Today I saw half a pigeon. I took a very bad picture of it. The light was harsh. But you can see, imperfectly, the part of the pigeon that is missing:
The back half of this pigeon is missing. There is only shadow where pigeon ought to be. There are some feathers covering up the plucked and angry-raw flesh, but the pigeon has no tail, and is missing a significant portion of its back.
It was sitting on the sidewalk. I had just eaten lunch; I was walking to my car when I saw it. It looked angry, as would we all be in that situation. His eyes (I cannot imagine that this was a female pigeon) were red and rheumy and baleful and I wish I had not looked into them.
I don’t know what happened to him, that made him half a pigeon. I looked at him, and I felt pity. I looked at him, and I felt revulsion. I looked at him, and I wished that he were dead. I did nothing to help this pigeon. But I looked at him, and he looked at me, and I will not forget it.
Later, he hobbled to his feet and hopped away.
I don’t know where he is now. But wherever he goes, a part of him will always be somewhere else.
Please, have you ever seen half a bird. Has this happened before. Is this something that is only just beginning. Are there more to come.
Tags: animals, death and decay, half birds, halves of things, pigeons i didn’t help
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But wherever he goes, a part of him will always be somewhere else.
I probably shouldn’t have laughed as hard as I did at this.
Known pigeon issue, no fix available.
That’s fascinating – I had no idea!
…. pigeons and skinks, both formerly dinosaurs oh my god.
They fix themselves apparently, according to Mummybutter’s link below.
Man I love that I learn something new every day on this site.
Of all the things in the ”it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” category, who would have guessed this!
1. good heavens, birds are pretty cool. What a useful thing to have!
2. lmao that comment thread! “Please, please never EVER mention that show on this blog again. It’s a science blog. About science.” yes, son, the throwaway half-sentence about Sex and the City will slowly poison the entire blog, spreading its noxious influence, tainting everything it touches; you should definitely flip out about it in the comments.
The only time I’ve seen half a bird was on a Saturday morning in the winter in high school, when a hawk chose my parents’ backyard as its dumping ground. We sat there with our cereal watching a hawk brutally dismember a bird and splash blood all over the snow. It ripped it up into pieces, then flew away after, I don’t know, ensuring it had grossed us out sufficiently. There was definitely about half of a bird left in the yard and what seemed like a gallon of blood splattered over the snow.
That happened a LOT here last year, when all the lakes and rivers froze. Duck corpses shredded to bits by eagles, hawks AND THE OCCASIONAL OTTER.
Otters look cute and cuddly, but check out those fangs and claws and beautiful streamlined swimming bodies. They’re like the barracudas of little furry mammals. Ducks beware.
when i was six i found a baby bird that had fallen from its nest and its head was partially consumed by maggots but it was still alive, opening and closing its mouth feebly. i asked my sisters if we could put it back in the nest but they said its mother wouldn’t want it anymore. they threw it in the creek.
birds!
D:
I can’t bear to give this a thumbs up but it is horrifying and thank you for sharing it!
….and the fish feasted. (Oh god this is so terrible I’m so sorry for you.)
This reminds me of that series of pictures where a gull had most of its neck parts torn out, so it was left with a comical head-on-a-stick look. Necks seem pretty important but I guess some birds are just like “whatever! smell ya later, neck parts!” and go on without ’em. Birds are fucking weirdos!
Everyone’s always saying dolphins are going to evolve and take over the human race, but if birds ever decided to really turn on us, we’d be in deep shit (literally and figuratively). How can they live without important neck bits?!
Birds are just super-evolved dinosaurs. Never forget that. They will hunt us down one day.
And so it is written in the prophecies of St. Alfred (The Birds is the only horror movie that has ever actually frightened me).
And then there were my doufus lovebirds who habitually divebombed themselves into mirrors and windows.
#notallbirds (are going to take over the world)
Walking to work one day at high rush hour near a very busy intersection, I witnessed a cat dart into traffic. I couldn’t turn my eyes away, but I did scream very loud. The cat managed to run right through to the other side, but lost its tail in the process. The puffy orange kitty part bounced around a few cars before finally being pulverized into the ground.
