birds are dying
a ramble about dead birds
Every Friday, this writing newsletter I subscribe to sends out three different writing prompts – one for poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. I started this after a recent Friday prompt told me to “peruse the National Audubon Society’s Guide to North American Birds” and pick three birds to write about. But then I realized that birds are actually kind of having a bad time rn, so here are some ramblings on dead birds instead! There’s no real main idea or thesis, as always!
A bunch of birds are dying.
To be specific – tens of millions of birds are dying. A new avian flu is decimating flocks across the U.S., resulting in the death of some 37 million chickens and turkeys across 35 states. Most aren’t dying from the flu itself; they’re slaughtered preemptively to prevent the flu’s spread. When the virus is found in just one bird or egg, poultry manufacturers cull the entire flock. They spray them with a special suffocating foam or shut them inside an unvented barn, roasting the birds to death in a few hours.
Wild birds are dying from it, too. In April, 80 vultures were found dead along the Susquehanna River in Maryland. It’s killed dozens of bald eagles (at least that scientists are aware of) and if the flu doesn’t kill an eagle, there’s a 50-50 chance that lead could do the trick. (According to a new study, about half of the bald and golden eagles in the country have chronic lead poisoning.)
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We always make birds into metaphors – a sign of some human experience to come or a mirror of some human experience in the present. We “spread our wings,” we “fly the nest.” We release doves at weddings (and funerals???). We name an actually absurd, if you look it up, number of American sports teams after cardinals and blue jays and hawks and orioles. We use their lives to make sense of our lives, sometimes, so maybe that’s why, sometimes, their dying unsettles us more than their living inspires us, or moves us, or whatever.
I probably, if I paid more attention, would see that I come into contact with dozens of live birds a day. There are these birds, I don’t know what kind, that are awake at 4 a.m. with me when I can’t sleep. I wake up in the middle of the night almost every night, but I never noticed how loud they were until I started writing this, now having a reason to notice them. Somehow, for the past 300-some nights that I’ve slept in my current bedroom and woken up at 4 a.m., I’ve fallen back asleep to their cawing and crying like it was a clunky radiator, ignorable in its familiarity.
But I can name specific instances, in detail, where I’ve come into contact with dead birds. Four years ago, on my way to the Metro, I saw a dead pigeon in the crosswalk of a Columbia Heights intersection. I can still picture the sea of feet just nearly stepping on it, skirting out of the way at the last minute. I can also picture the dead seagulls that line the highways when you’re getting close to the beach, the way their feathers flap around in the wind from cars, giving the impression they might be alive for a split second, until you pass them and see how their necks are bent, hanging and limp. I remember being little and telling my mom I found a broken blue egg shell in the driveway below a robin’s nest, the black pavement underneath it stained slightly darker with a goo that I now know was probably an embryo that didn’t make it, but at the time just knew to be a dead bird.
(A note: to smaller me, that crushed egg, its contents oozing out on a driveway, was a dead bird. Bigger me would probably have something different to say about whether or not that was really a dead “bird,” because if it was a dead bird, then I’d also have to believe that the embryo smeared on the driveway was a live bird, as in an actual life at some point, and that’s a tricky thing for me to pass a judgment on when I wasn’t the one who laid the egg and unfortunately the Bird Constitution is shaky on fetal viability. Figures! Anyway.)
I don’t really know what it is about a dead bird that makes me stop and realize “I’ve seen a dead bird.” I’ve seen dead squirrels, dead raccoons, lots of dead rats – flattened and mangled and torn up on sidewalks and roads, their insides turned outside – and I’ve passed by without a second thought, after a quick wince or “ew” under my breath. I once found a dead mouse wedged behind a door frame in my house, and naturally, was disgusted. But I think I might’ve been just as grossed out if I found a live mouse. It wasn’t so much the death of the thing that made me squirm when my roommate swept it into a dustpan and ceremoniously threw it in a trash can outside, but more the general ickiness of learning it was, at some point, scurrying around our kitchen without my knowing.
