Trust a snake, lose a bird (on death, birds, guilt, grief, and growth)
Content Warning: Animal death, pet loss
TL;DR NEVER KEEP A BIRD AND A SNAKE
While writing about the sudden death of my beloved pet budgerigar, I was reminded of an assignment I did in eighth grade English.
We were learning about essays. A few grades earlier, we had learned to write the five-paragraph essay: topic, 3 body paragraphs, conclusion. Now we were learning, by reading various essays written by grown-ups, that an essay doesn’t need to subscribe to that strict formula. Sure, a thesis is important, but maybe the thesis doesn't come until a few paragraphs in. Paragraph breaks can fall where they may, where is rhythmically and thematically appropriate. Incomplete sentences - that sort of thing.
The assignment was to pick a topic, any topic, and write two different styles of essay about it. This was one of the first essay assignments I had ever been handed to give me complete creative freedom.
And so, being the macabre child I was, similar at least in appearance to Wednesday Addams (I would later that year nail the audition for Lady Macbeth), the topic I chose was…dead birds.
Re-reading what I turned in, I find myself horrified by how I thought birds were just stupid animals. I had only had fish as pets as a child, and I was not fazed by their deaths. I know birds now. They are my friends and family. They are sometimes silly, but they are just as complex as dogs or other social animals. They have the ability to love and be loved.
And yet, they are so fragile. They sacrifice the very heart of their bones, their marrow, for the ability to fly. Because to leave the earth, they have to be full of air. They are truly creatures of the wind. They remind us how precious life is. I’m crying, sobbing reading something I wrote at age 13. I never thought it would be so relevant to my life. I miss her so much.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure I got an A on the assignment; they certainly are two different styles. I liked the second one better; at least it’s kind of hopeful at the end. But I think they’re both mean. Callous. I was a good writer, for a kid, but cold (or at the very least an edgelord). I wish I could take the words back.
But I’m trying to be vulnerable, and if there’s anything more vulnerable than sharing writing, it’s sharing writing from middle school I think is bad in some way. So here they are. All three of them, two from then, one from now. Character growth?
Feel free to skip ahead to the second or last one, and please be warned. It’s sad. If you want to skip to the end please leave an upvote: I don’t know how much it will help, but if it saves even one bird's life I want it out on the internet; I owe it to Milo to try.
DO NOT KEEP BOTH A BIRD AND A SNAKE AS PETS!
There’s No Animal Like It: The Very Stupid Dead Bird
Beebe, Arkansas – On New Year’s Eve, hundreds of people heard the sounds of fireworks erupting in the distance. Besides Independence Day, this is the only day fireworks are allowed in the small Arkansas city. But within minutes of an exceptionally loud boom, a different sound filled the air: the muffled thuds of hundreds of objects fell from the sky. One of these people, Mr. Parker, an Arkansas native, witnessed this odd phenomenon. Upon poking his head out the door to investigate the scene, a strange sight met his eyes: the ground, hard and bare from a cold winter, was now practically covered with small black fuzzy lumps. Upon further inspection, they proved to be birds.
Altogether, the deceased birds numbered nearly 3,000. After scientific analysis deemed it safe, cleanup volunteers – over 200 – picked up the dead birds. They were all red-winged blackbirds, a species notorious in the Midwest for their enormous flocks. “Sometimes you’ll look up and see a black cloud of birds,” Parker says. “They won’t be missed.”
But more mysterious is the reason so many birds dropped dead at the same time. When scientific specialists examined the bodies of the birds, none of them bore traces of poison, electric shock, or disease. The places where the birds nested yielded no dead bodies – it appears that only the birds that were up and about on New Year’s Eve died.
Red winged blackbirds aren’t known for their smartness. While crows have intelligence near or above mammals, blackbirds are among the stupider birds, barely smarter than insects. There have been few, if any, incidents of crow deaths. There have been more than four incidents of blackbird mass deaths in the last few months. “They’re programmed to just flock and eat,” a scientist says of blackbirds. “They’ve been around since the Ice Ages and haven’t got smarter since.”
Stupid though they may be, blackbirds are not suicidal. This time “Blame technology,” says Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson. Trauma present on all the birds’ bodies lead scientists to believe that the birds suffered collisions with objects. The fireworks, seemingly innocuous, are presumed to be the cause of their death.
