Featherbrained Plot: The Birds of Central Market

By: Dr. Don Dafoe

You’ve seen them. I have too. They creep me out.

Hundreds of grackles with long, pointed beaks and beady eyes sitting on the wires at Lover’s Lane and Greenville Avenue. 

Why are they there? What are they doing? What are they planning?

Experts say the birds gather for flocking and food.

Flocking protects these gregarious great tails from predators and food is plentiful around grocery stores and fast-food restaurants.

Tasty bugs are attracted to the parking lot lights and heat rising from the asphalt is a source of warmth in the winter. 

That’s the party line among the ornithologically predisposed anyway. 

I wonder if a more sinister plot is brewing. After all, the venery term for a group of Quiscalus quiscula is a “plague” of grackles.

The nefarious motives of these winged creatures may go no further than soiling a Cybertruck. (If the owner has not learned about the consequences of parking under the grackles — splat! – they will soon enough.) 

The grackles are especially amused if the vehicle was recently serviced at the Vintage Car Wash.

The Birds was a 1963 Alfred Hitchcock horror film wherein icy blonde Tippi Hedren and other citizens of Bodega Bay California are mercilessly dive-bombed and pecked to death in some cases. 

Could it happen here? Are these amassing fowl really killing machines just awaiting the signal? 

A poem comes to mind: 

Sing a song of sixpence,

A pocket full of rye,

Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.

Then…

The maid was in the garden

Hanging out the clothes.

Along came a blackbird 

And snipped off her nose. 

I wish I had not seen The Birds. Thinking about a grackle attack could drive a person Psycho.

Dr. Don Dafoe, a transplant surgeon, has lived in Highland Park for more than a year and a half — long enough to introduce his neighbors to his penchants for dad jokes and old movies.