Mercy Kill

June 2025

It’s a Wednesday afternoon when Isabel bludgeons the bird on the sidewalk. A bus full of junior high students coming from the school down the block pulls up curbside just in time for a brown tufted titmouse to fall Icarian from the otherwise clear sky. Beak, left wing, body, and both legs cemented in a black plastic glue trap.

We huddle over its shuddering torso. I lay a finger on its back and rub small circles. I look into its skyward eye, desperate and frenzied. Our fingers stuck in the sappy mess, we push and pull parts of its shivering body as gently as we can to loosen the gluey grip. Its hollow bones tense and release rapidly. The tiny heart inside is about to burst. I hold its head between my thumb and index finger and use my nail to wedge the beak from the glue.

As soon as it’s free the bird bucks and twists its neck, pushing the beak back down into the stickiness. The unstuck wing flaps desperately. Its skyward eye strains with the weight of acceptance.

We try this again, and then again: futilely separating the bird’s fragile body bit by bit from the glue, only for it to wrench and squirm itself stuck somewhere else. Hot tears blur my vision as my tarred up hands move like the world’s worst surgeon shakily cradling the bird’s stupid sticky deathbed.

Isabel and I decide on the kindest thing to do. Kindness feels incredibly awful, I realize. I scoop up the bird in the trap. Its wing whacks against my belly as we walk to the corner. Isabel picks up a broken piece of brick from the street. I turn the glue trap over so the eye isn’t looking at me.

Isabel says this is cowardly. I ask her if she wants me to turn the trap back over so she can see its face. She says no, of course not. I put my face in my shirt and sob. She does what I cannot do.

It takes three hard throws of the brick down onto the sidewalk for there to be no twitching, no more flapping of the unstuck wing.

We put the bird in a plastic grocery bag from Vincent’s on 12th and use what’s left in her water bottle to clean up the execution scene. We don’t even bury it. Where would we even bury it? We walk to a dumpster down the block and carefully place the bird’s body inside on top of a box of old kids’ clothes. We look at each other and at the dumpster. She asks if I’d like to say a few words. And I would, so I do. We laugh while crying.

I tell her I hate kindness. We reassure each other of the horrific fates to befall the bird, even worse than what it had suffered. Easy prey for a bigger bird, an alley cat, a car, if nothing else. Too fragile and weak to make it to a vet. What would the vet do? Something similar, but with a needle full of chemicals for the bird and a bill for us Good Samaritans.

It would have starved. It would have cannibalized itself to get free. It would flap and flit against the glue trap until it eventually killed itself with exhaustion. I tell her none of these things necessarily make me feel better. She tells me that’s okay. We still did the kindest thing.

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Over the last few weeks I have rebirthed an alertness to the sky, to trees, to telephone wires. I got a new canvas journal with blue flowers printed on the front and back cover, pages like waxy petals. I make notes now of each bird I see.

So far, there have been dozens of gray mourning doves giving throaty coos to the light dawn air – to another dove – I imagine. Somewhere I just can’t see, maybe. I have clocked black crows swooping over traffic lanes for fries and a melted milkshake smeared unrecognizably into the asphalt. In the evening, there are the Vs of geese hollering and guiding one another off to the nearby park’s pond with the big gray turtle statue where they will sleep on the banks.

There’s a mother red-breasted robin and her deadbeat baby daddy that live in the rose bush in front of my apartment. She digs through the grass picking up tiny wild strawberries, grubs, and the occasional fat earthworm all day, bringing one nibble at a time back to the nest, and then out again to forage. Mr. Robin comes home from god knows where when night falls, they squeak and argue at each other until they eventually give into sleep.

I’d love to take her to lunch, bring my girlfriends over to help with the washing, prepare some minced meals she can easily regurgitate for her babies after a long day. I bet she’d luxuriate in some alone time.

Out by my parents I see warblers, red-winged blackbirds, and several different kinds of woodpeckers. The pileated woodpecker, with its fiery head, plays the bark with its beak like a crazed snare. I watch blue jays squawk and fight with the squirrels over the millet and corn kernels my dad strings up for the finches. The finches, by comparison, pay no mind to this and instead pick up the fallen seed on the ground while the respective brutes distract each other.

They remind me of girls I would have died for in grade school — that were thin and beautiful just because they were lucky enough to be born that way. Their moms let them get blonde highlights over the summer. They had red LG sliding keyboard cell phones with the camera. I resonate with the jealous and defensive shrieking of the jays, the intrusion of the squirrels. I think they just want to be a part of something and are altogether too big and awkward for this given space.

