Predatory Birds

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Maybe it’s a pandemic thing, what with humans huddling away more, but the big birds have come back.  Turkey buzzards and Canada geese are pretty common most of the time, it seems, but other large birds have been putting in an appearance around here lately.  Perhaps the most spectacular are the bald eagles.  My wife and I saw a couple on election day.  (I’ve been a lifelong believer in signs, as much as I try to deny it.)  We were out on a rare errand when one of them flew right over our car.  A couple days later I saw one out the window while I was at work.  My home office has a window that looks out over a small local park.  There are trees and a creek runs through it.  The eagle was likely keeping a look out for fish.

Image by Kathy Büscher from Pixabay.

This past week, however, the activity stepped up.  On a bleary-eyed Monday I sat in my office chair thinking that there were five whole days until I could relax again.  Mondays are hard.  I glanced out my west window and a bald eagle was heading straight toward our house.  I got a good look, but didn’t have time to grab my phone for a photo.  Two days latter, as I was getting through my email, a flash of wings caught my attention.  A great horned owl swooped up into a tree across the street.  Since the leaves are down, I had a chance to grab some binoculars and get a good look.  It was far enough away that a photo would’ve shown only a blur.  I should’ve been working, but sometimes you simply have to stop and look.

On Thursday, again in the morning, a broad winged hawk came and landed on the large electric wire that runs down my street.  The electric (I presume) cable is quite thick and sturdy.  With the binoculars I could see the bird’s claws gripping the twisted contours of the cable.  We regarded one another for some time.  We’ve only lived here for just over two years but I sit in that office nearly every day and I’d not seen such a slow riot of predatory birds.  As I said, I tend to take things as symbols.  I don’t always interpret them correctly, of course.  One thing that makes me glad is that seeing a bald eagle around here, at least for the time being, isn’t such a rare sight.  And I think I know what it means.

Fishy Business

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There’s bound to be a logical explanation for how it got there. After all, this is private property and people have been here all day long. Somebody would have noticed if fishermen had stomped up this boardwalk, dropping their catch along the way. There’s no place to dock a boat. And yet here it is in all its Fortean glory. A fish out of water. Literally. It’s a perch, I think. About eight inches long. Forty yards from the nearest water. Other than the flies all over it, it looks in good shape. As if it were out for a swim in the dry air and lost its way back to the nearby lake. I’m sure there’s a logical explanation, but I can’t help but think of Charles Fort and his witty takedown of conventional reasoning.

In addition to fish, this lake also hosts ospreys and bald eagles. Just yesterday morning I saw one flapping above the water looking for breakfast. And one of my relatives saw an eagle struggling with a fish the other day—an issue of maintaining air-speed velocity when fully laden, I think—only to have to catch and release. Could that have happened twice? Raptor drops the slippery, heavy fish and can’t fit under the pine trees with that wingspan to pick the thing up. Possibly. It’s not the most fun explanation, but it will do when logic’s non-negotiable.

Charles Fort, the great anomalist, is perhaps most famous for his irrepressible insistence that rains of fish had a more exotic explanation than a tornado sucking them up only to drop them far from water. In his puckish way, he wrote how such “damned facts” were explained away by convention. Fort liked to hold the door open for the wider possibilities. Meanwhile we’re stuck here with the unarguable reality that there’s a dead fish by the boardwalk, far from water and a logic that makes me ask, if it fell from a bird’s talons why does it look so perfect? No twigs or pine needles picked up from its heavenly plummet. No obvious injuries to its piscine flesh. Even had some disgruntled fisherman rowed up unobserved and flung a perch as far as he could, the thing would’ve had to’ve had quite a spiral on it to’ve made it this far from the lakeshore. Science works by sweeping the facts outside the norm off the table. I’m not saying there’s anything paranormal about this fish, I’m just wondering what Fort would’ve made of it, beyond a free lunch.