Wow: Rebecca O'Connor IS good luck!

Normally I don't put much stock in good luck charms, but my friend Rebecca O'Connor has forced me to reconsider my skepticism.

It started last spring when Boyfriend, Rebecca and I went to a duck dinner with our friend Jim, his son and his son's friend. When the festivities began and the emcee started pulling raffle tickets out of the barrel, our table started winning guns.

First Jim. Then Jim's son. Then Jim's son's friend.

Rebecca looked at me coyly and said, "I'm good luck."

Yeah yeah yeah. Read more...
Then Jim won another gun, and then I won a gun. Boyfriend won one after that too, but for reasons I'll never understand, he swapped it for a nice bottle of tequila instead.

Does good luck follow Rebecca? Not necessarily - there's always that table at every duck dinner, the table that wins tons of stuff. I wasn't convinced it was Rebecca.

Then one day late last month, she came over to our house for a spur-of-the-moment dinner.

Dinner hour is right when the dove-banding action gets hot around here, and I did not cease my front-yard trapping and banding activities just because company was here. Besides, Rebecca's a falconer - she gets the obsession with birds.

I'd been trapping about one dove a day since my banding had gotten rolling, but that evening, something crazy happened.

It started normally enough: Doves started working my traps, and when one went in, I went out and banded it. It was a little young-of-the-year dove.

I re-set my trap and went back inside and I'll be damned if 20 minutes later I didn't have another youngun. I clamped a band on its cute little leg, re-set the trap and went back inside.

And 20 minutes later, I had yet another dove, this one a beautiful mature male.

When I came back into the house, Rebecca reminded me that she was good luck. This time I believed her.

"You can't leave until sundown, when it's too late to trap," I told her.

Twenty minutes later, I was on the verge of a record fourth dove walking into the trap when we spied one of the neighbor cats, Allie, putting a stalk on my babies. I flung the door open and shouted, "Fly away!" The birds left, the cat looked deflated, and Rebecca laughed at me and announced she was seizing the opportunity to go home.

Well, after that, my dove action ground to a halt. I got four birds in the next five days, then NOTHING. I'm even seeing a fair number of un-banded doves (read: not educated about the trap) in my yard, but they've just become incredibly wary.

Oh my God, not only is Rebecca good luck, but she takes it with her when she leaves!

So now I'm left trying to figure out what to do.

Should I invite Rebecca over for dinner this week so I can get a few more doves before the trapping season ends at sunset on Friday?

But wait. What if Rebecca is only good luck for any one person three times - should I waste that third time on dove banding? I mean, I'll need a lot more luck when I go blacktail deer hunting in October with my buddy Phillip from the Hog Blog. Maybe I should invite her deer hunting instead.

Or maybe duck hunting!

I went out with Rebecca once last winter when she was hunting ducks with her peregrine, Anakin, and I can tell you I did not give her good luck that day. (The feathers you see here in Anakin's mouth are the remains of the consolation prize of the day, an already dead something-or-other fished out of Rebecca's pocket - yum!)

But maybe if I get Rebecca in a blind on my turf - the land of shotguns - maybe I'll have one of those epic days. Hell, I might even have to hand her the shotgun.

Or, I could take her with me when I buy a lottery ticket. Then I could buy a duck club!

Hey, Rebecca, you busy this week?

© Holly A. Heyser 2010