'Big Bird' is one of the nicknames I use for a very large raptor that I ended up having an unexpected series of interactions with the first time I was homeless. Other nicknames include 'Murder Bird' and 'Hate Bird', though I mostly used those early in our interactions, for reasons that will likely be obvious in the telling.
So I should back up and expand on this 'first time I was homeless' remark; yeah, I spent a few years being homeless. And am homeless again right now, actually, which is a big part of what reminded me of Big Bird. (I meant to tell this story years ago, but kept forgetting) Anyway, the first time I was homeless I spent several years in California, trying to get back into housing; I'm not going to dwell too much on this 'was homeless' thing in this post, but I can't really talk about my interactions with Big Bird if I completely avoid talking about being homeless, so... it's now mentioned.
Anyway, I moved about California while homeless for various reasons, and my habit was to find a wilderness-y place for me to set up a tent for me to sleep in at night. This was of course so I could sleep somewhere without people getting on my case about being on their property or whatever, but in daylight hours I'd leave and go about my Daily Homeless Business, packing up my tent and taking it with me. Most of these wilderness-y places weren't really all that wilderness-y (Undeveloped land with plants growing on it isn't really wilderness), but in this particular case I was setting up in a very large field more or less at the edge of the city, bounded by a raised highway in one direction and a series of houses that had no ground route to the field in another direction; people from a nearby mobile home park would do a certain amount of hiking through the area for fun, but it was a strange space that was right on top of plenty of human infrastructure and yet sufficiently ignored by humans it was one of the most 'wild' places I ever saw in California.
Which brings us to Big Bird.
Big Bird was probably a golden eagle. I'm not any kind of bird expert and didn't think to even try to determine her species until sometime after I left her area, but out of the big predatory birds that the internet tells me live in the area of California this occurred in, the golden eagle is the only one that is large enough to match the bird I saw (There's a reason Big Bird is my preferred nickname for her) where pictures don't have me immediately going 'no, absolutely not that'. (For example, bald eagles are also in California, but Big Bird did not have the white collar, among other distinctive features bald eagles have) It is, however, entirely possible that Big Bird was an impressively large hawk of some kind, or some bird not expected to be found in California, or whatever; among other points, I never actually got to see Big Bird up close. I'm similarly only guessing she was female based on her sheer size and the fact that golden eagles skew towards the females being much larger than the males; at the time, I actually figured she was male, being a giant ignoramus about most raptors and thus unaware they often skew towards the girls being the big ones.
Whatever the case, Big Bird had staked out a sizable chunk of this field as her territory, and when I showed up, she Did Not Like Me. This was not actually obvious to me right away -for one thing, when I first showed up to her field, I was focused on looking for a place to set up a tent while tired after a long day and so she wasn't exactly my primary focus- but even on that very first day I noticed her as a very large bird who did not just get left behind as I walked. It was only later I became certain this was intentional on her part, but I did immediately notice that she twice took off from a power pole she was perched on to fly to another one somewhere ahead of me; I just initially sort of figured it was a weird coincidence, where she happened to travel ahead of me for her own reasons. Y'know, twice.
This belief of mine took only a couple of days to die, though; Big Bird would basically always meet me at the edge of her territory if possible (I sometimes took a path that went under the raised highway, placing me abruptly much deeper inside her territory than if I took the long way around), stare at me, fly ahead to another power pole once I was past her, and resume the staring, repeating as necessary to stare at me from in front of me. She'd also sometimes vocalize at me, though not often. (Which is consistent with the internet telling me golden eagles tend to be completely silent) So it was pretty obvious her attention was in fact on me, and it seemed likely she wanted me to know it; I never did think of an alternate possibility for why she was so specifically insistent on being in front of me, anyway.
Once I became confident about all this, I of course became a lot more concretely nervous that maybe I'd manage to provoke this bird into actually making an attack on me... but my tent site deep in her territory was amazingly good, probably the best camp site I ever had while homeless in California, and it had access to a good park, and a good public library, and a grocery store, and... there were not really any alternate places to make camp at night, not that were similarly safe and similarly close to all the things I wanted to be near. So I just kept an eye on her anytime I was in her territory so I'd know if she decided to make an attack run, and basically just hoped it wouldn't come to that in the first place.
(After a few weeks of this, if you'd given me the tools to draw a line out there and told me to draw the edge of her territory, I'd probably have gotten it very close to right; she was really consistent about landing nearby as soon as I crossed the invisible line demarcating what she considered to be hers. Sometimes she'd be elsewhere and take a bit to arrive, and a few times she never showed up at all where I can only assume she was asleep or something, but the majority of days she was incredibly consistent)
Time did not dull Big Bird's hatred for me, to be clear. No matter how many weeks passed, there was no point where she resigned herself to my ongoing intrusion. And in retrospect, I was very right to be nervous; in trying to see if I could figure out her species, I learned that golden eagles will in fact at times kill larger animals like coyotes or young deer by virtue of slamming their talons into their victim's skull, killing them instantly. At the time I was just thinking in terms of 'she might put out an eye', not wondering if she might actually be able to kill me.
