Today Christina started painting our dining room. She painted out the hideous birds that had blotted the corners of the molding, but they still lingered there in spirit. Then the horrifying Bird Exorcism occurred. It was pouring down rain when it happened, but since I needed to buy more paint I had go outside. That's when I spied the dead baby bird on our sidewalk. It was as bare of feathers as if it had been plucked, but there were no marks or blood on it; therefore I deduced that it had not been mauled by a cat. I couldn't deal with the sight so I left the body there. On my way back to the house, I detoured around it, feeling upset enough to tell Christina and Bob.
Before the paint job began, we had removed the curtains from our picture window -- so when Christina took a break we all sat down at the table to stare out at the newly revealed stormy gray horizon. Suddenly two black birds alighted on the neighbor's roof. "Those are big birds," we observed. "Like really really large birds." Just then the largest bird swooped down, grabbed the tiny corpse in his mouth and flew away. This was disturbing to witness, but Christina comforted me by saying, "Maybe their baby died in your yard and they've come to get it." Well, that's a morbid scenario, but it's better than thinking they had murdered the poor thing. At any rate, the actual birds disappeared from the roof just a short time after our painted birds vanished from the walls.
Sounds like the baby fell from a nest--grisly but common. Was it a turkey vulture that swooped in? They are carrion birds that clean up after a mortality. I once watched two vultures devour a dead possum in my yard in under an hour, leaving only the fur behind on the ground--miraculously intact. I marveled and was grateful, as my German Shepherd killed about one a week. They lived under the house and she really had it in for them as that's where her wolfy den was.
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