To kill a mockingbird - or just make him move away

Recently I picked back up Harper Lee’s “To kill a Mockingbird”. The book is the quintessential southern gothic and I highly recomend it if you have not read it.
In the book Harper Lee said that it was a sin to kill a mockingbird because mockingbirds never harm other living creatures. I understand the juxtaposition of the death of the mockingbird and the death of innocence in the book and all that. But I disagree with the point that a mockingbird won’t harm anything. Mockingbirds are like little heathen gang members.

Jerry, the only mockingbird that I ever knew personally, lived in a tree not far from my front door. He was a terrible and aggressive creature. Maybe it had eggs or little ones in the nest in the tree. But every time I would walk outside the front door, it would screech and dive bomb me until I was out of site. Our poor cat lived in fear of the front door.
Jerry would swoop down and flog the cat, pin him down low and then come in for another flogging swoop. The cat ran for cover in a drain pipe and the mockingbird guarded it until the poor cat had to make his way down the pipe a half block away. The cat eventually made it out the other end and snuck back to the side door where he was let in. From that day on, he would sit in the front window an gnash his teeth at the bird through the glass but lived in immortal fear of going out the front door. I named the bird “Jerry” because he was constantly harassing the little tomcat.

Mockingbirds can imitate just like a parrot. I would go outside and take the cordless phone with me. I would lay the phone down as I worked in the yard. If it rang I didn’t have to run back inside to answer it. All I had to do was pick it up and press “talk”. Eventually, Jerry learned to imitate the sound of the phone. He was actually quite adept at it. He sounded exactly like my telephone. This was funny at first. But a little known fact is that mockingbirds are prolific singers and will make noise all day and sometimes all night. Thus the phone rang whether it was ringing or not at all hours. I eventually had to buy a phone with a different ringer to be able to tell the difference.

Jerry was like a little Frank Sinatra. He sang all the time. Especially on the weekends when your head is under the covers hiding from the early morning sunlight. Jerry also loved to sit on the power line running to my house. The power line cut across the drive way. So Jerry used it as his own private little lavatory. The thing more annoying that being dive bombed was the bombs that he left on my car.

Jerry had to go.
I toyed with the idea of a BB gun but was afraid that if I missed the neighbors would have a cracked window. He seemed to disappear whenever I brought out the BB gun anyway. So I bought a plastic owl and hung him in the tree next to Jerry. I enjoyed watching Jerry dive bomb the owl and make his yellow eyes jiggle. Eventually Jerry got accustomed to the plastic owl and one morning I noticed that Jerry had switched his lavatory to the limb just above the plastic owl. Either it got too cold and Jerry move south or he decided that his bird poop covered plastic barn owl neighbor had driven down his property value to the point that he needed to move. Either way, good riddance Mr. Mockingbird. Harper Lee was full of crap.