facing mecca

I left work on time (which, in my world, feels like leaving work early) so that C and I could go buy the Christmas presents we've been planning for people. Our primary destination was not the mall, but since going to our primary destination would have required us to drive on IH-35 during rush hour traffic, we stopped at the mall to window-shop and people-watch.

For some reason, the area around Highland Mall is always teeming with grackles, large, ominous-looking black birds who love to congregate in trees and terrorize pedestrians who try to walk beneath them. But this afternoon, it wasn't just the trees that were full of grackles; there was a section of the parking lot where thousands and thousands of birds stood on the asphalt and sat on the hoods of cars. It was so full that one could literally not drive through that part of the parking lot, and most curiously of all, they were all facing Mecca -- every last one of them was pointed east.

I opened my window to take some pictures from the car, and as we sat nearby, hundreds more birds arrived to join the ones already standing on the ground. C rather nervously informed me that Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" used grackles to portray the eponymous flock. She was relieved when I rolled my window up again.

I was tempted to drive slowly into the flock to see them fly away, but C was rather persistent in her demand that I turn around and go the other way, so I left the grackles in peace.

Grackles remind me a bit of velociraptors. Their heads have the same wedged shape, and their eyes are almost reptilian. They're known for being very intelligent, which makes them look even more sinister. And though I've heard that people from other parts of the country find them exotic, around here, they're pest birds, particularly in the fall.

When I was an undergrad and living on campus, they'd hire people to come out with air rifles to shoot blanks into the trees and scare the grackles away. Generally, the grackles would fly away -- for a minute, anyway -- and then come back again. They're smart; too smart, really.

When we left the mall, night had fallen, and while we couldn't see the grackles anymore, we could still hear their deafening cries in the trees. The mall, apparently, has resorted to some rather creative measures to try to scare the grackles away. As we walked beneath an awning, we heard a strange loud crunch, like the sound of a can being smashed. C and I looked at each other puzzledly, then shrugged. We were well into the parking lot when we heard some poor (likely underpaid) person emitting a large meeeooooooooow through the loudspeaker.

The grackles couldn't have cared less.