Don’t blame Alfred Hitchcock.
I was 11 years old when I first saw “The Birds.”
It remains one of my favorite movies.
But it’s not simply the idea of crows, seagulls and sparrows attacking humans that intrigues me, it’s the shots they offer -- left to right and right to left passing shots, straight-aways and incomings, lot of incomings.
I fantasize about rescuing Tippi Hedren with my Model 12, racking a shell into the chamber and dusting the gull that attacks her early in the film.
And Suzanne Pleshette never would have died had I been there to fend off the crows.
But most of all I dream about birds flying closer instead of farther away. Therein lies the advantage of hunting birds on the fight.
The birds I hunt are seldom closer on the second shot. Rarely does the Hungarian partridge that flushes in front of my dogs come toward me.
Oh, sure, every once in a while a bird does fly in my direction, but rarely does that bird live to pass on his flawed genes.
Unfortunately, the birds that flush out of range and fly over the horizon seem to do most of the breeding.
What fun it would be to hunt ducks that didn’t flare when they spotted my poorly camoflauged carcass, but flew at me instead.
I’m sure I’d become a better shot. Give those sharptail grouse flushing out of range a few seconds to spot me and here they’d come, closer and closer until even I couldn’t miss.
And if I did.
No big deal.
It’s not like missing a shot at a charging Cape buffalo.
Even though the birds in Hitchcock’s film killed a number of folks, I think I could easily handle the average grouse in hand-to-wing combat.
At least I hope so.
I hate to think I’d turn and run, screaming like a little girl while that sage grouse I missed cleanly pecks me on the back of the head.
But who knows? The humiliation of losing a fight to a three-pound bird might send me into a comatose state like the one that befell Hedren after she was pecked and wing-slapped into unconsciousness by a swarm of gulls.
Had she been packing a Winchester pump, I like to think she’d have been able to control her emotions and pile up those birds like a dove hunter in Mexico.
But that’s just fantasy.
My reality is quite different.
It involves a lot of misses at the south end of too many fast-flying northbound birds.
I can’t blame Hitchcock for that.
Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net