Then an interesting thing happened. See, part of what was excellent about my camp site was that I was huddling my tent right into an apparently-dead, hunched-over, gnarled tree. (I don't know the species, but it reminded me of tumbleweed in general shape) This provided cover against wind, made the brutal California sun slightly slower to start roasting me in the morning, and made the tent basically invisible to people who went jogging in the larger wilderness-y area, as well as people on the raised highway, and even the people in the raised houses. And the thing is, I ended up using the tree as an impromptu toilet a fair amount; the camp site was sufficiently isolated, and aspects of my health sufficiently poor, that I couldn't always go in an actual public restroom the way I preferred, and so semi-regularly was grudgingly forced to use the tree as the least-worst option out there.
And after half a year or so of doing this, the tree un-died. First its branches got less droopy. Then it started growing leaves. Then more leaves. Then WAY more leaves. Then it finally started producing some kind of fruit. (I'm not sure what it was. Something brown and fuzzy-looking. I never took a close look at them and didn't actually realize until much later that they must be some kind of fruit)
That was all interesting on its own -I'd genuinely thought the tree was dead and never going to do anything ever again- but after a few weeks of the tree being Not Dead, my Great Campsite became actually kind of annoying because a horde of some manner of rodent made the area its home. Initially I was kind of mystified; it took me probably two weeks to realize they were probably eating the fruits the tree was growing. (The tree in fact intermittently dropped its fruits on the ground; the rodents didn't need to climb the tree or anything)
And then Big Bird stopped hating me.
Once again, I didn't actually immediately realize that was what was going on; I actually spent a week or so wondering if Big Bird had died, or maybe migrated, because I just stopped seeing her. But then I realized she was about, but just flying around a lot more, and more prone to flying off toward the farther end of her territory when I was on her turf, where historically I would only see her over there when I was on approach and still many minutes from setting foot on her territory. And even when she did land on a power pole nearby me, she only rarely looked my way, and certainly no longer did the thing of stalking me and staring at me from in front of me continuously. So apparently she no longer hated me?
Indeed, eventually other birds showed up in her turf. For the first year I was camping there, I never saw any birds in the area except Big Bird; it made it really easy to track her behavior, because there weren't other birds for me to confuse with her. So I was really surprised to be seeing 6 or so birds all wheeling about in Big Bird's territory, clearly doing Social Bird Things together. (I'm guessing Big Bird had suitors and that's why she was tolerating these birds; for one thing, they were all smaller than her. For another, after a month or so the bird conventions stopped and it went back to Just Big Bird being in her territory, plus occasionally a smaller bird that never came near me, who I assume is the lucky guy she picked. But, again, not a bird expert, etc)
So this was all fascinating by itself, raising questions for me about what Big Bird was thinking; did she credit me with her territory improving? Because that's what happened, even though I'd done so completely on accident, and you don't need to understand why cause and effect are connected to draw a connection between them regardless. It's possible she just stopped caring about an intruder because her territory got nicer and so she was less stressed in general, I suppose...
... but this takes us to my Final Memorable Interaction with Big Bird.
See, I said the area was pretty 'wild', and one of the aspects of that I neglected to mention sooner is that it had a coyote pack running about it. I largely wasn't concerned -coyotes generally don't attack adult humans- especially because when I would hear them at night they were basically always really far away. It was sometimes uncomfortable an experience -one time I clearly overheard them taking down something near enough for me to hear flesh tear and the thing's dying shriek- but I never really felt in danger.
Until one evening I was taking the long way into Big Bird's territory, and three coyotes were visibly stalking me in the long grass. (I should emphasize that 'three coyotes' was not actually all the coyotes stalking me, just the ones I saw in that moment. They were moving through the grass without really disturbing it; the three I could see were visible because they were stepping out into the lower, more intermittent portion of the tall grass) It would be an exaggeration to say I was fearing for my life, but I was definitely ready to use my backpack as an impromptu club and start beating coyotes to death if they came after me, and was in fact thinking about if I should pull out anything that might work better as a weapon-
-when Big Bird landed on the pole ahead of me and glared her raptor glare down toward us.
Now, my first thought was actually 'oh come on, I thought you stopped hating me', as the angle was such that it was plausible she was aiming her raptor glare at me, in exactly her classic manner. (I'm also something of a pessimist by nature, for that matter) But then, to my surprise, the coyotes slunk away into the grass. At first I thought they were just being sneaky, maybe intending to attack me once my guard was down or something, but then they stopped stalking and began fleeing; I could clearly see (and hear) at least five trails of shifting tall grass as they want directly away from Big Bird's territory at roughly full coyote speed.
And then Big Bird took off and circled above that general area, making the occasional cry, completely ignoring me as I continued walking to my campsite.
A: the coyote pack had not been coincidentally staying far from my camp site all these months, they were scared of Big Bird and staying away from her turf
and B: Big Bird apparently now liked me enough to fly in for the express purpose of telling a bunch of coyotes that they don't get to eat her Lucky Human unless they've decided they don't like living anymore.
That Big Bird had decided she liked me enough to risk such a confrontation remains absolutely fascinating to me to this day, especially as she started out so clearly resenting my intrusion and trying to broadcast 'get off my land', and especially also since we never once interacted in what I'd call a direct manner; I never directly gave her food or anything of the sort, and in fact I'd be surprised if she was ever closer than 15 feet away from me. (I don't know how tall, specifically, the power poles she glared at me from were, and I don't think she ever got closer than sitting atop one of those)