When the Feather Drops
Only Birders in the Building: Burder Crimes Witnessed in Big Pine Key (Episode 3)
[Author’s note: You’re smart, so I don’t have to tell you that this is a continuation of a series of articles, but if this is the first one you stumbled across, then you might want to check out the other two first.]
Broad-winged Hawk Range Map, All About Birds, Cornell Lab of Ornithology
I must confess something at the start of this third episode. I’m not, really, a birder. I like birds well enough. They are dinosaurs after all. Or, at least, birds are what dinosaurs became once they began reaching for the skies. (and after surviving a deadly fireball and the subsequent ice-age,) But although I like birds, and have been fortunate enough to live in places with lots of them, I am simply a bird appreciator. I can’t recognize them by song. I don’t keep a head catalogue of rare birds, log my sightings, or track specific fun birds.
This isn’t to say I haven’t enjoyed birding with my father, who, ironically, isn’t really a birder either. Not in the traditional sense. However, it’s a shared hobby, and we are fortunate enough to be living in a place with many different birds to see. So many, in fact, that you might wonder if anyone would miss a few. Which is why the disappearances went unnoticed for too long.
A few drifting feathers spilling from the branches in November weren’t the only clue that something more sinister was happening, however it took us a while to pick up on a deeper pattern.
Our first clue should have come from the Chickens.
When a wave of terror washes over a small community, it’s effects are often most prominent on the margins. On Big Pine Key, those margins meet their confluence in the Winn-Dixie shopping center, where a Radio Shack still exists, the floodwaters persist, and a gang of cannibal chicken’s roam. It’s these chickens upon which our first observation hinges, although there were wider community effects.
Mother hens roost in the bushes. Roosters rest in the trees, and there are, frequently, lines of chicks trailing their parents through the parking-lot. But this population surges, and then drops. Seagulls roost on the roof, key dear roam the roads nearby— often through traffic. There are people too. (They are the ones who feed the chickens fried chicken.) It’s this confluence where we witness the widest effects of the reign of terror caused by a rash of burders. (bird murders.)
The chickens scatter to the brush when anyoneone approaches. Seagulls squawk warnings when shadows fall upon them from above. Key deer, well, they mostly don’t do anything. Not even the massive kettles of turkey vultures intimidate them. But it is the fear amongst the fowl which is key, and their too stable numbers. For, while the chickens are ever laying, their numbers remain static. Something was feeding on them.
Big Pine Key is home to a number of year-round bird species: seagulls, egrets, cormorants, ospreys, the funny named limpkins, and the previously mentioned chickens. It’s also part of many migratory routes. Many fair-weather fowl flee here during the winter. (the bulk of the Turkey Vultures for instance.) And some birds come for specific seasons, White-crowned pigeons like to come when poisonwood berries ripen, cardinals and bluejays come when they want to nest, and Bahamian Swallows come here when they want a western vacation.
In such an environment, it’s not infrequent for bird-criminals to pass through. And when my father found evidence of a burder, it became apparent that there was a killer (bird-killer) in the area. But the pattern of chicken stability suggested that the killer wasn’t just a fly-by-night predator, but here for the long term. And it wouldn’t be long until we discovered why.
A few weeks after my dad found feathers in his driveway I witnessed a shadow swoop down from his kitchen window. Rushing outside to investigate, (creeping slowly so as not to scare the bird away,) we found a hawk hiding in the branches of a nearby tree, a known species of burderer. It wasn’t the red-shoulder hawk I had been expecting but was instead a broad-winged hawk, and when we saw it, we realized that the crime wave we’d been witness too was much wider than we’d expected.
Because the bird in the branches meant there were at least two more in the bush(es) nearby. It was a juvenile hawk, too young (and the wrong color) to be the first hawk I had witnessed months before, or to be the initial burderer. Which told use that its parents were somewhere nearby. It wasn’t simply 1 burderer, but instead an entire family. The bird-criminals had come to nest on Big Pine Key.
To be concluded.
[author’s second note. Somehow this wasn’t published last week. So I guess that I skipped a week. I toyed with the idea of releasing the last part of this true crime farce today but then there was a fun saving error which made me late on getting even this one out. I blame technology for both the skipped week, and any grammar errors I am, now, too lazy to edit.]