“You have a big boom of light and sound, and the birds start freaking out,” a news site writes. “They start blindly flying around at top speed, and crash into houses.” In fact, the flocking habits of these birds may have led to their downfall. “A single bird could have led a whole flock to their death.
This fatal flocking is exemplified in another mass bird death: 100 blackbirds found dead on a road in Sonoma, California. The birds had followed a single bird to their death when the whole, tightly clustered flock flew directly in front of a semi truck. “It looked like they were committing suicide,” the bemused truck driver said.
Strangely, these are not isolated incidents. Mass bird deaths have occurred in the last few months in other places. Alabama residents opened their doors to find a bird dotted landscape. 200 birds simultaneously kicked the bucked. The list includes Louisiana, Kentucky, and several European countries like Italy and Sweden. And the deaths are not limited to birds. 200 dead cows keeled over on a hillside. In Chesapeake Bay, over 2 million dead fish floated belly-up, and 40,000 crabs washed up on a shore in Britain, dead. The death roll even includes crickets, farmed for fish bait. “It’s a strange, freak event,” says an anonymous interviewee. Another person comments on a news site: “What’s next? 100 beached whales in Florida?”
Scientists the world over are assuring frantic people that mass animal deaths are perfectly normal occurrences. “They generally fly under the radar,” says ornithologist John Wiens, who calculated that there is an average of 163 mass animal deaths per year. “Depending on the animal, they don’t even get reported.” What’s new? Biologist E.O. Wilson has an answer. “With the Internet, cell phones and worldwide communications, people are noticing events, connecting the dots more.” Still, the coincidence of all these deaths is making people uneasy.
“With each of these incidents, the probability of coincidence drops,” a self identified “rational person” admits. “I think we should take notice that these mass die-offs are being caused by something.”
But what “something” is it? Some people are convinced that this die-off phenomenon is beyond what can be explained by the laws of science. Instead, they refer to it as a sign of the apocalypse. Certain fundamentalists believe that massive deaths of “beasts” do indeed signal the end of the world as we know it. A blogger comments, “Hundreds of birds in Italy died…and then just dropped out of the sky at the same time? Not buying it.” Others, such as Rev. James Martin, a Catholic priest, are more skeptical, but even he admits, “We don’t know when these things are going to happen.”
Kirk Cameron, however, readily refutes this. “People love to find codes and signs of future events and see if they can decipher them before anyone else. But birds falling from the sky?”
Living Like Dead Birds
Birds are stupid. Who knows what they think? They sit on telephone wires all day, occasionally taking a meaningless swoop in circles around the sky. They gnaw on stale breadcrumbs with their nail-like beaks. And constantly, they fly. They flap their wings for a few heartbeats, then fall back to earth. Blind to all but this instinct, they soar so high, yet fall so easily, to be knocked down by a rock or telephone poles or an awry gust of wind. Once, the mere noise of a fireworks celebration sent 3 thousand blackbirds to their deaths. Frightened insane, they died from collisions with houses, weather vanes, and even the ground.
And once, a hundred birds swooped in a flock in front of a semi-truck. All the birds had followed a single bird to their death. The blackbirds were found scattered on a highway. The birds’ flocks are so thick they look like clouds, which is how one truck driver managed to kill not one but a hundred birds. “It looked like they were committing suicide,” she commented.
I have been thinking about dead birds because I saw one recently. On my old walk home from school, there is a patch of tall grass, dotted with weeds, that sits between the sidewalk and the curb. Right past a patch of ivy and underneath crisscrossing powerlines, it doesn’t quite match the manicured garden across the sidewalk. Now, in mid-late spring, the flowers were open and blooming, and the grass-seed stems in the 2 foot patch of wild were waving in the soft wind, under the hot sun.
It was here that I was passing, as normally as a child walking home in spring might, when, inexplicably, my leisurely crawl had slowed to a halt. I was staring down at a thin trail of ants, sun gleaming off their backs, scurry across a crack in the sidewalk in front of me.
Involuntarily, my eyes swiveled to follow the ants and I found, to my surprise, a glassy, brown eye staring back at me. As, in my mind’s eye, I picked away the brush of grass surrounding it, the tiny, fragile image of a sparrow began to take shape.
