Craig Spence © April, 2022
It’s impossible for me not to anthropomorphize the hummingbirds that hover around our balcony feeder, sipping nectar… after all, I’m only human
Anony Mouse
“Grampa?”
“Yes, hon?”
“Where do all the dead birds fall?”
We were walking hand-in-hand along the gravel path between Porter’s Farm and the suburban fringe of Chemainus when Amelia asked me that. The sun’s rays warmed us with dappled light; a small herd of cows and their calves gazed at us from under the shade of their cedar tree; a rufous sided towhee chided from inside the bordering blackberry bush… “Kreeek! Kreeek! Kreeek!”
I didn’t know what to say, so parried with, “What do you think happens to them, dear?”
She looked at me not quite disdainfully, but in that precocious, knowing way of hers. Teasingly. Amelia is not one to honour the twisted ways of wisdom. In her world, Grampas must be challenged. She knows exactly what’s going on when an old man answers a question with a question, and was going to make me squirm.
If someone else had accompanied us on that walk, I could have deflected her curiosity their way, broadened the shoulders of responsibility. But we were alone, Amelia and I. We’d walked all the way from the Campbell family’s ‘West Coast Terminus’ to ‘the bench’ up in Wu’laam Wood, Amelia skipping and jumping over the roots and ruts that bisect the path, me tripping over them and grinding my teeth, trying hard not to curse out loud.
The Bench was where Amelia’s great-grandad, Eleanor’s father, went to sit and think. It’s most probably where he formulated his final, inevitable conclusion, alone, the detritus of innumerable falls littering the forest floor around him, compacted into its very soil. Frank was a walking-talking contradiction. He loved the forest, but not the tangle of roots and branches that burrow and stretch into its earth and sky. His future – ours too – was planned and measured inch by inch, all its precedents and possibilities accounted for so that the bonsai of existence made some sort of sense besides tortured beauty.
“Grampa!” Amelia pouted.
I gave her my best impression of a baffled look.
“Where do they fall?”
“Who?”
“The dead birds!” she tugged, insisting I smarten up and stop procrastinating.
My own grandfather, Hollis Henderson, would have had an answer. “Down the cat’s gullet,” he might have said. Or “Into the hunter’s sack.”
And if you questioned his no nonsense logic concerning falling birds, he’d have another example to share, and another. “But, Grampa, there’s millions of birds, and they all die, don’t they? And I hardly ever see a dead bird when I’m walking around.”
“Chickens in the pot,” he might say. Or “Hawk’s got the chicks.” Or “Hit by cars.” Or “Fell into the forest where you’d never see ‘em. Froze to death on the wing.” Grampa Hollis could think up as many millions of ways a bird might die as there are dead birds to ask about. “But it all amounts to the same thing,” he’d say. “Their hearts stop beating and that’s the end of ‘em.”
Maybe I was asking the wrong question? But Grampa Hollis was long gone before I could figure out the right one, and Gramma Henderson, too, buried by his side just a few blocks away from the Campbell family’s ‘East Coast Terminus’ in Sydney, Nova Scotia.
We have a bird feeder hanging from a branch of the vine maple out in our front yard. Every morning I shuffle out in my rubber sandals and dump a measuring cup of ‘Festi-Vol’ bird seed into it, then clang shut the lid and hang it back up. Dark eyed juncos, black capped chickadees, sparrows, stellar’s jays, doves, robins, flickers, wrens, they flit and flutter about nervously, balancing hunger, fear and aggression in their intricate avian ballet. And from the gutter over our front balcony we hang a feeder topped up with sugar nectar for the hummers to sip.
I try not to, but can’t help anthropomorphizing our ‘feathered friends’. Never mind that they’re jostling for position, that they hunt and kill, bicker and bluff, I still smile stupidly every time… thinking them ‘sweet’ and ‘cheerful’. My drinking buddy Greg has an antidote for my doting: “Imagine those suckers big as dinosaurs, say big as your lovey-dovey friend tyrannosaurus rex, and you’ll get over your infantile fancies mate,” he says. “They’d swallow you like a beetle or feed you live to their ravenous chicks.”
Which sort of puts things into perspective. “Like, how often do you see a dead worm, or ant, or deer, or rabbit, or raccoon my friend. Almost never, with the exception of road-kill, of course, when we blundering humans smush them with our tires, and are too stupid to stop and gather up the guts for our cooking pots… collateral damage, if we think of them at all, that’s how we do it.”
I like Greg. We get together once a week or so at the Horseshoe Pub and bend our elbows.
“I know where all the dead birds fall,” Amelia piped up.
“Oh?”
She smiled primly. It was my turn to wait for an answer.
“Well?” I nudged.
“We don’t see them because they fall up instead of down,” she pronounced.
“Ah!” I agreed, wondering, if that were true, why ostriches decided to give up flying?
~ The End ~
Hope you enjoyed Where do all the Dead Birds Fall?
There’s more in The Feel of Gravity collection.