Growth and Death
As June ends there’s no time to waste. Life blooms at the nests, change occurring at a preposterous rate. Before I know it the nestlings have gone from being scaly little black reptiles to majestic, nearly full-fledged birds. Every twenty-four hours brings dramatic change, as if a human baby were to grow six months older with each passing day. And yet, in ornithological terms, this is a relatively sprawling and leisurely development. The ospreys’ downstairs neighbors, the house sparrows, take just seven days to grow to their full stature.
While the birds grow, parts of the marsh have taken the turn toward death. The year has no sooner climbed to its apex than it starts sliding down the other side, some plants already beginning to retreat, to brown and curl, and the plushness, the fullness, shriveling. But while drought withers the green, Hones reports that the fish are still jumping, and the combination of fish and steady sun makes it an ideal season for osprey growth.
Excited about seeing the changes, I begin to wake earlier and earlier—at five, then four—getting out on the Chapin marsh before dawn. It’s the time of year when light crowds out darkness, and the nestlings look enormous, fuller, stronger, with more clearly checkered black-and-white backs. In fact, they’re too big to call nestlings. The young are now larger than jays, and they put their whole bodies into their warning and begging cries. But while the wings have grown, they remain unwieldy. These are wings that, for all their size, have outpaced the birds themselves. When one of the Chapin young tries to stretch out her wings all the way, she falls face forward in the nest. (I assume the two larger birds are female, and the two smaller are males, since females are generally larger than males. But this is admittedly guesswork. For instance, a female born last might well be smaller than a male born first.) “Awkward adolescents,” Alan Poole calls them, though these birds are luckier than humans, in that their early adolescence lasts only about twenty days. I’m witness to all of it, to a change that seems almost miraculous in speed. As the nestlings grow their young eyes blaze orange through bandit masks, and the patch on the back of their neck shines orange, too. As the primary and secondary feathers fill out, the black-and-gold pattern grows more vivid, as if coming into focus in the telescope.
At the end of a buggy June I watch the ospreys change daily, too transfixed to leave my post now that the plot is thickening along with the air. There’s a new excitement to making my rounds, to checking in on each nest, an excitement only partly dulled by the constellation of gnats, flies, and mosquitoes that hovers over my hands and face. Mosquitoes pierce the open flesh on the back of my hand. It would be a gross exaggeration to say I’ve begun to like the feeling of bugs crawling all over me, but it’s true that I’ve at least started to enjoy what I associate with this feeling: it lets me know I’m out on the marsh, looking through my scope, living on osprey time.
While I wear a halo of bugs, a thousand more insects buzz around the nest itself, drawn by fish and fish guts. Ticks, mites, larvae, and God knows what other microscopic creatures swarm in the interstices of the nest. For the nestlings, it’s an intensely itchy life, bugs combining with the uncomfortable sensation of feathers growing in. One of their dominant sensations of being alive must be the need to scratch. Not surprisingly, they spend a lot of their time doing just that, pecking at their feathers with their bills when not sleeping or feeding.
Of course, much of what they do is feed. All this wild growth requires fish, and it’s a good thing that the Chapin male is a great hunter. With four young, and six total mouths to feed, this is a family that requires more and more fish. In The Lives of Birds I read of the “wear and tear” on pairs of bird parents with large clutch sizes, but, other than the female’s ragged appearance, I haven’t noticed anything amiss. The male’s life simplifies to the point of obsessiveness. Other than resting and eating, he spends almost all of his time hunting, and when he delivers the fish to the nest, usually after he’s taken his share, the nestlings break into a cacophony of begging. They waddle and sprawl around the nest, their mouths open and their awkward-looking tongues jutting out demonically. As the mother begins to tear off a strand of silver skin, taking a gulp or two for herself before doling out the food, the nestlings aggressively jockey for position. For these young birds fish isn’t just fish but a substance to be converted. This is true transubstantiation: fish is energy, fish is growth, fish is size and strength. Flounder and trout are the object of intense yearning, begging, jostling, and fighting, for, though only a few weeks old, these growing birds already know that, on the most basic level, fish means life.
Even young ospreys eat with gusto and savagery. You wouldn’t want to get in the way of their meal. I have a running argument with my wife about the relationship she has with her cats. It’s my contention that if she were mouse-sized, her cats would torture and then kill her, but Nina claims that they would recognize her voice and face, and wouldn’t hurt her. For the sake of nonargument I usually concede this point. But even if her house cats are potentially benevolent, then you would be hard-pressed to say that of ospreys. I have no illusions as to the results if I were fish-sized and swimming.
