Angela Dove: Award-Winning Writer

Why let a dead comrade ruin your lunch?

 The bedraggled pile of blue feathers under my birdfeeder told me that the jay had met our neighborhood cat. Briefly.

 It does me no good to curse the cat. Why wouldn’t he think I had installed a little hunting ground specifically for him? To hold the cat’s nature against him would be pointless in the extreme. Instead, my thoughts turned toward the other birds. The entire area was crowded. Birds on the feeder. Birds on the ground. Birds pecking around the corpse of their recent comrade in dining. In a word: Yuck.

 How can I not judge them? True, I have never been at a restaurant in which someone dropped dead. Thank goodness. But I would like to believe that I would—at the very least—lose my appetite. Maybe question the quality of the food. I certainly wouldn’t step over the guy’s body on my way to the buffet, chortling a happy, “Haha, sucker! More for me!”

 More than a question of appropriate behavior, the devil-may-care attitude of these avians made me question the idea of instinct. Whatever happened to these birds’ innate sense of self-interest? Wouldn’t the fresh remains of one of their own tip these birds off to the fact that their lunch counter was under siege? Or at least located on the wrong side of town? Apparently not. They were not in the least bit phased.

 Far from displaying any “survival of the fittest”, these particular birds are on borrowed time. “Hey, look!” I can practically hear them say. “A hawk is coming? Well, Mr. Impressively-Hooked-Beak better go look for food somewhere else. Anybody trying to get these sunflower seeds will have to go through me first!”

 Our yard has become a variation on all those horror movies in which the young woman in the flashy dress (It’s never Betty White in a pantsuit. Have you noticed?) decides to go investigate the ominous noise in the dark abandoned cellar. We know how this plays out. We’ve seen it so many times that we don’t even bother to catch the character’s name. She is Doomed Female #2 or something. And when she starts down the stairs, and the noise in the basement suddenly ceases, and she calls out, “Hello? Johnny, is that you?” . . . well, nobody in the theater even bothers to shout a warning. She’s a goner.

 That’s how I feel about those birds under the feeder, only more so. At least in the movie, Doomed Lithe Chick didn’t kick other bodies off the stairs on her way to investigate the basement. So in a way, Whybotherwithaname was even smarter than the feathered no-brainers in my yard. I strongly suspect that one day very soon, they will spy the same neighborhood cat. “Dude!” one bird will exclaim to the other. “Check out that furry, four-legged bird over there! Why are his tail feathers twitching like that? Wow! He can really jum—“

 It’s not worth watching the particulars of how it plays out. It will happen, if only because their demise is scripted. And later that day I will meet my husband at the door with a shovel and that “Honey, do you mind?” look, and that will be the end of them. So long, Doomed Pigeons #3 and #4.

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Angela Dove is an award-winning humor columnist and the author of the true crime memoir, NO ROOM FOR DOUBT: A TRUE STORY OF THE REVERBERATIONS OF MURDER. She welcomes your feedback at www.AngelaDove.com