Mystery Solved

There had been some sort of explosion in the backyard. Granted it was a natural one, but something had been blown up, somehow.

There were bird feathers everywhere. My granddaughter, Alyssa Webster, 13, brought two tail feathers into the house to show me, evidence that a murder had taken place, perhaps, out here on Baker's Branch.

"Papa, do you know what kind of bird these come from?"

She held the feathers in the palm of her hand in front of my face. One was blue with black velvet bars and a white tip. The other was a bright yellow and black. I knew in an instant what they were. They came from two different kinds of birds, not one. The easiest thing in the world for me to have done would have been just to tell her what birds they came from. Papa doesn't operate that way. Papa believes in research. Papa believes in reading. On your own, with guidance and small nudges.

Two feathers from two different birds. Could the pile of evidence (like I said, the feathers were everywhere) be a sign of some sort of "civil" war? Well, then where were the bodies? Wars leave bodies. I asked Alyssa that after I got up and followed her to the crime scene in the backyard.

"What happened to the bodies?" I asked.

"Heidi? Heidi caught the birds, and ate them?"

It was a good guess on Alyssa's part, and showed that she was at least trying to reason through the thing. That pleased me but, Heidi, our German shepherd, a bird catcher, and two at a time? I knew better.

Heidi catches and eats, whole, all sorts of wild things out here, and not because she is not well fed on commercial food. But she is not a natural born bird catcher; no dog is. I saw a black lab leap four feet off the ground and catch a wild pheasant in midair once. I said, "once." I have been hunting pheasants with dogs since I was ten or eleven. Mutts mainly, like the men and boys that followed them.

Alyssa was onto part of the mystery; it looked like half of it. Heidi eats with gusto. If she ate the birds, there would definitely be a mess of feathers scattered about. I had a suspicion as to the other half.

"Alyssa, baby, Heidi can't catch birds. She picked these birds up off of the ground in the front yard, and brought them back here to eat. You know this is her favorite spot to eat things."

And, it's true. When Heidi catches a rabbit, lizard, squirrel, or snake, she carries it right to this spot in the backyard, right outside Pam's kitchen window, and eats them in plain sight; just like Pancho wore his gun outside his pants, for all the honest world to feel.

Alyssa and I went back into the house to look at the feathers some more and try and puzzle-out the mystery.

I have mounted both seed and suet bird feeders right in front of the living room picture window. When TV gets boring (hoo, boy) or I am out of a new book, the bird feeders entertain continually, all year long, until the sun goes down. I see marvelous things out that window from a front row seat. Bird ID books are handy, both on the coffee table, and in the bookcase under the window.

"Alyssa, go to the book case, and pull out that bird book on the second shelf."

"This one?" she asked.

"No, the one with 'Roger Tory Petersen' on it. Yeah. That's it."

She opened the book at a random spot as if that would suffice. It would, eventually, but it might take days.

"No, no, no" I said. "Turn to the index in the back. See how all the bird names are arranged alphabetically? Find the "B's", and go down the list until you find "Bluejay." She did. "Now turn to the page number it lists and you will find both a picture and a short, life history of that bird." I made her read it out loud to me.

Petersen's bird guide paintings are preternaturally real, and better than any known photos I have seen of birds. Alyssa was able to identify immediately one of the feathers in her hand.

"It's a bluejay!" she said.

"Right. Now, what about the other one?"

There was a moment of quiet. I nudged her again. I had to.

"Look under the 'F's' in the index for 'Flicker'." She found it quickly.

"There's two kinds," she said, "the red-shafted, and the yellow-shafted."

"Which kind do you have?"

She looked at the other feather in her hand, and then back at the book. "The yellow-shafted!" she said.

Done, almost. Bodies ID'ed; mystery still hanging in the air. Who dunnit?

I had her turn to the "S'es" in the Petersen, and find the Sharp-shinned hawk, a notorious bird murderer, especially in and around bird feeders where I have seen them commit murder out my front window, real murder, several times. I described to her how the victims die almost instantly from crushed skulls, and how the small hawk then eats only the liver, heart, and lungs, the purest fuel for its own high octane metabolism, and then how Heidi, always on the alert for the extra bite life gives to the assiduous, came along and cleaned up the leavings.

"Papa, is it murder if a bird kills another bird because it is hungry?"

It was an interesting question, but I decided to put off discussion of the Donner expedition for another time. History is interesting, too, but the best dog trainers know to quit while the dog is still wagging its tail.

In case you hadn't noticed, I just did.

© 2013 Conrad M. Vollertsen