Bird Watching

 Isn’t this the (bunny-eared) face of the sweetest, most innocent dog that ever did live???  HA!!

I don’t think I posted it on here yet, just on Facebook…but…Riley caught herself a bird a couple of weeks ago.  Yuck.  Forgive me if I’ve already told this story, but my memory isn’t the greatest, so I’ll just (not)enjoy telling it again.

I will say one good thing about my bird catcher here–she does listen to me.  I guess all those basic and advanced training classes were really worth it and have paid off!  I was outside with Riley in the backyard poop scooping and I had seen Riley running along the fence earlier chasing after birds (of course, I never thought she would actually catch herself one [actually, I should say “another one”]).  Anyway, I had my back to Riley and heard her run behind me, so I turned around and lo and behold, she had a bird in her mouth.  Disgusting.  I half yelled/half growled at her to “drop it” and then to “leave it” and she obeyed, so I was quite pleased.

I went over to where the bird was on the ground and saw that it was still breathing.  I was going to pick it up with our handy poop scooper and put it over on the “safe” side of the fence, but when I got near it with the poop scooper, it turned its head and looked up at me–thus, creeping me out!  I brought Riley inside and luckily my dad was just 5 minutes down the road, so I waited for him to come and deal with the bird.

When we went back out in the yard to get the bird, it was gone.  So I think it was just stunned and had flown off and we didn’t have to take care of it–hooray!  (Birds creep me out–always have, don’t know why).

This was on a Wednesday, so on the Friday right after that when I went out to poop scoop again I realized that the little birdie hadn’t flown away like I thought…  I realized that before I even saw the bird because I could smell it–yuck!  It had I guess moved itself further down into the yard, right next to the fence and kind of blended in with the gray wood on the fence, so we hadn’t seen it on our big bird search on Wednesday, and died.  RIP little birdie.  😦

The good thing though is that both dogs left it alone from the time I had told Riley to “leave it” to the time we found it Friday evening.  I can imagine Riley desperately wanted to bring it inside as a present or trophy for us, but thankfully, she demonstrated remarkable self control!

But……here’s a picture I took of Riley this evening…apparently she’s still on the lookout for another bird:

Nooooooo!

Her tally:

1 Bunny

2 Birds

1 (Already Dead) Mouse

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