I was puttering in the kitchen when I saw something anomalous through the windows into the back yard. Something in the air.
When I turned my attention to it, there was a cloud of feathers and a pigeon a few feet from the ground, the pigeon struggling to stay aloft and heading for our oleander bushes. While I tried to make sense of this, there came another explosion of feathers and suddenly there was a strange wicked-looking bird standing in the yard, its (I’ll say “his”) wings half-opened toward the pigeon, like a vampire spreading his cloak to envelop his victim. It was the same color as the pigeon, and only slightly bigger, mostly because of his big wings.
He must have stooped once and struck the pigeon, then flown up and stooped again within a second or two.
The pigeon made it beneath the oleanders and froze. The raptor saw me (and Anna, who had come up beside me at my urging) and likewise froze. Not wanting to get into a ground war, with possible enemies at his back, he flew up into a neighbor’s tree with an overview of the oleander and awaited the departure of the watchers and the reappearance of his prey.
When I checked in on them later the raptor was gone and the pigeon was still frozen beneath the hedge.
Later yet, the pigeon was gone too.
Not that you could tell. The yard is always filled with the creatures, who seem to be too stupid to fear anything. They walk right in front of our cat Pumpkin, who is occasionally moved to chase after them even though she’s old and fat and much smarter than the birds. Certainly something occasionally kills one in our back yard and leaves a corpse, or just a pile of feathers. I had always thought it was our younger and more dangerous cat Pike, but perhaps it was Death from Above instead.
Pumpkin had been outside during the attack. She came back inside right away, somewhat agitated. I could see her thinking, “Holy shit! A killer bird! I’m never going out there again!”
Last summer I was visited in the garage by a hummingbird, who came to see if there was any nectar in the dangling red plastic release handle for the garage door opener. I whipped around from the workbench when I heard what sounded like the world’s largest beetle, and came face to face with him for an eyeblink for me, and perhaps fifty wingbeats for him. No food here! No time to waste! Must keep myself aloft! and he was gone, zooming out into the sunshine.
When we first moved here, I would lie in bed in the morning and listen to the birds. So many, and all so strange. Wild screeches, soft hoots, and the first four notes of Cat Stevens’ “Tuesday’s Dead”. They look different, too. I’ve been calling them “pigeons”, but really I’ve never seen them before. They look like doves with curved beaks and tails like Japanese fans. There are blackbirds that move like bluejays, with long tails held up like a rowboat paddle before it pulls into the water. I saw an owl once, regarding me solemly under a blazing sun.
A lot of people think New Mexico is an impoverished desert. Some of these people live here. But if you open your eyes and ears, you soon discover that this is a magical place.
How else can you explain the occasional choruses of frogs that drift through the windows as we’re snuggling in to sleep?
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