Dead Birds On The Road

“All flesh is grass”— a cryptic saying of the Bible that seems to mean that no life is for very long, that life is of one piece, that no one, bird or beast or man, is very wise or very strong or very happy. And we know this is true of all men; but how difficult for us to think of it as equally true of all wild animals! Every fall the swallows leave early for the South. Just so every fall we see them go with envy, my mate and I. We take trial flights with them from the telephone wires, the lure of sunnier lands tugging at our wings, while tugging at our hearts is the lure of our nest in the rooftree.

Then suddenly they are gone, and we are left with the crows and jays and chickadees, to shiver like them through the gray days and the long bitter nights of cold. They must put on more feathers, we must put on more clothes, and all of us must adjust ourselves as best we can to conditions that may prove to be more than we can meet. We behave exactly alike under new conditions. The trees down the hillside weave a new, and all but impenetrable screen of branches every summer, but the birds dart through the tangle with lightning speed and rarely a bruised head or broken wing.

In the midst of the trees stands the house with a large arched porch screened in by dark copper wire; and I am glad every autumn when I can take away those screens, so many birds have bumped their silly heads, and hurt their wings, and even fallen dead against the arches, especially in the spring before they have become accustomed to the wire, and in the fall during the warbler migrations. The sharp-eyed warblers are in frequent and fatal collision with the screens. The home birds, except the cuckoos, learn soon to avoid them; but the cuckoo is either a weak-eyed or a very unobservant bird, for many here come to grief.

In motoring home from California in June, I was aghast at the destruction of wild life along the transcontinental highway. The slaughter seemed to be greatest in the West, and the far West. For miles and days I studied these motor accidents, and I can believe the recent report that estimates a million dead birds annually as our motor toll. But see the total of human deaths from the same cause. We seem as slow to learn as the birds, slower, possibly; for I think the birds are learning, or do I imagine that I see fewer dead on eastern roads than on the roads of the West? Driving my own car I killed to my certain knowledge only three birds between the two coasts, but there was an average of one dead bird to the mile over the entire long road. It was most depressing.