My dad has been at a constant war with the squirrels. He has tried elaborate contraptions and labyrinthian placements of feeders and small wooden bird houses. He sometimes puts out suet or sunflower seeds spiced with habanero peppers to deter the squirrels. It turns out they are quite acrobatic, and when hungry enough, ultimately don’t give a shit.

I went up to Wisconsin and on Otter Lake saw blue and grey herons arabesque amidst the reeds, then slender and strong as they took off with a few big flaps of their feathery wings and flew to their next spot. An owl, unseen, but heard, made it into the journal, too. Coursing over the water, sandpipers and white gulls scour for the glinting skin of a fish beneath the surface.

The gulls are the gossips, of course. The sandpipers are just happy to be there.

The lake narrows at the end to a small canal through the trees before opening up into Taylor Lake. Here under the arbors in the swampy shallows, I was able to note a pair of enormous sandhill cranes. At first I thought their brown bodies were a couple of young deer, but then one stood erect on its thin legs and its saffron head poked up, its beak pressed close into its own throat and then out and up to the sky in a low whistle. The other sat burrowed in the bank picking loose bits of reed grass and algae from its feathers.

I’m no real birder. Up until this point, I had relentlessly made fun of Dad’s middle-aged obsession and meticulous care for which plastic feeder will attract hummingbirds over the other, his shiny coffee table books and Missouri fowl indexes, his exorbitantly expensive binoculars, the app on his phone to identify bird calls.

I have friends of friends who regularly wake up early and hike special routes to catch glimpses of red-tailed hawks or green-tailed towhees. My friend’s mom is in an actual birding group down in South Carolina, where they routinely walk the boardwalks of the marshes and mangroves in search of painted buntings and storks.

A girl I follow on Instagram points out tracks in her backyard in Tahoe and explains the differences between summer and winter plumage of dark-eyed juncos and California scrub jays. My boyfriend’s mom has a Life List. These are all the bird species she’s seen in her life. This is something real birders have.

My canvas journal is a bastardized step in the right direction for my more legitimate birding future. For now, it’s proof for me that there are more things I have seen that are alive than things I have seen that are dead. For now, it is a gentle nudge, the back of a cool hand to a feverish forehead. For now, it is an empty palm upturned and open and waiting for yours.

Dad went on a walk and brought back a long black feather from a bald eagle and handed it to me. The milky quill was so thick and sturdy I shivered holding it, imagining it ripping from the bird’s flesh, something wrenching it out, leaving a bloody hole in its place. Dad says to look at the quill again. It is clean, it is dry. No blood. No ripping or wrenching.

Some feathers are just ready to fall, like a too-loose baby tooth, an autumn-dried leaf. And so they do, with a gentle nudge. With kindness, so that a new feather may push through, so that the molting may complete. I stuck the eagle feather into the sun visor above the driver’s seat in my car.

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The day after we kill the bird I cry on my drive to work. It’s a big hurricane of guilt and shame and sadness and more guilt and shame for always feeling sad about the wrong things. I imagine walking back to the dumpster and gathering the plastic bag with the bird and the glue trap inside.

Maybe I’d be able to get it unstuck now that it’s not moving. Well, with the rigor mortis it’s more than possible its brittle bones would just break at the touch. I could at least clean it off, give it a good and proper burial, put some flowers on top of its more dignified grave. Though, we run the risk of some dog sniffing it out and digging it up after all that. Maybe I could get it taxidermied and have it stuffed and stoic on my bookshelf. This may creep me out too much to be able to sleep. And again, we have the issue of the dog. This all seems like too much trouble. This all seems entirely useless.

I eventually settle on something like legacy. Maybe just reflection, maybe an elegy. Mostly, I guess it’s just a noticing. I promise to notice all the birds I can, if nothing else.

I’m collecting my Life List, gathering scraps and memories and old receipts to glue some documentation of my witnessing together. The things I witness are the things that I am, the things that I live beside and live through.

The kindness that feels like hurt is a kindness I still want to remember. The real brutal sacrifice. The frantic heartbeat inside the tender torso of a bird. Stamping it out. Scooping the slugger up and stoning it to death, the better death. Slinging the carcass into a dumpster before something gets it worse than we did. Saying a prayer so suffering feels justified.

I don’t want kindness to always feel awful, and I don’t think that it does. Mostly, kindness feels warm, like the only and inevitable choice, easy, even. But, I do think the awful sort of kindness that comes with a mercy kill is sometimes good, and sometimes needed. The awful bitter kindness that stings like vinegar on a cut tongue – the painful kindness that is nauseating to the self to give, but is preserving – makes the world sharper, more precious.

Image from Kiki Smith’s Six Crows, 1995