How to Get Rid of a Noisy Miner

The sword comes into the world because of justice delayed and justice denied — Pirkei Avot

Editor’s Note: A parable by Elizabeth Rosen that might ruffle some feathers. —David Michael Slater

Lee is outside drowning the bird. We have tried everything to avoid this solution, but nothing else has worked and now Lee is outside, holding the Noisy Miner down under the water with the pool skimmer and waiting for it to finally, finally drown. The bird is a blur of black-and-white underwater, and I can see he is stricken. Lee, I mean. I don’t know what the bird’s pronoun is. There is an expression of horror on my husband’s face. His eyes skitter every direction but down to the cool blue water of the pool and the gray flurry of feathers in the net doing everything it can to survive this new terrible turn of events.

Lee was raised in a hunting family on the other side of the Blue Mountains but never took to it because he loves animals so much. I’ve seen him avert his eyes from a nature documentary showing a lion cub with a broken back, its mother gently nudging it with her snout. Mina, five years old at the time and in the bed between us, stroked her father’s head when she noticed his distress and whispered to him, “It’s ok, Daddy. It’s just life.”

Her attempt to console him came back to me the afternoon she got off the bus crying last week because some girls at school asked to see her horns. I gathered her into my arms, hot anger flaring behind my face as I carried her home, furious that I would now have to explain the long history behind the taunt, furious that the comfort her roots had given her until now were in peril. I made us hot chocolate in the kitchen and tried to explain to my seven-year-old in as un-frightening terms as I could, but, like generations of parents before me, I found myself at a loss for words when she asked me, “But why?” I considered telling her the same thing she had said to her father: “It’s just life.” But in the end, what I said was “it’ll be ok,” because most of us had experienced gibes just like it at some point, and it had been, usually. I could see she did and didn’t understand me. I could see her hesitation before stepping up into the bus the following morning.

The Noisy Miners are an irritation and a menace. Once they discovered our shed roof, they just kept gathering there. No idea why. The skull-piercing wee-wee-wee sound, like a jackhammer on helium, was bad enough, but when the jackhammers come in different notes on top of and out of sync with one another, it’s enough to drive you mad. It’s chaos-made-audible and deafening. The soundtrack to Hell.

On top of the noise they made, they swarmed our dogs and us, mobbing us with an aggression that far outweighed their size, feathers fluffed out so the yellow streak behind their eyes looked bigger, angrier, more predatory. They were just as ill-tempered with each other, pecking at their neighbors, yammering and screeching, flaring then flattening their feathers and lowering their heads to glare at one another.

Finally, when the dogs cowered at the back door and Mina wouldn’t go into the backyard anymore, we decided we had to do something. We tried everything we could think of to move the birds on. We put plastic models of brown falcons and currawongs up along the fence. The Noisy Miners just mobbed them, knocking them off.

We strung a cable of reflective bits and bobs from the eaves hoping that the flashing mirrors and tinsel would scare them away. They were back within hours.

We played predator calls on a loop; it just made them louder and more obnoxious as they alarmed.

We even spent one Sunday afternoon spraying them with the hose as we sat on the patio, talking with Lee’s father, who’d made the trip into Sydney from the other side of the Blue Mountains to visit. Didn’t take. The birds squawked and screamed and flew away, but as soon as the water was turned off, they’d settle again on the shed, tails in the air and heads lowered, glowering at us.

The lines on my father-in-law’s forehead furrowed when I told him what had happened to Mina a few weeks earlier. He nodded tightly, took a sip of his beer. It wasn’t the only incident he’d heard about. He’d been watching the news, keeping track, talking to his network of friends about what they were hearing, what they were experiencing. My father-in-law was a tough old bird himself – he’d lived through more than one of these upsurges, had even gone to fight after the surprise attack of Yom Kippur in ’73 – but he looked as worried as disgusted when he relayed a story about a friend’s grandson who had been hissed at by a group of kids in the school hallway. I looked to Lee, puzzled.