Ospreys kill to live. Daily murder of other animals is central to their survival, and they take pride in their work. In The Wind Masters, Pete Dunne writes of a northern goshawk: “The truth, I believe, is that the bird liked to kill. It was something projected by the bird’s stance; it was something that could be seen, by things that hunt and things that are hunted, in the bird’s eyes.”
One day during the last week of June a stranger visits me at my Chapin watch. At first I’m wary, worried that he is horning in on my osprey turf. He walks up from behind and puts his hands casually on the back of my lawn chair. I stand up quickly and try to instill a look of territoriality into my eyes, but he ignores the warning.
“How many of them out there now?” he asks, as if it were his nest.
I resentfully admit to four fledglings but loosen up when he explains the reason for his visit. He introduces himself as Ralph Holmberg and says he was friends with “Scotty.” All spring long I’ve wondered about the little plaque on the pole of the lopsided nest, a tribute to Clinton Scott, “dedicated falconer.”
“He took that falcon everywhere,” Ralph says. He tells me the story of Scott’s somewhat eccentric life, a life centered on birds.
“His house was a mess. It had a picnic table in the kitchen. He lived frugally because what he cared most about was raising young birds.”
I like the sound of that. A simplified life, as pared down as the Chapin male’s. Ralph explains that Scotty took him out in the bogs and swamps, teaching him about plants and birds. I ask how Scott died. He says that they discovered him on the beach in Nantucket, where he’d fallen down from a heart attack.
“They found him there with his falcon perched nearby,” he says. “The falcon had a rabbit.”
Dying outside on the beach with his bird next to him seems a fitting end, and I say so. He agrees. My irritation at Ralph’s intrusion turns to gratitude. He has brought me a gift: a birder’s fable to attach to the lopsided nest.
On June 30 I head up to our local fish market, Northside Seafood, and talk with the owner, Peter Thombly. Not long ago I’d explained my osprey project to him and he’d said he was interested in helping. Today he lays out a variety of fish on the cutting board and has me run my fingertips along the scales of a flounder. Going against the scales, it feels like a cat’s grainy tongue. “The scales are bigger than you’d think for a small fish,” he says, sifting the flounder skin through his fingers as if testing fabric. He slices the skin off a salmon and shows me the white hairlike fibers that span the skin and pink membrane. I ask him what the toughest skin of any fish is, and he says that, after shark, he’d pick striped bass. “They’ve got a coat of armor,” he says. Since he doesn’t have any stripers today, he sends me home with a garbage bag filled with chunks of bluefish, salmon, and cod, and one entire flounder.
Armed with these goodies, my mission is to get a little sense of how it must feel to rip a fish apart. I resolve to make something of a ceremony out of it, and, to get in a more animal mind, I take a long run. I come back covered in sweat. I carry the bag of fish and an assortment of pliers, knives, and hedge clippers out to the back deck. With the house to myself, I decide that I should perform the ritual naked, as the ospreys do, but soon this feels too silly even for me. Wearing gym shorts then, I squat over the various pieces of fish that I’ve laid out on the lawn. I start with the flounder. It gleams orangish along the edges, the tail, fins, and back ridge; its two dead eyes—just above the small gill with the red innards peeking out—stare up at me. I first try ripping it with my hands. I’ve seen enough flounders torn apart by ospreys to get the idea, but while my fingernails are long, they only manage to scrape off the bluish scales. If I really had to tear this fish apart with my bare hands, if my life depended on it, could I? Maybe, but right now there seems no way in, no way to pull it apart: it’s too tough, too slippery. Scales clump brownish under my nails, like peeled skin after a sunburn.
When I give up on bare-handed, I go at it with the biggest set of pliers. Once I manage to pinch a bit of skin, I can tear it back, and for the first time I get a real sense of why the ospreys need to give it such a full twisting motion. To pull the skin back, down to the white meat and bloody middle, takes a good twist and rip. You can see how the birds have to work their heads down into it, down between their shoulder blades. I try the needle-nose pliers, which aren’t much better, and then decide on our small hedge clippers, which have a hawk-nose approximating the osprey’s bill. That’s better, and gives me a feel for just how sharp the actual bills must be. The clippers cut as well as rip, and I quickly get down to the cold cubish white of the flounder, the meat that must be the tastiest to the birds.
