Earlier this week, around lunchtime, I looked outside on the deck, and something had fallen there, along the back rail next to where the stairs lead.
I opened up the sliding glass door and stepped into the dappled May sunshine. I knew what it was.
A bird, on its back. Mostly whole, light chest, dark feathers spotted with white, no head.
I crouched down to have a closer look. It was a downy woodpecker. I’d seen a number of them in the trees behind my house. In late winter the wall would hum with their attempts to make a nest in the siding. I bought a bird house specifically for this kind of woodpecker which they didn’t use this year. From what I know of them visiting the bird feeders and looking them up online, only males have red at the back of their head. Since this one was headless I couldn’t tell what role it might have had in its nest. Or if it had recently fledged one. I don’t know much about their domestic habits, but when they visit to feed they move gracefully on a vertical axis, going from deck rail to suet cage to tree. They hop and flap and stumble if the squirrels are already plundering the suet and they go after the seed I’ve left on the horizontal boards of the deck. This is a bird built for scaling trees and hanging on the sides of buildings. Not for hopping along on the ground.
Nor for being separated body from head.
I cupped the carcass in my hands, ran my thumbs along its little bird shoulders. Apart from the head being gone, the body was clean. It had been here only a few minutes and dead for not much longer. It wasn’t the cleanest cut - one of the tendons connecting wing to spine had been severed and so one of the wings was nearly detached, but there was very little blood. Only a pair of small, winged insects crawled on its chest, looking to engage in luncheon.
Was it a gift or a warning or a message from the raptors? There are barred owls and red-shouldered hawks that live in the trees above where I crouched on my deck. They prey on little birds. This wasn’t an unheard-of occurrence, but in almost five years living here, I’ve only encountered three headless birds. And two of them were this spring, within weeks of each other, on my back porch. The other one was a robin.
The raptors are sloppy. Or they’re young. Or some choice I’ve made in the past couple months has converted me into a bird-beheading vortex. The robin fell the day after I got the first covid vaccine dose (though a cursory examination by search engine suggested a dead robin was good luck - this was a reassurance for the 30-year old who still lives inside me and looks for any kind of “sign” from “The Universe.” 40-year old me lives under a broader metaphysics). I had been hesitant. But then every tango scene was beginning to reopen but only for vaccinated people (and you really wouldn’t want to be associated with those who were hosting maskless milongas, god forbid they get a picture of you dancing there, nobody would dance with you at any of the other ones; the projections in our heads separate us from our hearts but that predated covid). I didn’t want to be separated from my friends. In the end I convinced myself that nothing about how we are living today is natural - industrial agriculture alone makes novel viruses much more likely, never mind “lab leak” - and my argument about wanting to let my body take care of it on its own held much less strength in that light. I convinced myself in my head but ultimately it was my body that did the work. I don’t know if I was right or wrong. I feel separated from my hesitant friends. I hope the shedding narrative establishes an endpoint so they might feel safe when I can be around them again.
Maybe it’s not a vortex. Maybe I’ve attracted the little birds with the feeders, lured them in with the convenience of easy eating, inviting them to a temporary quarantine where the quar comes from forty seconds instead of forty days, making it the perfect opportunity for the raptors, who really are just sloppy and easily-distracted predators that have set down any pretense of hiding this fact from the rest of us. I wonder if for most people it’s as obvious as it is to me how the pharmaceutical industry is making a killing these days. I feel like in the Before Times, we didn’t ever talk about it, we didn’t know who the Sacklers were, we’d never heard of epi-pens or insulin having their prices jacked up hundreds of percentage points. Nobody ever imagined a country being asked to put up its sovereign assets as collateral for a deal for vaccine access. The predators have become more sloppy because the little birds are right there and nobody can do anything to stop them.
I walked it down the stairs, said I was sorry that it was the one that had to be caught up in this, that what started off as a normal day ended in the claws of a much bigger bird, and laid it in the shaded sanctum of a nearby stump.
All that remained the next day were a couple of dark grey feathers with white spots on the edges.