Birds of ’Merica

Anything goes with guns among the bearded ones of Sportsman’s Paradise. If it flies, it dies, and they field dress it or mount it on a cypress stump for the man caves of tomorrow. With swallow-tailed kites overhead, hawks and kingfishers at rest, a screech owl whirling from ditch to ditch across the bike path, I’ve learned to stifle my delight for fear they’ll be shot, retrieved by dogs with bites trained on barbed wire. It’s safer for me to marvel over buzzards and crows jaywalking the entrail buffet, and purple martins as they bum-rush sunset—too common or too fast to catch, like flecks of ash rising into pastel clouds. When birds drift through my shadow, my pulse stutters, and I think of John James Audubon, naturalist, disciple of the ways of wings. Wishing patio-stunned thrushes back to life, I understand his desire to fan tail feathers and pin them wide, to unpack fluff from the breast and slice the knotted gizzard to its stones. But all that work and Audubon’s birds mimic the dead, decoys nested in the folio pages, where mallards are minus their jewel tones, and Great blue Heron stoops unnaturally to fit the page— spooked, like hunted waterfowl must be at the instant of sunrise. Duck calls buzz like kazoos, bird shot soon to follow, then the fall through watercolor skies toward voices and the grass-tufted marsh and boats skirted with palmetto knives and moss.