The wind comes up and dries the sweat from my skin as I turn my attention to the beautiful blue-and-white pattern of salmon skin, tearing with the clippers down to the familiar pink-orange flesh, orange staining the underside of the white skin. Next it’s cod dotted with orange leopard spots and bluefish with classic silvery scales of intertwined diamonds. The bluefish has a more brownish-red meat and is the hardest to cut, making me wonder just how tough stripers must be. An osprey’s head will sometimes jerk back when a tough piece of fish finally gives, and my hand mimics this, jerking back quickly when the bluefish skin finally comes ripping up. I find a small bluish-white chunk caught in the clippers, probably just about the amount a female osprey would feed her young.
Tearing fish apart is an intensely smelly procedure, and for the rest of the day I’ll reek, despite repeated scrubbings. Osprey nests must stink powerfully of fish, and the females, without the benefit of the males’ repeated dunkings, must truly stink. If ospreys become what they see, they also become what they smell, and it’s a good thing that their noses, two small slits above their bills, aren’t as well developed as their eyes. Or maybe fish, even old fish, smells good to them.
Finally, despite the odor, I turn my thoughts to dinner. I use my brother’s old filleting knife on the flounder, which, though dulled from the years, still works pretty well. Later tonight, I’ll wish I had my brother’s skill as well as his knife. I’ll be surprised by all the bones and cartilage that the ospreys relentlessly gnaw through, gulping everything down. Because I’ve never filleted a flounder before, I’ll end up grilling it more or less whole, and will eat it while avoiding looking down at the bulging eyes and the internal organs I’ve missed. But I’ll eat it all—despite any squeamishness—as the final step in this odd little ceremony.
My younger brother used the knife I use today to fillet flounder while working on the Albatross, the commercial fishing boat that docks in the harbor right across the street from our house. Standing out on the back deck this morning I can see the same fifty-two-foot-long boat loading its morning passengers. During childhood summers my brother helped tourists with their lines, strengthened his arms pulling and dropping anchor, and filleted fish in fast motion back at the docks. Most of the money he made was in tips, which he later pulled out of his pockets and dropped in our room so that the floor was covered with dollar bills that smelled of blood and flounder. Because he was irresponsible enough to leave his money lying around, it wasn’t hard for me to rationalize picking up a buck or two whenever I needed it. He was my little brother, I must have thought, and therefore it wasn’t really stealing.
Since Nina has known my brother he hasn’t been himself, and it’s hard for her to believe me when I describe him as a sweet kid with a good sense of humor. The man she’s gotten to know has long been at war with himself and others, chemicals inside him creating a world that no one but he sees. Coincidence or not, his breakdown began just after my father died of cancer, five years ago. My father was a strong man with a strong voice, and my brother and I measured and defined ourselves both by and against him. The three of us were deeply linked, and are still linked despite anger, death, and mental illness. My father’s death at fifty-six was the great cataclysmic event that shook my family, and continues to shake my family today. My coming back to Cape Cod and rooting myself is in large part a reaction to my family’s intense uprooting. My brother hasn’t had such a lucky or healthy reaction. It’s been over two years since he’s been back here, to our family home, in large part because the rest of us are afraid of him.
On Thursday, July 1, my brother comes to visit. Nina and I pick him up at the airport, but he won’t speak to us. In the two-hour car ride home, through bad Boston traffic, he says almost nothing, glares at us, stares out the window, angry that we won’t let him smoke in our car. That night he doesn’t sleep, slams doors, takes my mother’s car from 2:00 to 5:00 a.m. When he returns at 5:00 he claims that the neighbors are heckling him and calls the police. We wake to hear him yelling at my mother, and I come downstairs to try to calm him. At 5:30 I decide to take him out to the Chapin nest with me, and he comes along reluctantly. Though I suspect it’s futile, I attempt to interest him in the birds. But the outside world holds no appeal. He is turned chronically inward, and when I head out to the marsh, he sits with a cigarette in my station wagon and takes notes in his journal, filling the car with words and smoke. At the nest, I feel my own notes taking on an inward-turned intensity, and find it hard to concentrate on the birds.
