A couple of days ago

February 25, 2003

A couple of days ago I saw a crow who had taken its prized find up onto a telephone wire slung across the road. It was balanced along the wire with one end of the mass under foot and the other being yanked upward by its beak. The frayed end of the stringy mass looked like a giant shoelace that had lost its plastic sheath and was impossible to get through any eyelet. I marveled that the crow was agile enough to perform this task while balancing so well on such a narrow surface above a busy thoroughfare but I also wondered if it wouldn’t be less stressful to find a quiet place on the ground to shred the grotty flesh. “Nobody will take my booty here”, thought the crow as a bigger crow swooped down and knocked him off the wire only to retrieve the “mouse and or snake and or beef jerky” at the first real break in traffic. The big crow could return later to pick up the newly processed smaller crow from the tarmac. Perhaps this was a cannibalistic cycle that had gone on for eons. That stringy mass could have easily been crow that had suffered under about thirty all season radials. Maybe an eagle, falcon or hawk was waiting in the trees to cap off the days action. I noticed a few of those on lamp standards and roadside trees along the days drive. Animals are opportunists and scavengers are at the top of this game. Raccoons, rats, seagulls and crows seem to be painted with the same dirty brush. If a plane went down in the Andes carrying raccoons, rats, seagulls and crows one should be really afraid of the survivors. You can bet they didn’t wait around for the “food” to slowly ripen on the vine. These animals will be the ones outside your sliding glass door compelling you to make garbage faster or die. I know there are people out there who keep these species as pets. They defend the honour and intelligence of the animals and lobby for compassion and understanding. Sometimes they will walk shirtless down pedestrian malls with their loved ones crawling and scampering nervously across the flat of their shoulders. The animals nibble at the breaded ends of their wide fu-manchu moustaches as the owners bark, “see dude, he’s giving me kisses”. I tell you if the animal was as big as the man and he stopped feeding it . . . kiss of death is what it would give. I have never seen one of these characters with a seagull but I reserve the right to use that image in future works of fiction.