Posted on September 13, 2009 - by Rasham

TO WATCH A BIRD DIE

To watch a bird die with a broken wing is unlike anything I have ever seen. The junkyard wants them away from the trash so they’ve armed the perimeter with fishing line. The birds fly into them and remain trapped; in struggling to break away they instead break their wings. A broken wing means a flightless bird, and a flightless bird can neither be tamed nor caged. She explains this to me with candor and calm as she pulls the bottle from the shelf and fills the needle with an ounce of blue fluid; she has done this before. She cuddles the bird that is barely visible beneath the blanket which moves with his every heart beat, his every breath, and then after a whisper ‘I’m sorry’ she fills the animal with poison. My eyes swell with tears, the bird’s eye blinked once, twice, three times before it closed, the blanket was still and I left the room.

Utter disbelief, hate and confusion for the city junkyard which produces fifteen broken winged birds every seven days. They know their methods of protection are methods of inhumane slaughter but they do it anyway; why? Who knows. A broken winged bird in the hands of animal protection is a dead bird: she has no other option. So what then? The death of these animals is sanctioned by the city within which the free birds meet their unfortunate end purely on account of their innate patterns of flight which were evolutionarily learned before the construction of this forsaken junkyard. Is this a reflection of how heartless we’ve become? How destructive, selfish, and thoughtless are our actions, when in order to protect our garbage from the threat of vermin and vice we remove the beauty of the environment from the skies. Fishing for birds: what a waste, a disgrace, a testament to the very thing we need to change: our way of life, our ways of thinking.