Over the next few days the mood in the house darkens. This character currently inhabiting my brother’s body is angry, loud, sulking, and, seemingly, evil. It isn’t him, of course; it’s his illness. But like some ancient mythic creature, or the childhood bogeyman, he brings chaos and uncertainty wherever he goes. We have explored every option but there is no way for us to help him until he’s ready for help. My mother has spent a good part of the last two years trying to better his situation—worrying and fretting over him around the clock—but he seems to feel nothing but anger. How can this have happened? some part of him must still know to ask. When he heads back to Texas after six days it’s as if he’s been here a year. It will take us weeks to recover and will leave us all feeling dazed and depressed, upset and angry. A less consistent but more poignant sensation is an occasional deep, stabbing sadness for my brother and for what has become of his life.
Sometimes life provides coincidences that art would blanch at. During my brother’s stay an event occurs at the nest with symbolic repercussions that for the most part I try to ignore. Before my brother’s arrival I began to notice the workings of the pecking order, but the intensity of the competition increased while he was here. Other than jockeying for position, well-fed osprey nestlings don’t fight much, and up until recently the Chapin group has seemed remarkably harmonious. Nevertheless, the rule of muscle and size has applied at the nest since the first days I saw the birds. The biggest nestling, the one I now call No. 1, is always first in line and takes her time eating while the others beg. (I assume the nestling is a female since females are generally larger than males, and this one is by far the largest of the clutch.) She eats more aggressively than the others and, like her parents, sometimes lets go with a good canine head shake when downing a scrag of fish. While No. 1 eats, No. 2 will sometimes sidle up and manage to sneak a few bites, maybe one bite to every four the bigger bird gets. The size drop-off from No. 2 to No. 3 is fairly dramatic, and even greater between No. 3 and the runt. The gap between the largest and smallest birds is truly remarkable: while No. 1’s head now looks almost like her mother’s, the last bird is clearly less developed, half her sister’s size. The runt appears almost a full stage of growth behind, its goofy reptilian head still wobbling. Often the runt sleeps or lies low while the others eat, holding little hope that he’ll ever get his share. This is the same bird that I saw housekeeping as if to keep his mind off the rumblings of his stomach.
“Nature isn’t Disney,” my friend Reg Saner said the last time we talked, and all it takes to understand this is to watch a single feeding. One day I see the female osprey hop-fly across the nest with half a trout in her talon, briefly putting the runt in the best position to eat. I’m hoping to witness an act of benevolence, but this hope ends when No. 1 barges back across the nest and knocks the runt over, essentially sitting on the smaller bird’s head while she starts to eat. Reminded of junior high school indignities at the hands of bullies, I root hard for the runt to break free. When he finally crawls out from under and actually gets a bite I let go a little cheer, but the victory is short-lived. Soon No. 2 and No. 3 have pushed ahead of him, No. 3 delivering a vicious stab in the process. Other than shoulder-to-shoulder tussling, this is the first truly violent act I’ve seen between the siblings, putting the peck in pecking order. As with humans, those with little tend to turn on those with less, and over the next days No. 3 grows more and more violent toward the runt. As the birds become bigger they need more fish, and while the runt seems resigned to getting less, the second-smallest bird becomes increasingly frustrated in his efforts to eat enough.
I remind myself that the nestlings aren’t really any more heartless than human children. Childhood is war, after all, though it’s easy to let memory glaze over this fact. On a walk recorded by James Boswell in Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, Lady McLeod asked Samuel Johnson if he believed there was an inherent benevolence in human feelings, to which Johnson replied, “No madam, no more than a wolf.” Or, he might have said, had he seen one diving in a nearby loch, no more—or less—than an osprey.
It doesn’t do to get too excited about a bird’s “humanity.” My reading confirms that life at the nest can be quite gruesome and un-Disney-like. My books teach me about birds called brood parasites who lay eggs in the nests of other birds and whose offspring, once hatched, go about the quick work of killing their stepsiblings. Some brood parasites, like the freshly hatched cuckoo, follow an instinct to push the other eggs from the nest; others, like the honeyguide, take things to an even more murderous extreme, briefly developing a special needlelike point on their bills, made especially for killing birds that hatch at the same time as they do.
On July 2, my brother’s second full day here, the world blows sideways, then leaps ahead to fall. I’m out at the Chapin nest early. It’s the sort of day you wait all summer for, reminding you just how still, dry, and stultifying the season has been. My constant companions, the insects, are now swept off across the marsh. Pewter-gray clouds shift in front of a smudge of sun while beach grass blows and my journal pages flap. The light shifts low and jagged, the beach grass cutting more cleanly through the charged air. The Cape I love is back, even if I’d never realized it was gone. As I set up my chair and scope, it feels good to shiver with cold.