Reminds me of my old cat’s BFF 🙁 our neighbors across the street had a super-friendly ginger tomcat, Lenny, who would – no joke – come to our house to play with our cat (imaginatively named Oreo). Like, he would show up on our doorstep with a dead animal present and then come inside and he and Oreo would chase each other and wrestle for hours. It was precious and also really bizarre to see two male cats who didn’t live together be so loving.
Anyway, our street was pretty quiet, but Lenny had other friends who lived across the very busy nearby road. Sadly, he didn’t make it home one day. Cats are so smart, why don’t they understand “don’t run under the big metal thing that roars”?
all the pigeons in new york are SEVERELY fucked up and missing legs and toes and tail parts and eyes. do not look too closely at a pigeon. they are bad to look at.
once i saw a pigeon eating some vomit. it’s a bad animal
NYC pigeons are horrifying and yet people feed and encourage them??? There is a man who hangs out in Washington Square Park and lets pigeons sit all over him.
i bet he’s dead now
He is Bird Flu Patient Zero tbh
Those pigeons who hang out downstairs in the Amtrak part of Penn Station – WTF happened to their feet?!!
maybe a train ran over them
Pigeons with withered/missing feet have usually trod on lit cigarettes/broken glass and got an infection.
D:
poor babies.
city pigeons basically risk constant deformation, disease and crippling injury because the sheer wealth of food that exists around us is worth it.
They die hen they get too old/injured to fly away from cats, urban foxes, cars and shitty kids.
I don’t feel right about giving a thumbs-up to facts about mutilated birds, so I came here to say that I appreciate you sharing your knowledge of mutilated birds and I’m going to go be alone now.
I’ve been told my a Biologist that it’s not fights that take their toes, it’s frostbite.
Once I was outside eating lunch near Herald Square and I saw a super old pigeon hobbling around with one whole leg+foot combo, and then only one leg, like a peg leg but it was (presumably) his original leg. I felt bad for him, right up until the point where he waddled up to me, looked me in the face I am not kidding and pooped right next to my shoe. Like, inches away. Fuck pigeons is all I’m saying.
I’ve always found New York pigeons to be surprisingly intact. The ones in Paris though, oh boy. I have never seen so many partial animals.
No half-birds, but one time in college I was walking to class and saw a squirrel head on the sidewalk. No body nearby, just the head.
I was walking in Prospect Park one late afternoon/early evening and a hawk swooped down next to me. We stared at each other for a REALLY long time. Then it flew away. Leaving behind half a rabbit.
So did you divine the True Name of the hawk from the rabbit’s entrails so you can summon it later as your familiar?
LOL, no, but I went on to buy a rabbit. (She just died over the weekend, poor little bunny.)
Aw, I’m sorry about the loss of your bun <3
Found half a rabbit in my locker at the horse barn once. Still don’t know how it got in there. There was a barn cat, but like!! how did it get in and then relatch the locker door!!!
Late one night in college, when I was supposed to be writing something, I got to fiddling around with the non-functional fireplace in my very old dorm room, banging the flue back and forth and knocking old ashes out of the chimney. Just when I thought I’d knocked everything down, I gave it one last big bang and the headless skeleton of a squirrel came crashing down out of the chimney directly onto my hand.
Later, after I had calmed down, I tried a few more times to see if the skull would follow, but it never did.
I once saw a pigeon get run over a foot from where I was standing. Its entire body was flattened, but its head wasn’t hit, so its neck was still reaching up and it was bobbing its head like it was trying to go somewhere with an entirely flat body until another car came by and got it. Horrifying.
yep. just one more reason in a long list of them that pigeons probably just shouldn’t exist.
I used to live in a first floor apartment with an adjacent alley, or what Brooklyn real estate calls a “patio.” One winter a pigeon died on it, directly underneath the window that I stuck my head out through to smoke. After the snow melted, it became this nasty half-congealed pigeon corpse. It was so disgusting that I chickened out (no pun intended) and asked my boyfriend to move it, to which he responded: “you’re a feminist, you move your own dead pigeon.” So I used a sturdy hanger to try and throw the pigeon over to my neighbors side of the alley. In doing so, I cleved the pigeon corpse in half, leaving a gnarly pigeon wing with a bone sticking out of it on my side. My neighbors and I continued to play Throw the Pigeon from each other’s side of the alley to another all winter…that pigeon wing bone stayed there haunting me though for my sins against its kind…
I too am inordinately involved in the grotesqueries and presumed inner lives of the pigeons who share whatever space I happen to inhabit at the moment. The sheer variety of debilitating injuries to which they appear to be subject is seemingly endless and – I gotta admit – mesmerizing, at least for me. They’re resilient little bastards, I’ll say that much for them, and I wish them continued good fortune in their obviously hardscrabble lives.
