Chattermarks

Top photo: Red crossbill found at the Environmental Learning Center

A ball of fluff caught my eye on the road headed to work. Absolutely a bird. I got out and crossed the highway, trucks at high speed just feet from tackling me. With a grocery bag wrapped around my hands, I lifted the great horned owl to determine the cause of death: high-speed truck.

Why would any reasonable person risk her life for the sake of picking up a mangled, bloody bird carcass? Perhaps a few stories will explain this phenomenon.

A friend approached the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center office, bearing the corpse of a small owl. He’d found it on the side of the road on his way to work, and immediately thought to bring it to us. What better than a gift of slaughtered fowl? Really though, it was exciting. We spent the next few hours finding time to get away from our work so we could feel its feathers, measure it, look at the shape of its beak and talons. We got out The Sibley Guide to Birds of Western North America so we could figure out just what it was: a western screech owl. Dead birds are fun!

Western screech owl, found on Highway 20, North Cascades National Park Service Complex.

Last winter, during the Institute course Hidden Skagit, naturalist Megan McGinty and I led the group on a hike around the Port Susan Bay Preserve, in the Skagit lowlands of western Washington. We expected to show them flocks of snowgeese, the occasional bald eagle, all kinds of ducks, and what happens at the meeting of river and sea. As we rounded a corner on the dike, however, we introduced our company to a gruesome and unexpected sight. Wounded snowgeese waddled away from us, leaving their less fortunate friends behind for us to see up close.

Megan interprets stories from snow goose remains at Port Susan Bay Preserve.

Megan picked up the feathers and bones, passing them to the brave ones of the bunch, to demonstrate bird anatomy and behavior. She explained that these pieces were also evidence of the birds’ ecological relationships, whose predators are often eagles or coyotes. The class was written up in the Everett Herald and she even had her photograph in color, all for handling dead birds. (I can assure you she washed her hands thouroughly afterward.)

Here’s an email she sent me, just to prove how much she loves avian cadavers:

“Found this on a climb of Shuksan. Note the shield bug scavenging.The head clipped off so cleanly points to a raptor, probably a falcon; that day we saw two (!) golden eagles and several bald, it was spring migration.”_

After thinking about all of these bird body encounters, I realized that some people do this professionally. During graduate school at the Institute, my class took a field trip to the Burke Museum in Seattle to see their bird collection. The staff there not only played with dead birds, they cleaned them, sewed them up, categorized them, and had tea parties with them. Well, okay, maybe no tea parties.

Graduate students in the North Cascades Institute/Western Washington University MEd. program study birds at the Burke Museum.

At any rate, the moral you should learn from these stories is that you can be famous, entertained, and employed if only you take up the corpses of our feathered friends. I’d love to hear your success stories!