I got up this morning and wandered into the living room to finish reading emails and to pet Kedi. Some movement in my peripheral field of vision caused me to look out on the deck. It’s usually a large leaf blowing across the deck or maybe a squirrel scurrying or maybe a fat whitewing dove landing on the water feature. Not today. Today, I saw the lifeless corpse of a cedar waxwing. Alas.
I didn’t hear a crash; sometimes birds crash into the French doors. When they do, they usually make a loud thud as they collide. Sometimes these impacts are fatal; more often they stun the bird but do not lead to death – at least not immediately. Later this afternoon, I noticed a trail of bird bodily fluids on one of the door panels. It was probably a window strike that killed this one. Migratory birds die in window strikes by the millions, it seems. Sigh.
This event reminded me of a movie that I saw in graduate school. My then spouse was enrolled in an anthropolgy class, and the class was required to see a movie that was being shown in the student union theater. It was a 1963 documentary titled Dead Birds. The movie was about two feuding clans in Papua, New Guinea – something akin to the American Hatfield and McCoy feud, I suppose. Humans are a fractious lot.