8:45 a.m. This is a photo of the mean streets outside my husband's office. Our second-story window looks squarely into a schoolyard, and these gates are open all day long.

At night, once the megawatt halogen lamps come on, the gates are chained shut to discourage gangs of street kids from congregating. In the daytime the same kids are officially welcomed, encouraged -- and more accurately -- coerced into entering. Then at night: expressly forbidden.

Timing is everything.

If you look very closely at the photo, you will see on top of the fence, guarding the opening, that there are two black birds. The one on the right side is perched directly on the post and the one on the left is over a bit, right above the middle of the sign.

These are very, very bad birds. Very bad.

I assume they live in the fringes of the two trees. All throughout the cities of Santa Monica and Venice there are certain trees growing beside the sidewalks that are absolutely filled to the brim with invisible singing birds.

You'll be walking along, swinging your paper-in-plastic to the beat of your own footsteps and you'll pass under one of these trees and you will suddenly be totally and completely enveloped in the sweetest, loudest symphony of tweets.

The trees seem full of hidden mechanical wind-up metal songbirds, full of throat, all in unison. Singing trees. Life-arriving trees. Your head is full of wonder.

The two trees in the photo are silent. From across the street and behind closed windows, I can't tell if those two birds are members of the choir.

I do know that they have been on the attack -- dive-bombing anybody going past their watching posts. They go for the hair, and they like to go after young girls.

The younger the better. They seem to like dark hair, big hair, curly Latina hair. They are very bad birds, and we took a series of these photos, as evidence, to give to animal control.

But as you can clearly see, the birds in this particular photo look innocent. Butter wouldn't melt in their beaks. No matter how many times we've tried to catch them in the act, they swoop and flap and terrorize and then pop right back on the fence the second I raise the camera.

Timing is everything.