Murder

Robber Baron

Grackle

When something is gone

I think about birds. My dad is dying so I think about birds. All I can do is stare at the sky, my mouth agape. I think its going to rain.

Gulls

Every spring, gulls build nests on the roof across the street from my house. I watch them mate, fight for turf and build nests. They take turns watching for predators, while they sit on the nests. When the young come they are very ugly and large. Larger than their parents. As they age, I think they get smaller.

Species II

A British woman called into a radio talk show and told how she trapped starlings she found on her lawn. She killed them. Snapping their necks. She said they were an alien species and they didn’t belong.

Species

Crows, bluejays, and cardinals lay in heaps along junctions with injunctions: don’t touch.

Cardinals

The cardinal is a bloody red warm presence that perches against the bleak bare deciduous wasteland. A heart perched among the bare branches.

Varigated wodpecker

A fledgling woodpecker is on the ground near a busy road. I walk past it, afraid to do anything for fear of startling it. From across the street I stand watching it trying to fly up into a tree. Each try takes it closer, I stand watching the drama my fists clenched, as car after car passes and blocks my view.

From my vantage point, I watch as the bird gets weaker and more tired. Now its attempts to reach the safety of the branches becomes more hopeless. I stand paralyzed, wondering what I can do, when suddenly a women walks by and startles the bird and it flies out onto the road and is hit by a black SUV.

Passenger Pigeon

They hunted birds in North America because they could. Birds coated the sky so thick, they were like an overhead jungle shutting out the sun. An easy sport, they hunted the passenger pigeons until they were gone.

Habitat 3

Habitat 2

Habitat 1

crows don't like you

The Vagaries of Nature Photography

I was sitting in your back yard, trying to film birds. They were the most furtive birds I have ever seen -- well technically I didn’t actually see them. The little devils flitted from branch to branch of your still over crowded back yard. Even in the new bare stretches, where they have pulled out all the trees to make room for a big patio, I still couldn’t capture an image of those birds. They were so fleeting. I think about you that way. Trying to remember you, I catch only a moment, and when I try and focus on that moment, you disappear.

They Call the Cows Mad

Reports all over the media about the contaminated cat food. The dogs didn’t escape either. It was in their bacon flavoured treats. Good boy Fido. Good bye.

The human interest stories, pictured empty collars, and teary-eyed former pet owners. The pets. Their organs failed.

The wheat flour was spiked with plastic, parading as soya. We heard about the pet food, but we had eaten the fish before we heard about the fish food. How the fish were fed the same food, and we were fed the same fish.

They told us, as we were choking up our old fish, that we needn’t have bothered. It is a chain of events, but not the food chain they say.

… and they call the cows mad.

The Battle for Crab Park

All fall they were ripping out the wild roses, leaving them to die in mass composts. Then they tore out the mock orange whose boughs had housed all varieties of birds and whose scent had democratically graced the air.

Cutting down the sheltering trees, they sought to remove all refuge for a woman or a man or a child or a coyote or a bird or a rat. (I could go on.) Grudging them all a place to sleep unexposed.

Busing in a better class of fauna and flora, they attempted to cleanse out the remaining inhabitants. Peonies were planted, behind a line of box woods. California Lilacs were brought in to stand-in for the mock orange. As if the birds wouldn’t have noticed, which they did. At first they were confused, then the blackbirds were in denial, and the robins made their feelings known, and the crows? Don’t ask me about the crows.

Then this spring, the wild roses insinuated themselves amongst the orderly peonies. The blackberries crept up from beneath the rocks where they had bidden their time, stealthily they moved across the front lines, surprising a box shrub -- it is now missing. The California lilac unable to move, was hypnotized by the sinewy morning glory undulating at its trunk, waiting to strike. The Cosmos have this look like they would rather be somewhere else. And the tulips have long since fled the scene.

Wild Birds are Organizing