“Like gas showers,” Lee said, his brow creasing with the same intensity as his father’s.

After I put Mina to bed that night, I came out of her bedroom to see Lee and his father standing outside on the patio, their heads close to one another as Lee’s father spoke quietly, urgently to his son while they watched the Noisy Miners on the rooftop across from them.

The next day, Lee made a phone call to a friend, a biologist at the university, to see if my father-in-law’s advice had any merit. Lev came by the house that evening after work, and we walked him outside to see the birds. He nodded as we listed each of the things we’d done to get the Noisy Miners to move on.

“Your dad is right. You’re going to have to kill one of them,” Lev said after we’d finished.

Lee and I looked at each other, horrified.

“I know,” Lev said. “But it’s the only thing that will work with these bloody birds.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and showed us a video on YouTube. “Make sure you leave the body somewhere the others can see it,” he said a few minutes later as he shook Lee’s hand goodbye.

We still weren’t sure we believed him. It seemed crazy to think that it would have any effect other than reducing the number of birds on our shed by one, but having tried everything else, we bought a trap, and baited it, and when we found one of the squawking birds in the trap this morning, Lee went out with the skimmer, scooped the bird from the trap, and held it under the surface of the water until its flapping slowed, then stopped. He flipped the net over onto the pool deck, leaving the soggy, black mass of bird, with its one broken wing stretched out, in full view of the shed roof. Inside, at the kitchen sink, he washed his hands for a good long time and then stood with his back to the glass patio door for another good while before he muttered a few choice curse words and went off to get ready for work.

All day, I watch the Noisy Miners flit down from the roof to hop around the corpse. Their heads tilt this way and that, observing it. Then, a few at a time, they begin to fly away, the jackhammering decreasing bit by bit as they disappear into the sky. I text Lee in disbelief, sending a few seconds of video to him, but by the time he gets home, the birds are gone, just as his father and Lev had promised. We wonder whether the reprieve is temporary, but the next morning, the Noisy Miners are still gone.

For a few days, the lack of noise is strange, almost ominous. We test out the quiet, pulling our chairs out from under the patio to sit in the sun, waiting. We wear hats and sunscreen, just in case. We scan the skies, finely attuned for the sharp wing, the peck and squawk. But it doesn’t come, and we feel confident now that we can have Lee’s father back for a poolside BBQ without further issue.

When he comes two weekends later, we drink bottled beer and talk and watch Mina paddling in the pool while the dogs follow her from one end to the other, barking. When we yell at them to quit their noise, they do, and when Lee is occupied with the grill, my father-in-law gives me a meaningful look and I get up to follow him around the corner of the house to the driveway where he pops his boot and we peer in at Lee’s old hunting rifle. My father-in-law lifts it out carefully and puts it in my hands.

It is heavier than I anticipated, like a silent oath. I wrap my fingers around the stock. I touch the barrel. I try to imagine the noise it might make. I try, but the only sound I can hear is Mina’s lazy paddling as she floats on her back, taking in the clouds, the birds flying among them.

Colorwise, Elizabeth Rosen is an autumn. Her stories have appeared in places such as North American Review, Baltimore Review, Flash Frog, Pithead Chapel, and New Flash Fiction Review. She came of age in the '80s and still wants her MTV. You can learn other fun facts about her at www.thewritelifeliz.com.

What five tiny delights lift your spirits and make you happy?

• Used bookstores

• Librarians

• Dissecting the Met Gala fashion with my best friend the next day

• Dogs

• Macaroni and cheese

What five tiny JEWISH delights lift your spirits and make you happy?

• Barbara Streisand singing Avina Malkeinu

• Watching matzah balls expand

• Standing in the British Museum and being able to tell my kids that most of the ancient tablets displayed around the Rosetta Stone would have been written by our people

• Knowing my rabbi's great-great-grandfather had a little broth "to keep his strength up" between sermons on Yom Kippur

• Latkes