Dead birds

Yesterday Steve, who is working on our house and is consistently the first to arrive in the morning, walked out on our new deck and told me we had had some casualties. I went to look and found two birds, a cedar waxwing and a fox sparrow, lying on the deck near the rail. It wasn’t the first time we have found birds on the deck outside our tall living room windows – in fact, years ago we had some small victims that were stunned only and revived on our safer upper deck to fly away, as well as some that were already dead when we found them – but it was the first time it happened since we moved back into our house almost a year ago.

Steve said he couldn’t figure out how the two birds got killed and we both wondered whether the glass panels in our new railings and not the windows had been the cause. It could be that they both had flown down from the shad that grows next to the deck and crashed into the glass, but whatever happened I had two small and beautiful birds lying on the deck first thing in the morning.

I have picked up a few dead birds over the years, including a gorgeous yellow-shafted flicker that broke its neck after hitting the car in front of us and, amazingly, a sharp-shinned hawk that was lying on its side on a path through the blueberries at the bottom of our property. What always strikes me in these instances is the birds’ lightness, an almost unbearable lightness, you might say, of their hollow bones and the slight bodies under their ruffles of feathers. There is always pathos in the grounding of these small and wonderful flying beings.


I photographed the cedar waxwing and looked at it even closer than the camera can show. I marvelled at the delicate yellow that shifted to a paler shade under the belly and at the compact yellow tips at the ends of the grey tail feathers. The small black mask and black eyes and the swept back crest feathers were also wonderful to see. But most remarkable to me were the bright red waxy spots on the secondaries. They are pretty much impossible (for me, at least) to see on a bird in the wild, but on our kitchen counter I could see and touch these red spots and wonder what in evolutionary development could have given rise to such wonderful touches of colour.

The delicate dead birds are gone, but bird life does go on. I heard today the small lisping trill of waxwings in our shad and watched them pecking at the berries, just as I know they pecked at the blossoms earlier. A cardinal sang from a bare branch high up in one of our maples, crows cavorted on Irene’s roof next door, and the robins scolded me when I walked up the lane. It makes me happy to live with birds around and I’ll hope each day not to find any more small corpses out on our deck. The bird in the hand, after all, is not worth more than the two (or more) in the shad bush.