This has to be a strange day for the young birds, who up to this point have known mostly stillness, heat, and sunlight. Their new feathers blow, the gusts teasing out cockatoo hairstyles, and it must feel good to be cleansed by the wind. The string and rope that usually hang down from their nest now trails westward as if dragged behind a boat, while the nestlings stare up at clouds the color of healing bruises, clouds that stream westward with the string. The female, harried and windblown, hunkers down, protective of her brood. At first the nestlings refuse to follow the leader, standing straight up and facing into the wind, seemingly enjoying the way it cools their feathers and drives off bugs. After a while, though, they hunch down almost out of sight, at least until one large black-and-white wing flops up and over the nest edge like something unattached to a body. Though the birds have grown to two-thirds of their full size, their wings still remain things they have little clue how to operate. But at least they’re exercising now, and two of them, No. 2 and No. 3, stand up to give it a try. This, of course, could be a dangerous day to practice flapping. They don’t know much about wind, there’s been so little of it in their short lifetimes, and I worry that a powerful gust might sweep them out of the nest. As if hearing my thought or, more likely, the same worry communicated by their mother, the two nestlings settle back down.
They’re all up again five minutes later when the male returns with the usual slimy, glittering prize, the headless reward—this one a trout, I think. I hadn’t noticed the runt until this minute and I’m reassured to see his head pop up, though he barely stirs, looking dazed and tired. What must it be like to be perpetually hungry? Now his head flops to one side, almost entirely lifeless, and I worry that this may be the moment I’ve feared. Is he dying? Have the days of hunger and abuse finally taken their toll?
If so, the mother seems pointedly unconcerned. I’m struck by this seeming lack of caring, this sheer brutality of nature, as she tears apart the fish. The others muscle in, three tails in the air, while their tiny sibling lies sick or dying in a clump on the other side of the nest. Though I know I’m anthropomorphizing again, the mother’s lack of concern, her attention to feeding the other birds, seems particularly cruel. The only life that stirs in the runt occurs when the wind ruffs up his black-and-gold feathers, or when he gives his neck a halfhearted flop.
Meanwhile, the female doles out food in her usual inequitable fashion: three bites for No. 1, a bite for No. 2, no bites for the others. Furtively, No. 3 tries to work his way in around his siblings’ tails, but they have him pretty well blocked off from any possible approach. He turns around and stalks off to the other side of the nest, as if giving up, but then he sees the runt. It’s as if he’s just looked into a mirror at his own potential fate, and he charges back into the scrum. His begging cries grow intense and agitated, but No. 1 is in a particularly hoggish mood today and, despite the high-pitched complaints, won’t relinquish her spot. Finally, No. 3 gives up, retreating again to the far side of the nest.
It’s then that I witness something I’ll never forget. No. 3, banished to the nest’s other side, kept away from the food, turns on the runt. He pecks viciously into the side of the tiny, already dying nestling, tearing out feathers with his bill. The runt recoils in a manner that lets me know he’s indeed still alive, though not for long. No. 3 grabs the runt’s neck between the mandibles of his bill, closing on either side, and begins to savagely twist the neck this way and that, displaying the same sort of wild energy usually reserved for eating. He lets go after a few moments but then immediately stabs at the runt’s neck, tearing off more feathers. Then No. 3 again grabs the now-limp neck and twists and turns it until the runt is clearly dead. The fury of this action, which continues well after the runt is motionless, is nearly indescribable, the second-smallest bird working a ferocious figure eight with the smallest bird’s neck.
While the murder occurs, life on the other side of the nest goes on as usual. The mother ignores the fratricide and continues feeding No. 1 and No. 2, until finally, much too late, she seems to take interest in the deadly spectacle across the nest. The remains of the fish still in her single talon, she flies across the nest and sounds an alarm over the runt’s body. But this is blowing the calvary call after the slaughter. No. 3 has finished his work, and the runt lies dead, balled in a lifeless clump. Seeing there’s really nothing to be done, the mother hops back across the nest and resumes feeding the other two birds.
When the two largest nestlings, apparently sated, go back to practicing flapping, No. 3 finally gets his chance at the fish. I stare down the heartless little bastard while he eats. To look into his little orange eyes is to see something not just wild but purely savage—and not savage in any romantic sense. The fish finally devoured, the nestlings all hunker back down, casually sharing their bed with a corpse. The mother flaps over and stands directly above the runt’s body, but decidedly not standing guard. It’s far too late for guarding.