I hope the half-pigeon(s?…) find peace rather than turning the incident of their disfigurement into an avian Supervillain backstory, however strangely compelling I might find that scenario to be.
I once saw a man nursing a wounded pigeon. I asked him what had happened. He showed me her (?) feet, which were all bound up with twine. According to this guy, there are people who trap them and tie up their feet. Then swelling results, and circulation is cut off, and toes are lost…. So this guy, he was holding this pigeon under his arm, and he had some tweezers and tiny scissors, and he was gently cutting the twine away. The pigeon was not protesting at all. I asked him how he managed to get her to trust him so much, and he told me they become quite tame if you’ve got enough patience and food. He’ll spend ages earning the trust of a single pigeon in order to be able to pick it up and unbind its feet. I learned from him that there are both kinder and crueler people in the world than I had imagined.
Once I saw a pigeon with no head, but still standing there, on the sidewalk.
Once I saw a pigeon with only one leg, but it looked like it was doing ok.
There was a jay near my college apartment with only one leg. Everyone fed it pity crumbs: it was very fat. Eventually I realized I’d been feeding it last meal pity crumbs for two-odd years: that jay was doing fine.
There are peregrine falcons who nest on one of the buildings in my downtown area. Their kills (smaller birds) are littered across the city.
My brother had an outdoor graduation: midway through the speech on trying for your dreams, a peregrine falcon killed a pigeon, dropped it, and had two other falcons tear it apart in midair. My dad and I were talking about how <cough> there was a known falcon nest nearby, so maybe this was a parent and the chicks, but my mom said “This is Brother’s day, you should talk about him!” so we were like
“It is an omen.”
“The chicks have fledged, but they cannot yet hunt. The parents must still hunt for them.”
“It is a sign Brother should remain on our cell phone plan and health care.”
“”The gods are generous, to tell you this thing.”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
I thought I saw a pigeon with one leg once but it turned out that it had 2 legs and had chosen to just stand on one. Maybe it identified as a flamingo.
I see pigeons doing that a lot, but often it looks like they have stuff tangled around the foot they’re lifting up, so I assume it’s because it hurts to put weight on. 🙁
I used to work at a pet shop. One of the hamsters got pregnant, and so we put her in isolation so she could have her babies in safety. We came in one morning, and she had had her babies all right. She had also eaten 2 of them, so there was about half a baby hamster laying in the cage, uneaten. The third was still alive, probably doomed to be the next day’s snack. I don’t remember what we did about any of it.
Okay, that’s it, I’m done reading this thread.
…
*continues reading the thread*
Hamsters are monsters. But I did once have a friend who bought a footless hamster at a food market in China to keep as a pet (we were all living in China at the time, there was no cross-border trade of live footless hamsters), and that thing lived for like 14 years. Far longer than any hamster should ever live.
was it an evil wizard
I think maybe. Maybe it sold its feet for immortality.
This is not as uncommon as you’d think. How we fell out of love with our guinea pigs was when our “sister” pigs turned out to be brother and sister, got pregnant, and then ate three quarters of their incest babies (one survived).
Our guinea pigs did this too, and my parents LIED ABOUT IT. For YEARS I thought that pregnant guinea pigs could mysteriously “reabsorb” their piglet fetuses because my parents said they could!
Rabbits can do that, but I don’t think guinea pigs do? Also those guinea pigs were horrible. We had to have three separate cages pretty quickly after the new guy was born because everybody was always mating (yes including the baby) or attacking everybody else.
I believe some guinea pigs are cool (I have had an AMAZING rabbit and a doucherabbit so I assume pigs are the same), but those. Those were, in practice and spirit, the Hills Have Eyes of Guinea Pigs.
Any other Thurber fans who had to re-read There’s an Owl in My Room after seeing this?
Edit: And now, after reading all the comments, I am more horrified than I have ever been from reading an actual horror story.
