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A cardinal hit my kitchen slider in Boise and I just stood there with a sponge in my hand
Last Tuesday morning I was washing dishes at the kitchen sink in Boise when a male cardinal smacked the slider about two feet from my face. He flopped down on the deck boards and sat there with his beak open, and I just froze with a soapy sponge in my hand for maybe 30 seconds. I finally grabbed a shoebox, lined it with a dish towel, and slid him in, then put the box in a dark closet with the lid cracked so he could breathe. After about 45 minutes I heard scratching, so I carried the box out to the backyard and he shot off into the spruce tree like nothing happened. I taped up two sheets of printer paper on the outside of the glass that same afternoon, but they look terrible and I know he'll be back. Does anyone have something that actually works on a slider and doesn't make your house look like a daycare craft project?
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paulperry1mo ago
Watched my neighbor go through this exact thing with a blue jay two summers ago. He tried the paper trick first, then moved to those window decals shaped like maple leaves, and the jay still rang his bell twice more that month. What finally did it was when his wife hung a set of those beaded curtains in front of the slider, the noisy wooden kind, and the birds just started bouncing off the beads instead of the glass. She hated how it looked for about a week, then got used to it, and honestly it made the deck feel like a tiki bar. The birds see the beads moving and pull up before they commit. My only worry with that setup in Boise is whether the wind out there whips the beads hard enough to drive you nuts at night. Have you checked whether your slider has one of those screens you could just close all day?
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