Villa Diodati - A NiaD writing event

What is this To Kill a Bluejay?

A courtroom drama about a murder in a Canadian baseball team?

It’s a book by Stephen King? Can’t find it, searching the title.

It was, like your earlier reference to Jane Austen’s Hunger Games, a riff on the ongoing “alternative reality of books” silliness! :slight_smile:

(Taken one step further by twisting the original title “To Kill A Mockingbird” and playing on — spoiler alert — one of the lines in the book where (to paraphrase) “you can kill all the blue jays you want, but to kill a mockingbird is a sin”.

As someone who live last in an area overrun by these mofos… that’s a lie. One of them is copying my alarm at “not alarm time dark-thirty”. It will be ended if I can find it.

Mockingbirds are not my friends right now.

I watched a mockingbird completely mess with one guy for a good fifteen minutes.

The person parked his car then pressed the button on the fob to lock the car as he walked away.

Immediately, a mockingbird made a sound as if the car had been unlocked. The guy stopped and tried locking the car again. The bird made the unlocked sound again.

They kept doing this, and I just watched and laughed. I wanted to see if the guy would ever figure it out. Instead, he got back in his car and drove away.

I’m convinced that bird knew exactly what it was doing.

Mother Nature will find a way to punish humanity for our crimes against her…

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At this point my crime is not shooting out my neighbors “safety” lights (note the quotes). I feed these vermin, give housing options, and keep predators at bay. I would shoot out lights but the authorities suggested that “your sleep being disturbed is not sufficient to violate multiple laws pertaining to discharge of firearms and the destruction of private property”.

I bet if I captured this bird (also against the law) and sent it to law makers they would quickly change the laws.

I used to live in a village in Herefordshire, UK. Being a birder, I had various feeders, including a ground-feeder, and a nice little rockery with running water and small pools for the birds to bathe in. I got all sorts visiting. But when the starlings arrived, and especially when they were breeding, the real entertainment began. They bicker and peck, starlings, and when the fledglings bathed, they all went in together, bickering and pecking.

Anyway, the parents sometimes took time out from their progeny, probably in shifts, and gathered on my roof. Just hanging out and chilling in the sun.

One day I was lazing on the lawn and about half a dozen starlings turned up on the roof. They probably wanted to use the ground-feeder, and were waiting for me to leave, which they knew I would, eventually. Suddenly one of them mimicked a phone ringing. I like to think that sound had worked for them before. Then, a minute of so later, another made the sound of a car horn. When that didn’t move me, they began a whole routine: dogs barking, other bird calls, a clucking chicken, police siren. On and on it went, a cacophony of starling mimicry. In time, I caved and went inside. As one, they flew down to the feeder.

Fabulous birds, starlings.

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A follow on joke riffing on Jane Austen’s Hunger Games…

I suppose that I should have considered that satirizing a author that has abandoned satire might have been a field too far.