Nature. UGH.
The first time I went to a bus station (a decision I regret to this day), I was taking a Greyhound from Philly to New York. While waiting for my bus I saw a drug deal, some sketchy bathroom activity, and various other unspeakable things, but nothing scarred me more than the pigeons with little nubs where feet should have been, repeatedly picking up and discarding a smooshed Swedish Fish.
I have never seen a half pigeon. I saw a pigeon with no legs one. Well, half a leg. One of the legs was still there, just withered up into a horrid, unnatural deformed thing. The other was a stump.
The pigeon could still ‘walk’. It sort of waddled like a dying sailor on its tiny stump and its withered leg. Its feathers were falling out and it look mangy, but it was fat and all the other, skinnier pigeons seemed afraid of it.
Later I saw it fucking a lady pigeon. Or I assume. It was fucking another pigeon, and I can’t tell the difference between boy and girl pigeons.
After spending way too much time watching the pigeons in my neighbourhood, my working hypothesis is that they’re gender-fluid. I’ve seen a pigeon threesome with a lot of position-switching. I’ve seen more than one twosome with position-switching. It has also crossed my mind that all of the pigeons in these situations are boys, as the girl pigeons never seem to be in the mood. Pigeon courtship generally looks like this:
P1: Hey baby.
P2: [Continues eating]
P1: I said HEY BABY.
P2: [Walks a few steps away, resumes eating.]
P1: I SAID, HEEEEY BAAAAYBEEE!
P2: Go. Away. [Flaps feathers, resumes eating.]
P1: [Attempts to mount.]
P2: I SAID, GO AWAY. [Flies a few feet, resumes eating.]
P1: Whassamaaaaatta, baby? You not in the mood?
P2: Correct. I AM NOT IN THE MOOD.
P1: You”re never in the mood. [Sulks. Eats.]
*three seconds later*
P1: How about now?
P2: [Flies away]
That said, I did once witness consensual pigeon coupling. There were two pigeons on a patch of grass, away from the flock, and I swear to god, they were CUDDLING. Like, rubbing their heads against each others’ necks. I had to stop and stare because I had not know they were capable of being cute. And then pigeon sex happened. It was not cute, but it only lasted 5 seconds.
Tears in my eyes from laughing so hard. Thank you. I really, really needed that.
I was riding in the first seat of the upper level of a megabus early one morning. It was in North Jersey between New York City & the New York State Thruway (where the highway goes through cities. Jersey is a weird place). Five turkeys tried to cross the road. I can only verify that three made it to the median. So many feathers.
Is this a safe space to say for the past twoish months I’ve seen like 20+ dead birds all around Chicago? Not even just babies, and one was a seagull (!!) I think it is an omen of some kind but I don’t want to know what it means!
I wouldn’t have gotten into Lake Michigan anyway (I am from the Pacific Northwest and large bodies of non-salt water wig me out on a deep, visceral level), but once I was walking around Lakefront Trail with my family and saw a half-submerged (as in, sunk into the water up to its neck) diseased-looking seagull that might have been dissolving paddling around Lake Michigan.
It’s one of, like, 10 seagulls I’ve ever seen here, and the lake was devouring it. It was horrifying. I refuse to put any part of my precious fleshsuit into that lake.
I have seen several in Chicago of late, but I think it is because my office building is all glass and birds are dumb (because 100% of the ones I have seen have been within a few hundred feet of my building). Or it could be the End of Days! Anyone’s guess!
Yep, I once saw a pigeon flapping around the Amtrak waiting area of Penn Station (which, of course it was) with no feet. No feet at all. Just flapping around, trying to walk on its little stumps, then flapping around some more.
If I ever feel that I can call myself a true New Yorker, I will regard that moment as my initiation.
There used to be a problem with somebody sticking hypodermic needles through piegons’ heads in downtown Seattle. ‘s gross.
I had a friend in high school who was the kind of friend that had a really active internal life and wanted to share all of it with me- in the form of reading the transcripts of her “cybering” with dudes on the internet, and like, listening to her slam poetry- and this also included daily updates on this brown pigeon she would see every day on the way to school. I thought about poisoning the pigeon so I wouldn’t have to hear about it anymore. That seemed easier than telling somebody to change their whole personality.
