It has been raining for days here - the azeleas, heavy with blooms, are bent in arcs nearly to the ground, exposing their dark internal stems. The boxwood line has split open like baking bread.
After my usual return-home walk around the house with the dog, I noticed we had a dead bird on our front walk. Some of you might remember my pet dead Downy Woodpecker from when I lived in Castleton, which lived in my freezer for well nigh three years. I steered the dog in a wide arc around it, and cheerily greeted John when he drove into the drive with a "We have a new pet dead bird!"
We live across the street now from a group home for Alzheimer's patients (the potential hilarity of this has not escaped us). We've been told that slow ambulances are common, and once pressed against our window late at night when EMTs unhurriedly entered and left the home, as red lights washed the houses.
John, of course, paid less mind to the dead bird and noticed the ambulance across the street, humming in idle, shiny red. Is it...? he asked, and I replied, No, I don't think so. They carried in someone, perhaps? Upon consideration, I then thought that perhaps just pink blankets were piled on the stretcher, and someone would indeed be coming out - living or dead, I did not know.
I took my camera out, and snapped a set of pictures of the little bird, water in huge beads on its wing. I took a baggie and picked it up. Birds are always lighter than you expect, barely there. This one was the size of a small sparrow, with a bright orange stripe on its head. I held it up and made John say hello to it. I found the window spot where it smashed, feathers still sticking, and made a movie.
Sometimes birds are only stunned when they hit windows. You must then set them inside a brown paper bag, somewhere cozy, until they awake and peer up at you when you peek in. That is when you can release the live bird. Life was gone from this one, however. A bit cold, tiny pink legs stiff. The ambulance still waiting in the drive while I found a shovel and slid the olive creature into the slice of wet clay. I went inside to download the pictures.
Death sauntered by. And John and I took a long walk down to the creek, and returned to watch the News Hour. The TV deaths were more real.
I got out my books for the identification. Death's meditation set aside, I moved on. At first it seemed a common sparrow of some sort, but soon found myself in the warbler section, inspecting the orange crest of an Orange Crowned Warbler. Birdwatching has been a growing delight for me, as I live in places with varied supply of species. Racing to grab the book, chanting remembered identifying marks to myself, I've been delighted at backyard glimpses of wipporwills and woodpeckers. This time, it should be easy - I had photos.
After several hours of worrying over the lack of black speckles on my Orange Crowned Warbler, I posted on a bird forum. I threatened to exhume the creature if I couldn't solve the mystery, to John's horror. Finally. flipping between my two bird books, I finally realized I was off track with this orange comb - and focused instead on the speckled belly. Paradigm changed, I turned quickly to the Ovenbird.
There it was! My little olive backed orange-headed bird was an ovenbird, with pink legs, stripes on the side of its orange head, and speckled black and white belly. The nests, like little dutch ovens, give Ovenbirds their name. Mostly forest-floor or underscrub dwellers, my little corpse was probably wandering over from nearby Dora Kelly Nature Park when it met its end. I can only hope it wasn't a female, because she would have a nest to keep. They just flew up from winter lodgings. It seems a shame to have one die at the start of the season.
(One of my books mentioned that Ovenbird males sometimes mate with up to 4 females, and that two males can be seen feeding a female's clutch. Sounds like some saucy little polyamorists to me!)
Posted by argus at May 4, 2004 12:12 PM