The Case of the Drifting Feathers

Only Birders in the Building: Crimes Witnessed on Big Pine Key (Episode 1.)

Well, I had an entirely different blog entry planned for last week. And I’m still putting it together.

However, yesterday morning I was woken by my father. My dad was witness an ongoing sky-crime, and he wanted me to see it. Outside his window something was happening, something which would forever change Big Pine Key, a small, dis-incorporated community in the lower half of the Florida Keys.

Drawing me to his upstairs porch, he made me a witness too. We both became witnesses to events so shocking that I have to ask myself if I can ever look upon the piney rockland of this tiny little island again and think of things the way they once were.

This is a story of what we saw, a line up of the evidence and an accounting of events which lead to the the most shocking of crimes. I’m sharing this with you, so that you may become a witness as well, and perhaps may help us think of what steps should come next.

Here is what we saw:

Can’t see it?

Let’s zoom in, and maybe use some helpful graphics to explain:

Yesterday, outside, across the street, there had been a burder. . . a bird-murder. Also known as a: squakening, an assisted-landing, a terminal grounding, a buteo-branching, a flappening, or a flap’tricide.

The crime had already been committed, and my father and I could only bear witness, and capture evidence, (also known as playing extremely-amatuer wildlife photographer,) as a rain of white downy feathers began to drift from the crime scene, the breeze blowing them away as quickly as they were plucked from the victim. The burderer, a bird itself, was doing the plucking! A life had been ended, at the claws of another, and all we were left with were questions, (and a lot of photos.)

Why had this occurred?

How had it happened?

What were the events which lead up to this burder?

Could the criminal be brought to justice?

What was happening now?

And what were we going to do about it?

To answer all of these questions, and more, perhaps we should go back a few months.

Oct, 2023

I was riding high on the release of my new book The Specters of Mammoth Cave (Check it out now) and preparing for Halloween. But events so meaningful to me were simply the daily life for everyone else on Big Pine Key. Key Deer were out and about, being small, looking for new buds in the never-autumn of the Florida Keys, and searching for ripening palmetto berries to pluck from trees. The turkey vultures were beginning to take up their winterly residence, and the pumpkin fairies were depositing carved gourds onto porches. (the deer were eating those too.)

There were rumors of a cool breeze. (which wouldn’t appear for another month.) But the temperature was under 90 degrees, so I decided to take a walk. Hiking along a pitted gravel road beyond the Winn-Dixie, the shopping center which marks the boundary between the developed highway-lands and the wild wetlands to the north, I was hunting pokemon near the pickleball court where the firefighters play when they aren’t being called out on emergencies.

The park is often empty. There are a lot of emergencies after all, and while others use the pickleball courts, it was the vague hours before evening after everyone had finished work, school, or their afternoon hobbies, but before dinner time. I myself was thinking about dinner, my next stop was the grocery store, the previously mentioned Winn-Dixie shopping center, where seemingly domesticated Key Deer mob unwitting tourists for handouts, (unaware that cookies aren’t good for them,) and flocks of decorative chickens squabble for space in the sparce vegetation of the parking lot dividers.

Dinner was a long way off for me, but I believe someone else had just finished eating. I was lost in thought when there was a rustle in some nearby low-hanging shrubs. A brown shape darted out in front of me and across the road, soaring into the sky.

A hawk, of some sort, or a falcon. I wasn’t sure. Before I could switch to the camera app on my phone, the bird was 50 yards away and harassing two small crows near the top dead pine tree. The hawk, (I was more certain now) landed upon a skeletal branch while the crows squawked their protests, circled the tree a couple times, and retreated. It was clear who was the bigger bird.

The hawk paid them no mind. But it noticed me from its high perch, and when I tried to take a picture, it flew off, leaving me with an empty frame of pale blue sky. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but maybe I should have. Why was it so anxious to get out of those bushes before I arrived? Why wasn’t it willing to stick around for my camera? Landlocked as I am, I posed the bird little threat, unless the picture itself- a picture which could identify the hawk and place it in time and location-was the threat.

What was it doing in those bushes before I walked by?

I may never know. At the time, I forgot about the sighting, and caught a geodude instead. But the next day, as a kettle of turkey vultures boiled around the radio tower which stands within the abandoned minimum-security prison which had been decaying since Hurricane Irma, a shadow swooped overhead.

At first, I thought that it was another turkey vulture, flying low. But the shadow was too small, and when I looked up, I saw an exposed white and brown patterned belly, not the solid brown or black of a vulture. Anyway, the pale form was far too small to be a vulture at all. It was a hawk, again, perhaps the same one. Birds fly fast, and before I could whip out my phone, it had flapped out of sight.

We continued this game of catbird and grouse for days, but the hawk stuck around. Sometimes the bird would post itself on the highline wires outside the neighbors. Sometimes it was a fleeting shape retreating from me as I ran. Often it was swirling within the the vulture’s kettle, or racing over the neighborhood. Sometimes it seemed to be in two places at once.

One day my dad was on a walk, and he called me to let me know that the hawk I had been telling him about was on the powerline in front of the neighbors yard, by the time I saved my work, (edits for the upcoming novel Treasure of Biscayne Bay. - look for it soon) put my shoes on and raced outside, it was gone, but as I returned home, I saw a brown shape darting through the trees North of my house, the opposite direction of the neighbors. You might say: “Nathan, birds are the masters of 3 dimensional space. It could have simply flown over your head, and entered the northern woods without your notice. However, when I looked back, I could almost swear, on a set of powerlines further to the south, beyond the neighbor’s, another hawk was resting, watching me.

I walked back to investigate, but it flew away before I could identify it, leaving me to wonder if it was a hawk at all. (there are also Kestrels who frequent the key, and they are prone to hanging out on the powerlines.) Uncertain, and wary, I headed home. Could there be more than one hawk?

That was a question only beginging to percolate in my mind, bubbling up like a hawk out of a kettle of vultures. The answer would lead to the crime I would witness only a few months later.

It was only a few days after that potential ‘double’ sighting, when the first feathers began to fall. White down drifting outside the window, evidence of a burder. The first we would witnessed, but not the last. From the wide branches of the mahogany in front of dad’s house that slow trickle of white feathers marked more terror to come.

To be continued. . .

Previews for next time

- “Big Pine Key has become a seedy place for birds of many different feathers. So much so as to warrant a mention the pages of the Audobon’s bird guide, where a certain type of swallow is said to . . .

- “The skies changed when the hawks arrived,

- “Some mistakenly hoped that they would do good, even help the other birds retake territory lost in the Iguanna wars.

- The Swainson’s Hawk wanted no part in the case, but I knew they flocked together, he was a witness…

- “Why pluck the victim anyway, was is it so that they couldn’t be identified?”

- “The fawns were getting too rough, and everybody knew it.”

- “I haven’t seen that bunny in a long, long, time.”

- “How does one become a burderer? Are they hatched or made?”

- No body, no crime, they told me. But we had the body on film. Wouldn’t that be enough?

Stay tuned! for the next episode of Burder - Crimes Witnessed on Big Pine Key

Author’s note.

I was all set to start my big takedown of AI. (Which isn’t really AI but we’ll get to that at some point.) But when my dad knocked on my door, waking me up to show me an incredibly rare site, I got a better idea. Why not turn an interesting nature experience, (and my terrible photography of it,) into a True ‘sky’-crime series.

I’m having fun being ridiculous. Hopefully you will enjoy the ridiculousness as it continues.