Dog-gone Decoys

Our backyard has turned into a scene from Alfred Hitchcock's movie "The Birds." Every morning before Phil leaves for work, he fills Buckley's bowl with dog food and sets it out on the back porch for him to eat from all day. But last week I noticed that Buckley never touches the food, the freaking birds eat it all before he can get to it! They come from who knows where and sit on the fence and in the trees waiting to make their move. Then six or seven of them will move in, and they have a system. One bird gets the food while two or three other birds watch from the ground and the trees for anyone coming. The one getting the food feeds the "watch birds" and himself. If the watch birds see something coming, like Buckley or Phil with his BB gun for example, they make a noise and all 47 birds in the surrounding area fly away. This makes them very difficult to shoot. We have been leaving the BB gun on the counter next to the back door to have handy for when the birds move in. I tried all day Friday to get a good shot off, but to no avail. Then Phil set the dog bowl up on Saturday so he could see it from the kitchen table, waited for the birds to come to eat, then shot them from the dining room! These two birds were two of his victims. He decided to use them as decoys to lure in the other birds. How did he get these lifeless birds to look so real, you ask? He shoved a wire up their gut and stuck it in the ground. Then he posed them over the dog bowl to make it look as though they were eating from it like all their other friends! He shot three birds that day.

Only Phil could come up with something like this. I just had to capture the moment.