Not long ago, UD almost witnessed a Being Dead incident. She was in her office, typing away at the blog, when a massive something struck the glass doors leading to her deck.
Of course she knew what it was, and she approached the deck grimly. A bird. A bird had flown into her windows.
But this was two birds, two red bellied woodpeckers, and together they’d slammed into the glass and fallen, inches away from one another, under the deck table. (Here’s the table a couple of weeks ago, with my woods’ enormous mushrooms on it.)
So now UD had the questionable privilege of examining beautiful woodpeckers very close up.
They weren’t dead. They lay still, eyes wide, chests aflutter, heads occasionally turning.
In shock. Dying, or trying to recover? They seemed to look right at me, and I thought: “Ugh. Bad enough to be traumatized as you’ve been; now you get to witness inches away the monster whose slightest shadow you fly from.”
I stood there for awhile, staying inside my house, staring at the paralyzed birds, and I thought more thoughts.
If they die, Mr UD will have to dispose of them. I won’t do it.
If they die, I should get the really flashy one stuffed. How difficult is it to get someone to stuff a bird for you? And then… what? You put it on the wall?
I left them there and went back to work. I checked on them every few minutes. Quiet, panting, waiting together for death or recovery.
And then, minutes ago, I wandered over to the windows and they were gone. They’d made it. Flown off.
September 22nd, 2010 at 11:39PM
This reminds me of the squirrels around the UNC-Chapel Hill campus that would fall from the trees (sometimes right in front of me), lie convulsing, and then, later, be gone, as if they had never fallen.
Which also reminds me of this youtube video of a butterfly that gets eaten by a turtle, makes a daring escape from the turtle’s mouth, swims away from the turtle, and then flies away unharmed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eERrtN8mS3k
Which then reminds me of the insect that gets away from Mr. Quincey’s cat, “as might indeed the human soul from the jaws of death, [flying] up, up, up soaring over the trees,” in Lowry’s Under the Volcano in Chapter 5.
Now I’m just free-associating haha
September 23rd, 2010 at 7:06AM
Love it, Leland.
January 19th, 2011 at 5:25PM
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