I wrote a little something about starlings. I started this last fall, shortly after we watched a starling die, and then had a little encounter with one this weekend that made me want to write more. I'm not sure if it's finished, or what it's really about, but I have a few little vignettes and maybe they will become something bigger.

A starling peers over the edge of the gutter, looking straight down at my face through the window, his head cocked and considering. I find my neck at an angle too, gazing up at him through the streaked glass of the window, watching his sharp twitches and speckled neck and long, thin beak until he hops backward, into the wet pile of leaves on my roof and joins two friends. They launch, swooping suddenly up and over my watching eyes to the power lines across the street. Three black parallel lines sag slightly against the grey-blue Saturday morning sky and three starlings wait there, one on each cable, feet grasping the metal in silhouette. The pale yellow sun of late autumn is still below the tree line, but lightens the sky to the shining of sun on water, backlighting the birds on the wire.

It’s early autumn and I am new to Iowa, but not to starlings. They live scattered across these United States—I have seen them in every time zone. I know of the animosity that even bird-lovers hold for these large, simple birds. I know they’ve edged out native species across the country. I know they were brought over from Europe centuries ago, for a nobleman who wanted to populate the new world with all of the birds referenced in Shakespeare’s scripts. A testament to the transformative power of literature. I know Shakespeare has inadvertently changed the dynamics of bird population and migration in this new world. I watch the starlings chirp and squawk at each other. Some people even go so far as to intentionally starve starlings—their goal is to protect the native birds, so they set out food for those species, and pull it back indoors when the starlings show up to scavenge. It seems unfair to blame these three starlings for the disruption. It seems cruel to starve them. But I also know that nature is often cruel and would let all the natives die out. Starlings are stronger, and therefore more fit to survive.

*

Last week, I watched a starling die. We found one sitting on the floor of the magazine office, its brown flecked wings tucked beneath its body against the cement floor, just sitting and waiting. Rachel took it into her cupped palms without a fight, and sat on the yellow sofa, stroking it and speaking in a low mother’s voice, trying to coax energy back into its tired body. We had no idea how it got inside.

The starling had one last fight in it, and leapt, falling out of Rachel’s hands, fluttering sideways and scared beneath an old ottoman. She got down on her knees and bent, fingers crawling tentatively under the furniture and cradled him softly out again. He needed food and water and hope, so we took him outside and kneeled in the wet bark mulch and tried to feed it bits of white bread crust from Rachel’s roast beef sandwich but he wouldn’t take it. Instead, he tried again to fly. We were suddenly elated, his weary wings beating like a pulse three times and then he lay on the ground with us. Oh no, we all sighed, knowing. We knew he didn’t have much time left, we knew as he arched his back, showing us his smooth white belly feathers, flecked with mud from the plot of garden outside our office building, we knew a life was about to leave.

*

Nearly a year later, I stand outside in the rain, waterproof hood pulled up over my hair, huddled under the slight overhang of my front door. I wanted to watch the downpour up close, to see the April rain beat the pavement into puddles. When I scuffed a sneaker against the cement stoop, a starling suddenly appeared from above and behind my head, flapping wildly up and away, to a tree just across the small lawn, near the sidewalk. I looked up at the corner of my gutter and saw the small hole stuffed with mud, loose twigs poking out the entrance. I think it was a she-starling, but I don’t know, saw only a grey-black shadow of a bird scuttle out of the nest it was building, startled by my presence.

The starling danced with my for the next ten minutes, as I waited out the storm outside my front door. She would swoop in for a landing, wings beating backwards ceaselessly to slow her descent as she scuttled back into her nest-box. She’d stay for a few minutes, and I stared at her small opening, hoping for a glimpse of a furrowed wing, nestled in against the rain. Then I would move too suddenly, clear my throat, shift the weight to my other leg, and she’d flutter out to the tree. Once she dove down toward the nest but lost her nerve at the last minute, hovering above my head and then retreating again. Or perhaps she was warning me, flying at me like a predator, pseudo-attack in hope of my retreat. After another ten minutes in the tree, she began squawking at me, angry staccato calls like get away get away. I should know, but I don’t, whether or not she’s laid eggs. Is this a mother’s defense of her babies? A standard response to anyone too close to the nest? Am I reacting in a way that surprises her or frustrates her or am I exactly what she expected?

*

When the starling died last September, it took a long last breath. It’s back arched further, stretching into an angle that looked like a question mark, further than I thought possible. At its furthest point, head curved back against its wing feathers, it quivered slightly, as if a chill ran through its hollow spine. I know this sounds too appropriate to be true, too much like a metaphor, but it isn’t. Birds are flying metaphors, full of the hope and potential we land bound mammals can only dream of, but this one wasn’t flying anymore. Its eyes pinched shut like a baby falling asleep against all its best efforts; it quivered, and sighed a giant exhale of its whole life and then relaxed. The tautness of struggle left its body, its feet curled up towards its white, muddy belly, and it was gone.

We had to go back inside for class, Rachel and I. I could see she was upset and I felt tears welling up from way down in my throat. We sat through workshop and put what was left of Rachel’s sandwich back in the refrigerator and didn’t talk about it for the rest of the day. When I told Kevin about it later that night, I started to cry and as he held me I thought myself ridiculous for allowing something so mundane as the death of a wild bird that got trapped inside a building for a whole weekend without food to bother me so deeply. But I had never seen a living thing die before, never seen the life actually leave a body or feel the tiny heart actually stop beating and perhaps I had never really know that death happened. But now I knew, and couldn’t escape it, couldn’t move back from the knowledge that when a starling dies it shudders.