Maybe it has something to do with the certainty of a dead bird. When you see one, there’s usually no space left for hoping it's still alive. Birds are supposed to be up in the sky, popping in and out of a tree, hopping around the sidewalk, poking at cracks in pavement. Even when they’re resting, perched on a branch or folded into themselves, assuming the shape of a little feathered teapot, there’s still an alertness about them.
But a supine bird, lying still on the ground with its belly and peak pointed at the sky, is almost the exact inverse of how we know and revere birds when they’re alive – flying above us, looking down on us, heading to some place they know and we don’t. There’s a certainty to seeing a bird on its back like that; it’s hard to imagine it’s anything but dead.
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When my cat was dying, I wasn’t sure what it would look like. The night before I (or I guess it was the vet, but it often feels like it was me) put her down, I was worried she might die when I turned my back, or went to the bathroom, or fell asleep. She spent the night tucked inside herself like a loaf of bread at the bottom of my bed, intermittently seizing. Each time I heard her twitch, or the bell on her collar jingle, I stared at her waiting for it to happen, like she’d go out with some obvious spasm or dramatic gasp for air, and I’d be very certain that my cat just died.
When less than 24 hours later, the vet injected a lethal dose of an anesthetic into her, it was very much the opposite. The vet told me it happens quickly, in just a few seconds, and it did. I was holding her like a baby, and when the vet checked her heartbeat and said with a nod, “she has passed,” Lauren didn’t look dead to me, or I didn’t see whatever I expected death to look like on her. Maybe that’s why they call euthanasia “putting to sleep.” She didn’t gasp or twitch or seize – her eyes just closed slowly, like she was blinking off to sleep. The only way I could tell she was really dead was the lack of resistance in her body when the vet scooped her out of my arms.
So maybe it’s the certainty in the corpse of a dead bird, mixed with the uncertainty of how it died, that makes coming across one memorable. Did it just drop out of the sky like that? How’d it land on its back, then? Did it get hit by a car? Fly into a window? Was it sick? If it was sick, why’d it die so publicly, in the middle of the sidewalk? Did it twitch and seize and gasp for breath, or did it do as Lauren did – blink its eyes slowly until they didn’t open again? And maybe it’s just the rarity of the image, too, that makes it somehow seem like it’s important, or symbolic, or even prophetic (if you believe that) to see one. For all of the birds we see on a daily basis, for all of the birds we don’t see but who are humming around us anyway, it’s not very often we see them dead, and even less often we see them actively dying. So when we do, why wouldn’t we pay attention?
I don’t really know what it means that a bunch of birds are dying, and I try not to picture what it looks like inside a barn that’s roasting a flock to death, or how an eagle slowly dies of lead poisoning. But for all of the meaning we’ve ascribed to living birds – it seems like their death should mean something right? If their lives are vessels through which we make sense, or memorialize, or find hope in own our lives, should we be searching for all of that meaning in their deaths, too?
Liz Bruenig wrote a piece last summer about the mysterious illness (not the current bird flu) that was infecting birds in the eastern U.S., filling their eyes with discharge, resulting often in blindness or death. (Scientists still haven’t identified the illness, or why it came and left so quickly.) Bruenig drew an almost too-obvious parallel between the bird illness and the pandemic, the death that’s been all over everything for the past two years. So maybe that’s part of it, that there’s some symbol to be made out of concurrent viruses killing a bunch of humans and birds at the same time.
Or maybe it’s none of it, and the avian flu is just a sad epidemiological event that’s killing a number of birds we can’t wrap our brain around. Although, I’m sure there’s some human experience we can compare to that, too.
P.S. — on a lighter note: The bird that most perplexes me is the shoebill. I reccomend following the twitter account Shoebills Every Hour and scrolling through the pictures, they’re insane. The bird that most endears me is the sanderling. They’re those little starling-type birds that run toward the water at the beach to pick at the crabs in the sand, and scurry away quickly before the next wave comes in. They just do this over and over and over, running in and out of the water. They move together like grass blowing in the wind — it’s very cool!