It was lying on its side, its wings splayed out as if it were captured in a still life, half up, half down, unable to fly or rest either way. Its legs were stretched out, reaching, toes curled around an invisible something that was not there. The tail feathers cocked back as if, in its last moments of life, it had tried futilely to balance itself as it tumbled head over heels from the sky. Its feathers, though rumpled, were perfectly speckled cream and brown, like an artist had used a detail brush to paint each one. Its beak was open.
The open beak made me wonder. What had happened in its last moments of life? Had it been soaring blissfully, only to have collided with a larger bird or perhaps a lamp post, knocking it from the sky? Had it looped, eyes closed, and perhaps unfortunately flown into a patch of exposed power line? Did it die instantly from shock, or in its last seconds, see a glimpse of grass rush towards it open eyes? Did it try to flap up, only to realize it had lost the power of flight? Or was it very old, and tired, and simply succumbed to a graceful descent? Do birds know anything? Do they feel? Do they realize that even they must obey the universal law: what goes up, must comes down? Or are they like children, who believe that joy and life are everlasting, immortal in their souls? Do they know that those who soar eventually crash? That by flying, they risk their lives?
We could live that way, you know. We could risk it all for that one glimpse of sky, the short window of flight where we are not tethered to earth in our bodies or souls. We could take to the sky and seize our dreams by the tail, to chase in endlessly in mindless circles, above. Like the birds, we would risk falling. But we could abandon our fears, leave them on the ground while we fly high, and fearless, achieve anything.
Trust a snake, kill a bird
I can’t shake the feeling of guilt. We got the snake first, then a bird, then a second bird. We would’ve never gotten a snake if we had birds first; we know they’re predators. But snakes are easier pets to take care of. You only have to feed them once a week and they don’t care if you leave them alone.
Frito was our first pet, and we loved them (we’ll never know their sex; snakes don’t have external genitalia). They were really small then, too, a baby corn snake no thicker than a finger, who refused to eat anything but pinkies (thawed frozen baby mice). They got bigger, but slowly. They learned to “hunt” the mice before eating them, when we wiggled them around with tongs, but we thought that was cute. They stayed in their tank unless we picked them up, and they were always friendly then, unless they were shedding and couldn’t see. The tank which was nowhere near the birdcage. They liked to probe the edges of the enclosure, checking for weaknesses to slip out of. We thought that was cute too.
All it took was one day. We fed Frito in the morning and didn’t properly lock the tank. No one noticed all day. If Frito had escaped during the day, maybe things would’ve turned out different.
But snakes are nocturnal. It’s in their nature. Just like the instinct to hunt moving prey.
That’s why Milo died. She was always the more anxious bird, the younger one. She must have tried to fly away. But her cage had been closed for the night. She was not strong enough to slide open the doors next to her food dish, but Frito was.
My sister-in-law came down to check on them at about midnight or one. She found Milo lying there, breath strangled out of her, with Frito beside. Her body still warm, we rushed her to the 24-hour emergency vet, but it was too late. It was the worst night of my life. To think what would’ve happened if my sister-in-law hadn’t had the instinct to check on the birds that night. If we had come downstairs in the morning to find both of them dead.
But Tim Tam survived. She was the reason we were able to get through it. She was traumatized: she wouldn’t go in her cage that night, wouldn’t go near the food dishes for weeks. But she was there for us. Still the same friendly, happy little parakeet who would perch on your shoulder and play with your hair. We really watched her for signs of depression, but she was okay.
Milo loved her big sister Tim Tam so much. We called her Lil Miss FOMO, because she always wanted to be doing whatever Tim Tam was doing, be it climbing on our sleeves or eating a particular dish of seeds, to the point of fighting her over it.
Milo would want us to keep taking care of Tim Tam. And she would be glad that Tim Tam was alive, and safe now that we re-homed Frito. We didn’t blame them, because they really are just a simple creature, and we hope they're happy in their new home. But we knew Tim Tam would never be safe as long as they were in the house. They would get out again, find their way to her cage again. Snakes are predators. They are designed to kill. We should have known.
Please, if you have pet birds, don’t keep a predator species in the same house. All it takes is one mistake to make a tragedy you can’t undo.
I’m sorry Milo I’m sorry I’m sorry sorry sorry
We loved you, we loved you so so much, we would do anything to take it back.
Do you think birds have souls? I do. I know she was capable of love. I think that people get reincarnated as people and birds get reincarnated as birds. So when I hear a bird sing outside, maybe that’s my Milo Milo.