A Week of Birds

As I detailed in my earlier entry, last Wednesday, Steph found a Brown Creeper that had collided with the windows of the NMU art building. Tiny and weightless, it was incredibly hard to photograph. The pictures I took, despite trying to portray the bird from a neutral point of view, still feel very sad; perhaps it is because I know exactly how the creeper died -- and how needless and avoidable the death could have been.

A couple days later, while walking along a path in Marquette's Fit Strip, Steph and I happened upon something quite unexpected -- a dead Ring-Billed Gull, right on the trail. The bodies of gulls are a rather common find along the beach, but not in the forest. The gull we found had died quite recently; its feathers were strewn for several yards alongside the trail. I flipped the body over, and there was a large patch of feathers missing. It's quite possible that the gull was attacked by another bird, perhaps a crow or a raven. Nothing was eaten.

Indeed, the gull had died so recently that its eyes were intact. It was quite jarring when, upon a closer view of the body, I saw its yellow eye, staring right back at me.

Yesterday evening was the find that truly saddened and angered me: a Black-Capped Chickadee, dead, resting on the ground by the back entrance of the art building. It, too, had collided with the windows.

The chickadee's tiny body was still warm.