I watched a pigeon die today.
I was walking along on the sidewalk when I came upon a pathetic sight, a pigeon flipped over on his back, flapping around in seizures, with feathers all around him and blood pouring from his neck. He’d obviously failed to avoid a speeding car.
“Damn,” I said, “you aren’t going to make it, buddy.”
I stood there eating my sandwich while he bled out, his little pigeon claws trembling desperately. There was terror in his little beady pigeon eyes.
I thought of a heroic Spartan warrior, fatally wounded in battle, lying upon the battlefield in his last moments. But, on second thought, the pigeon didn’t fit that bill. Instead he evoked images of a curving population graph from high school biology.
I thought about what his life, the entirety of which had just culminated in a dramatic death upon a Los Angeles sidewalk, must have been like. What were his first pigeon memories? Warm and safe in some filthy nook, swallowing mama pigeon’s regurgitated gutter slime, undoubtedly. Did he have a family, now destitute on the streets? I wondered if his entire pigeon life had flashed before his little beady pigeon eyes: the first day he soared out of the nook at two hundred feet (surely not a more impressive altitude), then several years of scouring the pavement, dodging pedestrians, head bobbing, flapping up to a wire, flapping back down, drinking from oily puddles, perhaps finding a lot of crumbs and rapidly devouring as many as possible amidst a flailing heap of his cousins, flapping up to a ledge for the evening, cooing, pecking, preening convulsively. Pigeons, when healthy, are really beautiful birds, a fact I’d be capable of appreciating if I didn’t see so many of them every day. I often try to kick one when I come upon a herd, but my prey can always launch itself slightly out of the orbit of my boot just in time, peering up at me with that wood-stupid, terrified expression that never leaves a pigeon’s face.
Finally the pigeon’s spasms wound down to stillness and the pool of blood in which he lay began to coagulate. His beady eyes glazed over. A businessman in an impeccable suit looked down at the corpse with an expression of disgust and distain as he walked by at a clipped pace, stepping awkwardly and with exaggerated caution over the pigeon, lifting his briefcase so as to avoid befouling it. I laughed at him, and the pigeon, my mouth full of sandwich, and then walked on myself. We’re certainly past due for a pigeon holocaust around here.