- (Posted June 19, 2010) Driving in this morning, one car ahead of me on the Emerson Road, a blacktopped rural two-lane, she sat in the oncoming lane: a hen partridge (ruffed grouse) her head bobbing nervously, her dark birdy eyes blinking incomprehensibly. The car in front of me flew past the hen without hesitation, the breeze from its exit ruffling the tail feathers of the bird. She did not back off. She did not move from her station. She stared blankly at a small tuft of brown, white, and black feathers smashed into the pavement behind the departing car and immediately in front of my Pacifica. It was if the bird was on sentry duty, her attention riveted, her demeanor stern and protective (if an avian brain is capable of such complex thought.)
What the hell, I thought, slowing the car. I have to spend all day in divorce court. Might as well stop and find out what’s going on.
The Pacifica rolled to a stop just short of the blob of feathers that was once a partridge chick. The hen bobbed and pecked the air. Her eyes never deviated from the body of her dead offspring. Meager morning wind brushed the soft down of the dead bird as a new sun rose behind a line of second growth. I opened my window.
“What’s the matter, Mrs. Grouse?” I asked, the name rolling off my tongue like a murder suspect from Clue. “Did you lose one of your little ones?”
The bird studied me but did not advance. Whether finally cognizant that her chick wasn’t coming back to her, or in recognition of me as danger, the bird ducked her head and darted through the kinnikinnick of the ditch, disrupting the detritus as she ran.
I hope her other little ones are safe, I think as feathers merge with landscape.
Peace.
Mark
