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Bird on glass
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Perhaps he's nearsighted
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Have you ever had a bird try to fly into your house through an open
window, only to discover by banging into the glass that the window is
actually closed?
Some time in March, I heard the noise of a bird running into my window.
Over the next few days I heard and saw quite a few birds hitting various
windows around my house.
"What a lot of stupid birds there are this
year," I thought to myself.
Over the next few weeks, I realized that
there was not a multitude of stupid birds, but only one bird with the
combined stupidity that I had assigned to dozens.
At first, our bird was not very choosy about which window he banged into,
dirtying up at least ten different windows in four different rooms.
As time went on, he narrowed his choice down to just a few windows, and
finally settled on one particular window as his favorite head-banging
target.
At his peak of frantic activity, he would bang into the same window
at an interval as short as about three seconds for periods of up to a
couple of minutes. Given the marks on the windows from his collisions,
and extrapolating from the times I have heard his attacks, I estimate
that this bird has run into my windows at least three thousand times.
It's now May, and he's still at it. He has admittedly slowed down a bit.
Perhaps all those hard knocks have finally started to get to him.
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The culprit
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Wing marks
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How high could B.F. Skinner have counted with this bird?
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