Avian Hazards

Not all hazards come on four legs; some have wings.  Every spring rural route drivers have encounters with nesting tree swallows.  And then there’s the old world robin in the Midlands who found the perfect nesting box: waterproof, perfect sized entrance, and centrally located.  Oh, people had a habit of poking mother robin with bits of paper while she set her eggs but she just poked the paper back out the hole.  All was well until people started complaining about missing mail. 

 

Nesting robins can be quite feisty when they’re brooding eggs.  Letter carriers have been dive bombed on many occasions when the got too close to a nest.  After our Crown Corporation was proclaimed and its leaders decided to impose their idea of a wardrobe on their less than willing employees, I hit the street on a hot day with long polyester pants and a 100% acrylic “burger king” shirt.  Somehow I felt it only appropriate when a robin dropped a deposit all over me. 

 

Purple martins and other small songbirds seem to sense that predatory birds do not like to get too close to human habitations.  People who fail to take down their Christmas Wreaths frequently find themselves hosts to an avian family.  Hanging baskets are also favoured haunts as are the occasional unclosed mailboxes.  Homeowners frequently avoid their front entrances until the brood has been hatched and fledged but the mailman still has to visit the mailbox enduring the squawks and hurried departure of the nesting inhabitants. 

 

Each June marks the arrival of swarming wasps who find the air holes in mailboxes the perfect entrance.  Many customers discover they have tenants when they receive notice that they won’t get mail until they mount an eviction.  Mailboxes are frequently mounted at doors used only to reach the mail as the owner accesses their car through the garage entrance and never use their front door.  This can result in approaches that don’t get shoveled in winter but also can lead to wasp nests of which their hosts are blissfully unaware.  In one such case I served notice that I didn’t consider it safe to continue delivery with the wasps inhabiting the customer’s rather overgrown lilac shrubs.  When the professionals were called in they had to cut out much of the shrubbery to remove the one yard diameter nest.  Which serves to remind me of the gentleman in Boston who decided to do something about the honeybees in his attic when people started crossing the street before they walked past his house.  The exterminators removed 5 tons of bees wax and honey from the hive in his attic.  One can only hope he had better screens applied to his attic vents. 

 

In just the past five years I solved a problem of another kind for a customer.  When I met her with her children in the driveway I reminded her that she hadn’t picked up her mail in over a week.  She was scared of spiders and reported that there was a spider in her mailbox.  Returning to the box I found a hitherto unobserved nest in a corner of the box where mother spider was raising a large family of spiderlets.    With a piece of the customer’s unaddressed mail I cautiously removed the nest and its inhabitants and unceremoniously stomped on them—no, it didn’t rain the next day.