Dead Birds

My dogs love to bring me gifts. They truly leave these gifts for me to find the second I walk through the door from work. Mind you they have a spot and window they sit at every day to wait for me to come home. They have internal clocks and know when I should be home. When I'm on time they are filled with abnormal joy at my arrival, when I'm late I find wicked behavior like chewing on my table legs. Regardless, they are cognizant of where I come from and when. The gift they are most proud of was perhaps my worst...a dead squirrel that they left on my living room carpet right at the entrance for me, fully intact I might add. All my pups lack are opposable thumbs, wrapping paper and ribbon.

So last week I arrived home from work to get a new gift. I screamed out in complete bloody agony to find a dead little limp bird laying on my living room carpet.

Then just as I got acclimated to the reality of it, and as I was trying to figure out how to pick it up, I walked outside my back door to let the chickens out into the yard and in horror there was another dead bird at my feet. My stomach turned like if this was all a bad omen...a rain of dead birds. However as I faced being home alone and having to address these birds, I gathered courage and began my usual twisting, turning, bloating and wringing of a problem. I couldn't help but to see them as dauntingly beautiful, fragile and spiritless. So on a week where I would have paid to have an extra hour in the day, I proceeded to spend the next four hours photographing dead birds. Here is just one of the results:

my two little dead birds photo by m.diaz