STEPHEN KING SHOULD SEE THIS

It was the oddly scrambling sparrows that caused me to notice, on a recent afternoon, that the farmer who owns the paddy a couple of fields below us across the road has done away with the usual eye-noxious glittertape as bird deterrent; nor is he using the big shiny hawkeyes, the old CDs, the plastic dead crows, the spinning PET bottle propellers or any of the various other bird-repellent gadgetry you see in the fields at this time of year, just as the rice heads are beginning to swell and the stalks to bend under the weight of their growing value, a value also recognized and prized by local wild pigs, deer and monkeys, which are easily kept away by electric fences, whereas the birds are and always have been another story.

Years ago, in a paddy up above us, the owner - one of the more artistic farmers up here - used a regular scarecrowy approach, but his scarecrow was a straw-hatted samurai farmer wielding a bloody (bamboo) sword. As I recall, though the occasional passerby was startled into appreciating the farmer's artistic inventiveness and gory originality - especially around dusk - the unmoving samurai did not convince the birds, who seemed to enjoy the safety of their sword-wielding protector. Still, it has a place in scarecrow history.

The farmer I speak of today, however, has tossed all that derivative stuff and done what is the simplest, yet most harrowing thing I've ever seen in this regard-- he took two flexy mountain bamboo rods, stuck one end the ground at each corner of the open-sided edge of his paddy (these mountain paddies all shelf outward as the slope declines) and to the tip of each rod tied the smaller end of a long and unappealing necktie.

More than unappealing, actually. That waving fabric isn't just dull the way only ties can be dull, like plain brown, blue or grey ties, or even duller, like striped school/political ties, or garishly hand-painted ties like from the 30s, or a broad yellow-and-red paisley tie like I used to wear to get out of having to wear a tie altogether; those are really nothing more than just bad ties. These I speak of are ties that Stephen King might write a bestselling horror novel about, if he lived around here. They'd be right at home in Misery. They seem to be working, too, for there are no birds around that paddy anymore; it has had an aura of eerie silence ever since the wind began to wave the threat of neckwear before local birdlife.

The ornate fashion items seem to be functioning like a force field of some kind, for beyond their flailing reach the sparrows are happily nibbling at the rich riceheads dangling over the identical edges of the neighboring tie-less paddies, though not one of the little rice thieves has drifted anywhere near those grasping neck pendants waving emetically in the breeze. The farmer who had owned the ominous ties must have been fully aware of their dark powers as he withdrew them from the depths of his closet to hang out in the elements where they could at least benefit him by repelling rice thieves.

How freely the birds dine at the neighboring paddies, as I say, only now and then glancing sideways to make sure that those narrow creatures of restraint are edging no nearer...

Now that I think of it I haven't seen any wild pigs around, either, and the deer are acting as strangely as the crows. Stephen, you can reach me at the email in the sidebar.