it!” Another fair assumption is that these angry birds are clearly full of shit.

I never leave the motorcycle parked on the driveway. It's probably a good thing for our pooping cardinal. I have a vivid image in my mind of him doing a hot chrome bird hop because he tried to take on his reflection in the chromed oil reservoir while perched on the exhaust muffler.