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Sunday, February 9, 2025
HomeAgingThe Thing With Feathers

The Thing With Feathers

On a hot morning in July, my neighbor Lynn asked me for a favor. 

“I have an injured bird. I need you to put it out of its misery.”

Behind her, at the foot of an old pine tree, lay a gray mourning dove frantically flapping its wings. 

 I can’t kill anything. Even insects. I wrap spiders and stinkbugs in Kleenex and throw them out the door. 

“Duke would do it,” I said, thinking of the big guy across the street. “But he’s not home.”

“Jake would do it, too,’ she said, referring to an older neighbor, “but he’s in the hospital.”

The flapping wings slowed down. The little head lay still.     

“He’s going.” We had chosen his gender and it was not ours.  

Lynn began to softly sing: “A-may-zi-ing grace….” 

The dove’s wings fluttered, lifting half his body off the ground. 

We discussed taking him to the SPCA or the Aark Wildlife Center. But what could they do? This bird was dying. That little jerking head, those flapping wings…maybe he’d flown into a window. Maybe he’d be all right, like the sparrow that lay on my doorstep for hours, then flew away. Like the friend who was cancer free…until it came back.

We love our backyard birds, Lynn and I, filling our feeders with seeds and peanut butter. She even feeds the squirrels. One bright yellow oriole, not playing favorites, visits us both, the old ladies who watch for him at our windows. 

It was a moment to recall what we asked our friend Dan when his wife died: “What can we do?” Nothing but say the words and be there. We leave the injured dove where he is.

Later, another neighbor walking her dog said the bird had flapped into a parking spot.  

“My mother owns a petting zoo,” she said. “I know how to handle birds.”

 She lifted it off the ground and placed it on the grass, far from the road. We 

wouldn’t want a car to hit him, forgetting we had just talked about finding someone to end his hopeless fight.   

A dangerous heat warning was in effect. The temperature had reached the 90s and the humidity was high. Lynn put a dish of water near his head, then placed a laundry basket over his fluttering body and weighed it down with a brick to protect him from squirrels.  

“We’re doing bird hospice,” I said, helping her center a towel over the basket.   

I told her about another dying friend, and how I knew she heard me though she could not move or speak. We talked about living wills and the neighbor who is in and out of the hospital at 90, the one who fell at 92, the one who is still going strong at 95. We joked about what we wanted when the time came for us. Maybe a feeding tube with a nice brie and Chablis.

She said she had buried another dead bird in our woods and would welcome my company.  

“Maybe he’ll make it,” I said, peeking under the towel. Maybe.   

The next morning, our little guy was still alive. But during the day, he grew more feeble, leaning against the inside of the basket. There would be no more frantic flapping. No jerking of the head. In the heat of the quiet afternoon, we watched a wing tremble now and then. He did not drink or eat, but his eyes stayed open.  

By turns we repositioned the towel, refilled the water dish and squatted on the grass to peer into the basket. We had checked with our neighbor Flossie about her dying husband every morning, until the day he was taken away. The little dove’s body expanded and contracted with each shallow breath. 

The next morning, the grass was wet with dew. The basket was gone.  

“He died peacefully during the night,” Lynn said, the words we’ve all said or heard or wished for when the suffering became too great to bear.   

 She and I walked down the sidewalk in a little procession, the dove’s body wrapped in a towel in Lynn’s arms, a fresh bunch of lavender in mine. As we crossed the bridge into the woods, another dove fluttered up from the creek and onto a tree. Another mourner? Did she want him there? Lynn dug a shallow hole in the dry dirt with her garden trowel. “Goodbye, birdie,” she said, placing him gently inside. 

I laid the lavender on his grey and white chest. “Fly high, little dove.”

On the walk home, she told me a secret. We talked about aging and how the end might come for us. Probably not flying into a window.

Birds die in the wild and we never see them. We knew that to be true. But this one, this one had us with him, right to the end.

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***

Silence is not an option

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Linda Wisniewski
Linda Wisniewski
Linda Wisniewski shares an empty nest with her retired scientist husband in Bucks County, PA where she writes for a weekly newspaper. Her memoir, Off Kilter, was published in 2008 by Pearlsong Press. You can find her online at www.lindawis.com.
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