I was digging through some old, loose text docs on my laptop the other day when I found a page of notes from a conversation I’d had with my friend Sheila back in the early 2000s.
She’d called me in a pique while I was standing in line at a bookstore. And it was early enough in the cell phone era that I’d felt compelled to answer.
Sheila, at the time, lived in one of those Key West houses where it was tough to differentiate the inside from the outside. Her kitchen opened up onto her deck, which opened up into her yard.
She also had an outdoor shower. She wanted to know why why why the birds kept pooping in it.
I asked her which birds. She said the gray ones.
Eurasian collared doves? I asked.
No, they weren’t doves, she said, they were just regular birds — little gray things with black caps.
I asked if they had a ruddy patch under the tail. She said she hadn’t thought to look there.
I told her they were probably gray catbirds, slightly skulky winter residents that looked like the no-frills versions of northern mockingbirds. I said they most likely were sneaking in after someone uses the shower to drink from the puddles of fresh water on the decking. I said the pooping-in-the-shower thing most likely wasn’t personal because birds, like nearly all animals on the planet, don’t tend to put a lot of forethought into where they poop. They just let loose.
She said there weren’t any puddles to speak of. I said they didn’t have to be very big. A drip would be plenty for a bird as small as a catbird. Fresh water was hard for birds to find and access in the Keys.
I told her she was lucky to be confronted with such non-threatening poops, as I knew a guy who studied roseate spoonbills and got it in the mouth while he was approaching a nest one day. I said someone else I knew had a warbler land a poop in their ear.
According to Sheila, this was not helpful information. She wanted to know what she could do to make the birds stop pooping in her shower.
I recommended indoor plumbing, which, apparently, was not helpful, either.
She told me she held me personally responsible, as the birds weren’t pooping in her shower before I started writing a newspaper column. (I was writing a column for that other paper at the time.)
I told her I’d speak to their union rep.
I had a lot of great conversations with Sheila.
I once used the word “avifaunified” in a column, a neologism I made up to be the bird version of personified. Later that week she slipped a note through our mail slot, written in Sharpie on the back of a pink rack card advertising jet skis, that said, “Avifaunafied is a pretty fancy word for a straight guy.”
I once sat down and helped her edit a letter to the editor that she wanted to send. After about an hour she said, “Everything is the (hecking) Declaration of Independence with you, isn’t it?”
I still hear her raspy voice in my head on random occasions, despite her being gone for more than 15 years. On an island filled with misfits, freaks and “unique” personalities, she was in her own genus. Key West is a lesser place without her.
Other than joking with Sheila, I’ve never been judgy about outdoor showers. The fact that you can use one almost year round is one of the great perks of living in the Keys.
I actually lived in a house on Packer Street for several years that didn’t have a functional indoor shower or bathtub, just two pipes with valves that met at a shower head just inside the back gate.
I’ve been wanting one ever since, until last summer, when I actually got one working on our back deck. And it has been great in a way that is hard to articulate. An outdoor shower is just exceptionally pleasant. So far no birds have pooped in there. At least not that I’ve noticed.
One of the things I can say I appreciate about it is the way it limits what you can see of the world to a big overhead square filled with sky and clouds and treetops.
In the yard over the back fence there’s a big mango tree, and over the months it was fun to watch from the shower as the fruits turned from little grape-sized things to full-on sunset colored fruits. The neighboring house is a construction project and the owners only come down a couple weeks a year to work on it, so mostly it is unoccupied. Which means occasionally people sneak into the yard briefly to grab the fallen mangoes off the ground.
I was taking a shower last summer when I looked up and saw a mango-picking basket on a pole rise up into my line of sight and yank down one of the mangos. For the fun of it I cleared my throat very loudly. The basket rose up again, more quickly this time, grabbed a second mango, then disappeared.
The shower birding also has been pretty entertaining. I remember how happy I was the first time I saw a magnificent frigatebird, the first time I saw a peregrine falcon, the first time I saw a kettle of turkey vultures, the first time I saw a short-tailed hawk. (Considering there are only about 500 short-tails in North America, you have to wonder how many people have had the privilege of seeing one from an outdoor shower.)
I’ve also seen some small songbirds that I could identify, birds like blue-gray gnatcatchers, which are obvious from the way they spin around on the branches; palm warblers, which have a telltale tail twitch; and female American redstarts, which have big, easy-to-spot yellow spots on their tails.
And I have been able to identify the occasional gray catbird.
I considered keeping a list for a while but it was hard to work out how to do it, as paper and ink generally don’t mix well with water. Also, I really don’t like keeping lists.
This week, though, I was out there when a trio of warblers flitted from our other neighbor’s tamarind tree to the mahogany in our yard. One of them I could tell because of its bright yellow face – a black-throated green warbler. But the other two slipped away, their identities known only to each other.
I might have to start keeping a pair of binoculars next to the shampoo.