I see a lot of pigeons with misisng feet (generally just one missing foot per pigeon). Sometimes I see pigeons with bits of thread/string tangled up around their feet, which I assume leads to the blood supply being cut off, speeding up the foot-losing process. Don’t drop rubbish! Think of the pigeons!
I also once saw a pigeon with a wing hanging on by a thread, trailing behind it. I strongly considered trying to catch it and calling the RSPB, but was scared that if it tried to fly away in a panic it would injure itself worse.
These comments are all the worst comments. I hate everything.
For real
This is seriously the worst thread I’ve ever read. I had no idea.
Pigeons are SO dumb, I don’t understand how they’ve managed to populate our cities so densely when they can barely navigate around any type of machinery (maybe because they can live as half-pigeons, I don’t know). Once I saw a pigeon fly INTO the streetcar tracks, just constantly flying up against the side of a moving streetcar. It was horrifying and I couldn’t stop watching but it somehow didn’t get killed, just had some of its wing feathers torn off. PIGEONS PLS.
Yes. Yes, I have.
an angel lost its wings
he was no angel
D:
http://importantbirds.com/post/98209066179/disapp…
ETA: Ugh, this is a reply to Alexis up there!
My dad caught a seagull once when we were fishing. It was at this pool club thing we used to go to in Brooklyn, and we were fishing/gull-ing off the dock.
Another time at the same place I saw a seagull that looked like it’d been involved a drive by shooting and it was proooobably the first up-close dead thing I’d ever seen.
the Philly Greyhound station is like a wonderland of sadness and horrors but not even in like a vaguely cool way.
but you haven’t truly lived til you’ve spent a night in the PIttsburgh Greyhound station.
ETA: Supposed to be a reply to Claire…
“I’ll take an early lunch break and catch up on the Toast while I eat” – me, making the worst decision I will make all day, probably.
My old job was a few blocks from the nesting site of a pair of peregrine falcons (they’re so cool, I really miss them!). On a regular basis, I used to see intact pigeon wings on the sidewalk directly below their favorite roost to “prep” their meals.
YES. Came here to say exactly what you’re saying. There’s this one pigeon who lives on the Staten Island Ferry (I forget which boat – I think the JFK) who stomps around on stubby legs WITH NO FEET.
ETA: That was a reply to Matt_L.
I have seen a pigeon slowly murdered by seagulls.
It was in the bay, just kind of floating, because pigeons will float but are not very good swimmers, and it seemingly wasn’t able to fly away. Every few minutes a seagull would swim by, peck at it, and then swim away when the pigeon flapped its wings helplessly. Eventually though, the seagulls grew bold and just swarmed on the pigeon, pecking.
It took a very long time.
I don’t know if they even ate it or not. Maybe they did it for fun, because seagulls are evil.
I’ve seen this too. The pigeon fell in the water and was just floating along, hoping to get to a flat bit of bank (Jos and I were talking about helping it out if it did, but it was too far out to wade to when we saw this)
And then the seagulls came.
“And then the seagulls came” is the most ominous sentence in the English language.
All birds are evil. Chickens are also found of pecking things to death. Like a small girl, just trying to visit her grandmother on the farm…
I have never seen half a pigeon, but once I found two bird legs, a wing, and a head under my bed.
I have always blamed the cats for this, and I refuse to hear any other explanation.
i once saw a pigeon eating another pigeon’s carcass. the pigeon eating the other pigeon had one eye, one glimmering evil eye.
i also once witnessed a small child chasing the pigeons and one of them was dumb enough to get caught. the kid was so startled that he dropped the pigeon and started crying.
Well, at least that kid learned early what it’s like to achieve your goals.
OK this is maybe not the best comment thread to be reading while I’m eating my lunch. Be back later (maybe).
Seen this in London. Grim.
The last (and best) may be relevant here. At least this is what I think of when I think of badly wounded animals.
http://www.progressiveboink.com/2012/4/21/2912173…
Oh yeah if you are keen on pigeons then this is a good site http://www.londonpigeons.co.uk/
Half a bird is still more bird than I’ve got in me, so shine on you crazy pigeon.
For about six months there was a dead squirrel in my neighborhood that was hanging from a power line by its little hands, positioned as if it were about to do a chin-up. For half a year it decomposed high in the air, until its paws finally rotted enough to let go.
oh noooooooo
My mom has been cleaning out her basement lately and she found a dead mouse that was basically just skin and fur, holding on to the back of a picture frame.
WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT
ONE LAST REP
THIS IS THE BEST ONE
birds do that when they’re relaxed- my parakeet used to. so maybe that pigeon was just chilling especially hard.
I once saw a man catch a pigeon at London Bridge station, put it in his back and walk away with it.
I sincerely hope you meant to type “backpack” but I have the full-body shivers just in case you didn’t.
I did. But yes.
He scattered birdseed first! Then pounced! I have never gone from “aw!” to “OH MY GOD” so fast.
That is a one-sentence horror story right there.
One time I had to stop my car on a highway up here because two gigantic tom turkeys were fighting – FIGHTING – so hard they were all over the highway and didn’t care about cars. One ended up killing the other with his feet and beak. Then we, the cars who had stopped, just kind of moved along.
Once a tom turkey in a road near my dad’s house tried to get into a fight with his car. He honked the horn at it and it puffed right the fuck up, gobbled in a rage, and attacked the hood.
They are so aggressive. I used to live in a neighborhood bordering a park, and they would wander the streets in gangs. I’d have to run to my car.
where do turkeys run free like that? are they full of disease, so no one eats them?
One time I thought I saw a pigeon trying to swallow another pigeon’s face, but it was actually just the parent feeding the baby. Baby pigeons apparently look like full-grown adults almost immediately.
Parent-feeding-baby-bird looks really really weird when it’s two grown-looking birds.
There is a really good book called Mermaid in Chelsea Creek where a young girl discovers, among other things, that pigeons are her … soul animal, or something. She can talk to them, they can talk to her, and she soon assembles a large army of pigeons.
This post made the demonstrable badassery of being a teenage girl with a large army of pigeons EVEN MORE evident. I know what my Halloween costume is going to be next year.
I LOVE THAT BOOK THAT IS THE GREATEST BOOK #2 COMES OUT REAL SOON.
also if coming of age witchy stories are your jam go read akata witch.
There’s a really cool fantasy series (the Provost’s Guard books by Tamora Pierce) wherein pigeons carry the ghosts of any people who have unfinished business. The ghosts can’t do anything, they just ride around with pigeons. And our heroine, who is sort of a medieval-ish fantasy cop type person, can talk to the ghosts! So she’s always hanging out with pigeons and grumbling about how rude they are while also listening to ghosts for clues. That’s like, just part of how she does her job, it’s fine.
(ALSO SHE PICKS UP GOSSIP FROM DUST DEVILS)
This is a super graphic story about a dead cat so DO NOT READ if you are squeamish.
One day I was strolling along and came to a fairly busy intersection that has a streetcar on it. I see a man looking at me strangely and I’m bracing myself for a creepy interaction. All he says is “there’s a dead cat over there, it’s bad.” I keep on walking and look down when I get to the corner. There it is. Just laying there half squished, half its intestines spilling out onto the road. It was so painfully close to the curb and there were blood smears suggesting it tried to drag its horrifically injured body to the side of the road. The worst part though was its eyes. They were bulged out of their sockets. I hope I never see anything like that again.
I walked on further and when I was passing a man pushing a toddler I asked them if they were going that way. He looked at me strangely but thanked me profusely when I told him why I was asking. Turns out they have a cat at home as a pet and he definitely didn’t want his little boy to see that and ask questions about why kitty wasn’t moving. *shudder*
That is indeed a horrible, horrible story. Yikes.
While driving in Trenton in May 2001, I saw a dead, half-squashed tabby cat in the road, and another cat eating it… as the slowly passing horrified drivers gave both a very wide space.
OH JESUS CHRIST NO! I would have driven fast! who knows who is next on that cats menu.
Yeah, I want to say that this was a really messed up or desperate cannibal, or the dead cat made some really bad enemies, or Trenton just takes something out of those who live there. Because the alternative really screws up my ability to anthropomorphize my pets
Well I…I can’t say you didn’t warn me…
For a few days there was a dead hummingbird that had clearly been stepped on right outside the metro station by my office, which A) what was a hummingbird doing in downtown DC anyway B) that’s like the quickest bird, how did it get stepped on C) oh god, I don’t want to see a beautiful little jewel of the animal kingdom crushed to death on my way to work
These comments are like a carnival of horror and i love it. everyone hates the world and the world hates us. excellent tidings for the bleak maw of death
day before halloween, seems appropriate.