I lean back in my chair, away from the scope, taking a break from the intense, violent world of the nest. The wind blows across my face as I try to make sense of what I’ve seen. For me the phrase pecking order has long since passed from the conceptual to the concrete, but today it’s changed into something even more dramatic, something blazingly, achingly corporeal. I think of how hard the runt struggled up until now, how it pecked its way out of the egg and how hard it fought just to live this long. Its one month of life was nothing but struggle, a losing battle to get food, the one thing, the only thing, that might help it live long enough to fly and escape a nest where its position was firmly entrenched and unalterable.
The next morning the clump of the runt’s body is no longer visible through the scope. Among some birds of prey the body would be cannibalized, precious nutrients not to be wasted, but not among these fish eaters. I assume the body’s been thrown over the edge of the nest in the night, but by whom I don’t know—mother or sibling? I rule out the father as a suspect on the grounds of his general distance from the nest’s inner workings. I consider walking right up to the platform to hunt for the corpse, but I don’t want to spook the other nestlings, especially now that they’ve begun to practice flying. Likely the evidence has already been disposed of, dragged off by a delighted raccoon or fox.
Over the next couple of days coming to the nest fills me with anger. And superiority. “Savages,” I call the birds in my journal. Of No. 3, whom I refer to as “white trash,” I write poetically: “I’d like to see that fucker blown right off the nest.”
On a more intellectual level I understand that no one is to blame, that this all makes perfect evolutionary sense. The fact is No. 3 has done everyone a favor—now no precious food will be wasted on the futile act of keeping the runt alive. And, according to the strict laws of instinct, the mother is also blameless. Her job isn’t to be a referee. She doesn’t want her kids to play fair; she wants one or two of them to remain alive. It’s logical to keep feeding the ones who are already strongest first, even if it rankles our human sense of fair play.
But it’s one thing to discuss or write about the remorseless mechanism of the world, another to see it in action. I can’t get the murder out of my mind. The nestlings will never again be quite so adorable. I feel an as yet unclear change in attitude: a less romantic view of the nest? An acceptance of cruelty? A more honest relationship with the birds as what they are? I’m not sure. Certainly it gives me pause, making me reconsider all the wonderful qualities I’ve been attributing to the ospreys. Maybe the best thing, the only thing, that can be said for the murder is that it keeps me from attributing at all for a few days.
I know one of my faults is that I’m overly quick to read meaning into things, to regard events as if they were so many tea leaves. Taken to an ugly extreme, symbol making defines the sick human mind. My brother is a case in point, reading portents in everything. I’m human, too, and can’t resist stewing over what things mean. For instance, if I were just a little crazier, I might see the events at the nest as a sign about how I should deal with my brother. Not that I should kill him, of course, but that I should harden my mind. The fact that this happens while he’s here is almost too much. But I’m clearheaded enough to realize that the events I witnessed have nothing to do with how I should handle my own sibling relationship.
What I saw was not a symbol of anything, and certainly not of that. We are human, and we—or most of us—do not remorselessly kill our brothers, no matter how much harm they cause the brood. I’m not claiming that humans are above this sort of behavior—we kill each other every day—or that our motives are all that different from those of No. 3. As a species we kill for the same reasons: jealousy, frustration, bitterness at our mistreatment, hunger, desire for more. For me it isn’t the murder itself that defines this event as below, or maybe more accurately, beyond human. What made it so foreign was not the murder but the reaction to it by the fellow members of the nest, by the bird’s family. The complete impassivity, barely a glance from even the mother, whose yellow eyes had never looked colder or further away. If in the past I’ve been surprised by this impassivity, during the murder I am shocked. “I hate those birds,” Nina says after I come home and tell her what has occurred. Despite myself, I briefly share her reaction.
But for the birds it isn’t a question of hate, or love, or judgment. Certainly it isn’t a question of any imposed human morality. This death springs from a yearning for life, a yearning that occurs at the most basic, savage level. What I take away from this event, in the end, is nothing, no meaning, or at least no human meaning. The murder is a more savagely distilled example of what Thoreau found nearing the summit of Mount Katahdin, a vision of nature where the human was foreign: “Man was not to be associated with it… . There was clearly a presence of a force not bound to be kind to man.”
But it won’t do to quote from classic books either. This is least of all about books. It is what it is. The thing itself. Horrible and brutal, it is also life, a thing that even I am incapable of wrapping up in a neat and tidy human package.