Rising early one recent morning in May, I stepped out onto the front grassy lawn to catch a little air. Standing still, leaning on my cane facing the wooded lot across the road, I looked about and noticed five feet from my right a red breasted robin standing still on the grass staring in the same direction. We stood there for a minute or so, her glancing at me, me glancing at her, neither alarmed by sudden moves. It was a warm, blue sky day. The air was still, peaceful and quiet. 
With a sudden move the robin started pecking at the grass. At first, her beak came up empty, but suddenly she picked up a long, squirming worm I hadn’t seen and dropped it.
She then pecked at the worm, lifting and shaking it, dropping it and repeating that three or four times. Then she lifted the worm, held it aloft in its beak, and tossed it about without dropping it to maneuver the worm into position, when in one swift last accomplished motion she had the worm head first into her open horny beak leaving its body to dangle helplessly squiggling. She nervously looked around twitching her head, the worm swinging loosely.
Satisfied she was not vulnerable to becoming a meal herself, she tossed her head back and in three impatient gulps the length of the worm disappeared into the appointed chamber gut to serve one’s greatest purpose in life.
I expected her to fly off in search of other long soft slender juicy bodies when to my surprise she hopped a couple of paces and pecked the ground again lifting a second worm that only she saw. This one she dispatched without much shilly-shally or ceremony.
Now looking a little jumpy, she hopped in a straight line to a shrub, but seemed to change her mind when she abruptly took wing to the unseen places to where none of us grounded creatures can follow.
There are uncounted primordial desires that each tell a story of changing circumstances preceding, even presaging the end of us all, wherein the early bird gets the worm and the worm gets to serve its destined link in the chain of life. And death.
Damselflies in distress
I’m not as effective a taker as Robin. There’s too much static in my noggin. These issues are coming to the fore for me in recent days, so I find this article timely. I’ve been trying my hand at fly fishing, figuring after all these years in Vermont, I might as well indulge a fascination, and attempt to learn a form that has always intrigued and attracted me.
It all began so long ago as I’ve always enjoyed hanging out on moving water, swimming in pools, bounding on rocks, just watching the flow. My biggest problem with this new activity is, I don’t need the fish. Nor do I have any particular desire to have to kill and eat them, even for bragging purposes. I get that’s what fishing is about, but I’m ill-disposed to take a life.
To just practice casting indefinitely, dropping hookless flies seems a bit ridiculous. So I’m in a dilemma, as the art of angling is about finding the fish, learning to think and observe from a trout’s point of view, then tapping that part of the life cycle that humans have been involved with far longer than history.
It’s also an immersion in lay entomology. Learning what flies are what, which are hatching, their life cycles, and what imitations of those forms have come down through time to be enticing to fish. But as I say, I’m a bit torn, and way more reticent than Robin. I have caught and released, that seems benign-er. But it does feel that however delicate I’m being, it’s a barbed spike removed from the mouth kind of consideration.
I’m getting assurances from naturalists that it’s OK to take trout from streams, especially the stocked variety, as they were bred for that purpose, and tend to crowd out the natives. It’s an environmental mitzvah- so to speak. Good river stewardship. But when I think about Vidda’s Robin, gobbling down eagerly, even indulgently, I wonder about my place in the chain of life. About taking. About ‘going soft’, and all that human baggage we carry around.
“I’m ill-disposed to ‘take’ a life”
Spinoza’s wonder about his “place in the chain of life” is of the essences of Robin’s story. Thanks to our larger brains it is our intrinsic nature to ‘leap upstream’ always in pursuit of data, known and unknown. It is indeed “baggage we carry around” especially in the context of “it’s a barbed spike removed from the mouth kind of consideration.”
We are fatality fixed to be predisposed about things our sister and brother mammals do not think of or worry about. While it’s true some of us are akin to a rock with lips, most people are attuned to be circumspect if they must “take.”
Robin’s story, which greeted me that early morning, reminded me how much we have to think about while she simply gulped the fleshy worm “down eagerly, even indulgently.”
Ah, awareness and thinking – you gotta love it.
Smart birds
I’ve been watching a pair of robins in our yard for the last week or two. They work together as a team, picking over things in the side yard. Haven’t seen them get lucky with worms, but they seem happy enough.
I enjoy when they stop and give you a good look in the eye. It has a real inquisitiveness to it, behind the ordinary “are you going to eat me? ” sort of look birds can give you. Crows and blue jays have it, too.
We had a pair of blue jays return to look for peanuts where they found them a year ago. Hopped around the area poking at things, then yelled at us for not having any. We put peanuts out once every few months, when we feel like the squirrel could use a treat. The jays found them once, and thought to come back again.
Just like a human
On a hot summer day in NYC I thought I was the only one walking down the shady side of the block. About midway I saw a lone pigeon walking toward me. Both of us were walking nonchalantly in a straight line center sidewalk. As we closed the distance between us neither showed any sign of giving way. Closer and still on a straight line towards each other, as we got within a dozen feet we both veered at the same time, my left to his right. Then we veered again, his left to my right, left, right, left, right until finally the pigeon squawked in frustration, flapped his wings in disgust, made a sharp right and angrily strode to the other side of the street…just like a human.
Pigeons in New York know they are not a meal for the two-legged creatures, like them, and oftentimes seem to think they own the street.