Just last week I walked outside on a break at work and saw a tiny green hummingbird lying dead on its side on the sidewalk, with its tiny eyes closed and its tiny wings half-folded. It was beautiful in a terribly sad way. I touched its beak because fuck germs.
When I stopped to look at it the woman sitting on the bench across the way said, “I know, isn’t it sad?” She’d been sitting there for half an hour trying to decide whether to pick it up or not. When I got back from lunch the hummingbird was still there but the woman was not, so I guess she decided to leave it.
I will warn you up-front, though this is a comment section about dead and wounded animals, that this is rather graphic.
Not a pigeon, but I once walked past a disemboweled dog. His guts had been exposed, whether by accident or artifice I do not know, and I assumed at first that he was dead.
Then, it breathed, and began making the most piteous sounds. (The specific tone has escaped my memory, thankfully, but the memory of my reaction to it remains.) At this stage I was uncertain as what to do. His motion had dislocated a certain amount of worms that had been growing within his exposed bowels, and spilled them onto the ground. I considered finding a solid plank and braining it till it died, because I thought it the merciful thing to do, but being cowardly, I simply walked away and left it behind.
When I returned to the spot later, the dog had gone, leaving only a few worms and intestinal juices behind. I hope it died somewhere quickly, in some painless fashion, and I still wonder if I shouldn’t have just done the merciful thing and killed it.
My cat left a dead mouse on my back porch this summer, and I didn’t realize it until I STEPPED ON IT UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. The noise it made will haunt me forever, forever, forever — a terrible popping sound. Thank GOD I was wearing flip flops.
ETA: this was meant to be a response to bird_internet’s comment about the stepped-on hummingbird…
oh nooo oh god I am thinking about the possibility of your poor bare feet touching the poor dead mouse and now my entire skin is trying to leap from my body and escape.
I’VE BEEN WAITING MY WHOLE LIFE FOR THE PERFECT OPPORTUNITY TO POST THIS IN A TOAST THREAD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Ch…
thank you for this gift Mallory
!!!!!
I KNOW RIGHT
WOW
I’M AGOG
It’s such a city meme to say “You never see dead pigeons, you should see them all the time, right?!” (see also: “You never see baby squirrels! Where are they?!”) but I see dead pigeons CONSTANTLY.
I think I am seeing all the dead pigeons, so no one else has to. This is my burden, this is my curse, this is my gift.
I once saw a pigeon get run over by a huge truck and it literally popped. Sounded like a loud balloon bursting. There was nothing vaguely pigeon-like left when the truck pulled away just a smear and some feathers.
I will never forget it.
I really can’t handle any of this.
They just don’t look. I also see baby pigeons all the time. Finding baby pigeons is a fun thing to do while waiting for a bus.
Dead pigeons not so much.
No, I have not seen half a pigeon.
But I have seen various parts of a hawk that exploded itself on a power transformer. The cool part is that the hawk had just caught a snake and was flying off with it, when the dangling snake hit the transformer, blowing the wings off the hawk. The snake was still hanging, smoking, from the transformer when we ran outside. The hawk was below, in pieces. (Mostly the wings were separated, also I think the torso was missing the head as well.)
It was pretty neat.
When I was in Paris, I saw a pigeon with one missing foot, who was hopping about piteously in a public park. I wrote one of those Dirtbag Teen poems about it, but in a very sincere way.
In 6th grade while on a hike for one of those awful public school “LEARN ABOUT NATURE” weeklong camping trips we came into a clearing only to stumble upon a very large deer head in the middle of the path – blood and weird fleshy things oozing out from its severed neck all over the path. We all stood there in shocked silence until someone said “there are no flies. whatever killed it must have just done it.” then chaos erupted as 30 6th graders began screaming their freaking heads off and running in different directions in the woods. the rest of the trip was an experience eerily close to the plot of lord of the flies.
One thing I hate about late summer/early autumn is seeing the half-grown fledgling seagulls being rejected by their parents. I see them walking up and down, crying to their parents, who just turn their backs and walk away. It is horrible.