A Bird Eats It

I had popcorn for lunch today. Well, there you go.

As I was sitting on the back porch, bare feet warming in the sunlight and distant clouds going through their slow tai chi, I noticed that I had been noticed. Urban birds were gathering in box hedges and rain gutters, wherever they could land and get a peek at me and my fragrant food. Aware of their intent to steal, I pulled my bowl in closer to myself and acted nonchalant. I wondered if any of them would be so emboldened as to attempt some popcorn theft.

Scrub jays, crows, English sparrows, pigeons and starlings are the urban bullies. The gentle native birds are long gone I think. Some migrate through in the spring and sing their little hearts out, telling wild stories of their travels, hoping for some notice and their chance at stardom. None of our urban trash birds have pretty songs. Not even close. Instead, they have loud voices, pointed elbows, and an abrasive manner. They throw beer cans around and bully the local weaklings, kick dirt in their faces.

I thought about this as I was munching the popcorn. Rather than seeing the gathering mob, I heard them. Crows made a hoarse rasping call. They bashed around, rustling and shifting restlessly, their talons scrabbling on the rooftop of my neighbor's garage beyond the nearby wall. To tease them I rustled the popcorn in the bowl and munched as loudly as I could. They rustled again themselves and one cocked his head over the top of the wall, sizing me up it seemed. I quickly made a mental inventory of my defenses. I believed I could hold my own against him, but his beak was very pointed and his eye was dark and glittered evily. Alfred Hitchcock must at one time have been munching popcorn in the vicinity of this sort of bird, heard their tuneless cackles and thought of what I now imagined: Hordes of birds attacking mercilessly, insanely, horribly.

All of a sudden, the beady-eyed rustler disappeared. Pfffft, gone out of sight. More rustling, coarse caws, thudding and flapping. Then several squawks resounded followed by the most gutteral and resoundingly garbled choking-on-a-hairball GLAAAAAACK that could possiby be imagined. It echoed off the surrounding rooftops and windows. The breeze stopped blowing. I stopped chewing and waited, holding very still. Nothing else. Silence fell with a long hush and a single feather drifted slowly to the ground.

Yes, it was odd all right, just the oddest thing. I hadn't hired the local cat, but I don't know that it was a cat. Coulda been a racoon, but the chances are very slim. I suppose the bird could have been vaccumed up by an alien; it sounded that weird. The bird got whacked is what it sure seemed like. Most emphatically deader than a doornail, but I couldn't see it, only heard that GLAAAAAAK and made my inference, you know. Somehow nature took its course in a rather dramatic, sudden, gizzard-squeezing, eyeball-popping way and I was saved. The breeze started up again slowly and a distant bit of music from a passing car wafted to me.

Popcorn is not my usual lunch, but it was good. When you're in the Groove, it will do just fine.