dead birds and all

i'm choosing not to take it as an omen

When one of my family dogs, Jackson, was two, just a puppy, he killed and ate a bird in broad daylight in our backyard. I forget what kind of bird it was. But I remember that my little sister, Eden, the baby of the family and only ten years old at the time, saw it first. She yelped in genuine horror, causing the rest of us to race outside with urgency to see what had happened. We all got there at different times, sparking a domino effect of gasps and jaws dropped, one after the other, all of us in utter disbelief that our sweet boy could do such a horrid thing. Jackson sat and stared at us, confused, but generally unbothered. I’m pretty sure he licked his lips, the classic behavior of a culprit. 

Apparently a dog’s short-term memory lasts about two minutes, so he surely had no idea what he had just done, much less why it would ignite such a reaction. For all he knew, he just ate lunch. He didn’t understand. He did this a few more times over the years, but it didn’t come as much of a surprise after the first. The initial reaction gasps and “bad boy, Jackson!” persisted with each dead bird he brought us, but we grew accustomed to taking turns on feather cleanup duty. It’s been about two years since his last kill—at least to our knowledge—so maybe he finally learned his lesson. Or just grew tired of the taste of bird. 

when jackson was a baby, circa 2018

Fast forward to the present, and I’ve just emerged from an argument with my mom and went to take a lap or two outside to blow off some steam. I’ve also been sitting down all day writing, and should probably get some movement in anyway. And because he’s been cooped up inside too and wanted to tag along, I’ve taken Jackson with me—just to kill two birds with one stone. Pun intended. When I make it to the sidewalk and get into a rhythm of walking, I’m not even finished crying yet. I didn’t even take the time to double check my face for any mascara streaks before I left, I just desperately wanted to get out and get some air. I could tangibly feel my own lips pouting and turning downward as I made my way toward the culdesac, and despite January winds pushing in the opposite direction I walked, I felt so much dread that I began to break out into a cold sweat. Jackson began to walk faster than me, my anxious energy probably transporting to him through the leash that connected us. Although he was very sweet, he’d never been the most calm walking companion. 

My head whirled around at my surroundings, as if suburbia could speak and provide me with a solution I hadn’t thought of yet. Predictably, I was met with silence, besides the distant chatter of married couples on their daily evening stroll and the even further sound of cars on the highway. What I would give to be in one of those cars, I thought. To be one of those people with places to go. A person with purpose. Ever since the beginning of December, it feels like I’ve lost all direction in my own life, a feeling I wasn’t used to and surely didn’t plan on feeling until much, much later. Something tells me it’s not just the seasons messing with my emotions, but the feeling isn’t strong enough for me to question it further. I decided to shelf the concern for a later time.

Forty-five minutes later, I’m feeling multitudes better, but most of it can be attributed to a phone call with my sister. After hanging up, I continue walking in the direction of home, it’s all muscle memory from this point. I hardly make any effort to look up from my phone, my peripheral vision doing most of the cautionary work, momentarily pressing my phone against my chest to make sure neither Jackson or I trip on anything. I’m only four houses down from my own when I press my phone against my chest to check the walkway and notice a flurry of feathers scattered across the sidewalk, panning down the length of the sidewalk along the next two houses. It looked deeply morbid, like a bird-slaughter version of flower petals along the aisle at a wedding.

My gaze fearfully followed the trail of feathers leading up to one of my neighbors’ lawns, up to where a lifeless bird lay. I looked away very fast after glancing at it once, blinking rapidly in a mix of fear, sadness, and disgust at the carelessness in which the bird’s corpse had been left and quickened my pace back home. Jackson, an ex-bird killer, didn’t bat an eye, much to my surprise. He must have just wanted to go home at that point in the walk, but I also choose to look at this instance as evidence of his growth since the last incident.

I thought about all the stories and fables and superstitions I knew that had to do with birds; maybe my happening upon a dead bird was a message or symbol that applied to my current situation. I thought about how a dove brought an olive branch to Noah at the ark, a sign that God had kept his promise after the flood—but this bird wasn’t a dove, it had been a pigeon, and there were no olive branches in its vicinity. I remembered how vultures circling in the air meant that whatever was directly beneath them was reeking of an imminent death. But again, wrong breed of bird, and this bird had been the one to die, not the one to circle around and signal a death. There was the whole thing with storks and babies—but also wrong breed. I couldn’t think of anymore, so I googled “dead bird meaning”. I was met with a very broad array of choices. 

The meaning of a dead bird can vary depending on the context, and can include omens of good or bad luck, a fresh start, or a warning of danger.

I looked up from my screen, unsatisfied with this result. I clicked on a few different links, all of them essentially reading the same thing. One of them even listed a variety of meanings depending on where you saw the bird, but none of them pertained to my context. I only found meanings for “outside your door”, “in your driveway”, “inside your house”, and “in a cage”. I would have even accepted “on the street”, but I couldn’t find anything for that either. What did that mean for me? Was I always meant to be uncertain in life then — if even this dead bird omen was unable to make up its mind on what it wanted to mean? Another site said that a dead bird simply means a message is being delivered, which is just even more vague than my initial options. If any message was ever meant to be sent to me through this bird, I think it got lost and torn to shreds along with the bird, never to arrive in the first place. 

The more I thought about it, the more irritated I became with the whole concept of omens. Who decided that seeing something as common as a dead bird even needed to mean anything at all? Birds die every day, probably hundreds of them in this city alone. Were we supposed to interpret each one as a a divine warning? I unlocked my front door, Jackson padding in ahead of me, already headed for his water bowl. But the bird and its meaning, or its lack thereof, still nagged at me, even as the familiar comfort of home began to dull its edge. My mom was first to greet me as I stepped inside, appearing to have cooled off from our quarrel in her own way while I was out, but the normalcy of it felt jarring against the backdrop of my existential bird crisis.

If this particular bird was meant to be a messenger, it had failed spectacularly at its job — unless its message was about the futility of looking for meaning in random events. My fingers hovered over my phone screen, tempted to keep searching, but what was I really looking for? Validation? Direction? I thought about how many other people might have walked past that same bird today, about how each of them might have come to their own conclusions about what it meant. Symbols are only as fluid as the people interpreting them, their meaning shifting depending on who’s looking and when. Maybe the real message was that life goes on, dead birds and all. The universe has a way of forcing metaphors into your lap, even when you’re just trying to walk your dog home. But sometimes, a dead bird is just a dead bird.

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