When my family moved to Massachusetts three years ago, we bought a house that was much too large for us. More specifically, the yard was too large: every week, it takes a full day for my father to mow/garden/weed/whatever it is that people do to keep yards looking acceptable. Because my brothers and I had grown up in a house confined by a fence and also because we knew absolutely no one in Marshfield after moving from Idaho, we spent most of that summer exploring our yard. We didn't find much: besides an old chicken coop and an abandoned tire swing, our findings in the backyard only led to us finding empty spaces to put our slack-line and hammock.
Someday, we will move out of our home and when we do, our place will be taken by new children that perhaps also don't know anyone in Marshfield. When we do move, the children that will occupy our home will find the old chicken coop and a perfect spot for their slack-line, should they be as individualistic as the Prandato's were that summer. Beyond those original findings, though, the new children of Winter Wood Lane will find something slightly more horrifying: the bird graveyard, enacted one year after our fateful move to Massachusetts.
Bird Number One | Robert Paulson
The same time I was beginning my last semester finals of my sophomore year of college, a bird laid three eggs in a nest it had built on a wreath of our front door. As a family, the Prandato's were collectively ecstatic. Every day I was in Indiana, I'd get updates from my family on how the eggs were doing and they excitedly predicted the birds would hatch around the same time I returned home for the summer. Seeing as it already doesn't take a ton to get me excited, I was pretty stoked.
A few days before I returned home, another egg mysteriously appeared in the nest. My family was astounded and generally didn't know what to do with the situation at hand... except for my father. Truly a millennial at heart, he did what came naturally to him in the strange situation:
He Instagrammed it.
It's been my personal experience that the social media posts with the most traffic are surprisingly posted by my parents and their friends. The bird egg post was no exception. In a reminder that my father will always be more social media savvy and popular than I, the egg photo received more likes and comments than any of my posts had in months. (Not bitter, it's fine). While most of the comments were some sort of variation of "Beautiful!, "Exciting!," or, in my grandmother's case, "BEAUTIFUL! EXCITING!" (she had hit the Caps Lock button on her keyboard three years ago and never turned it off), one comment actually shed light on the situation at hand.
"The brown egg was laid by another bird," stated one of my dad's bird-smart friends. "The baby is an impostor that will kill the other babies, leaving the mother of the dead birds to unknowingly raise its children's murderer."
Naturally, the Prandato's were horrified by this news: after fawning over the eggs for weeks, learning that three of them were slated to die while the remaining bird was born to kill was devastating. The news, however, was not as devastating as the day after I arrived home to find broken eggshells and a crumpled bird fetus on our doorstep. Above the body, safe in the nest, was a sole bird: the murderer who, although was clearly a monster, was also super adorable because, come on, he was a baby bird. I attempted to distract myself from his evil cuteness and refocus on the small, dead bird at my feet.
Our glutinous cat, Sugar, well on her way to the preposterous weight she currently holds, had already eaten two of the birds after they'd been pushed out of the nest, like the monster she really is. Miraculously, she had (for the first and last time in her life) become full, leaving the body of the bird we'd named Robert Paulson and causing proper grounds for the first-ever Prandato family bird funeral.
Of course, at this point, we did not expect there to be any more bird funerals, so we were extremely elaborate in our celebration of Robert Paulson's very, very short life. His funeral included a reading from Leviticus, a moment of silence, a poorly constructed cross made out of loosely-tied sticks and rubber bands to serve as a grave marker and a ceremonial acoustic closing rendition of "Blackbird." The whole ordeal was touching, funny and just weird enough to become one of those quirky stories my family has become known for. We left Robert Paulson's makeshift grave on the top of the hill, assuming that would be the last body we buried on our property.
We were very, very wrong.
Bird Number Two | Maya
About a week after Robert Paulson's death, a hummingbird became stuck in our garage. Unknowingly realizing that she was changing the fate of all of our lives, my mother asked my brother to help get the bird out.
Before I begin writing about the second bird death on the Prandato family's hands, it's important to note that this story does not paint my siblings and I in the best light, but despite what it may seem, we were really, truly trying to help this poor hummingbird we'd already named Maya escape from our garage. Looking back on the events, it's obvious to us now what we would have done differently. We unfortunately did not have that knowledge at the time and thus, here is the story of Maya's horrific death and the Prandato's second bird funeral.
Maya was going crazy in the garage and rightfully so: hummingbirds move fast and clearly anxious from becoming trapped, the bird kept missing the opening of our halfway opened garage door. Looking around at the items surrounding us, my brother decided the best course of action was to guide Maya through the garage opening with a lacrosse stick. In essence, the plan was to softly cup the flitting bird and in the same way one would toss a lacrosse ball, we'd send the hummingbird gently out the opening. In essence, it was a perfect plan.
In reality, it did not work.
What was meant to be a sweet guidance quickly turned tragic: it was impossible for my brother to guide the bird safely while it was flying around in a terrified panic and instead of sending Maya safely through the opening, she catapulted into our garage door. To say the least, it was a horrifying scene. Stunned against the door, Maya moved her wing once, then fell to the ground, clearly dead. In the silence that followed, we all realized that the afternoon, which was supposed to contain lounging in our hammock and slack-lining, was instead once again going to be consumed by yet another bird funeral.
Jonny got his guitar, Dana got the sticks and I got Maya -- it was not my first choice job by any means, but it was chillingly stated that it was "my turn" to handle the body, noting that this was not our first time around the bird funeral game. We hiked up to the hill where Robert Paulson was basically still fresh in his grave and began digging a hole for poor, bad-luck Maya. I placed her as lovingly as you possibly can place a bird you accidentally just murdered into her grave and right as Jonny was about to start reading a poem by Maya Angelou, the most horrifying thing that could have happened, happened:
Maya moved.
Maya moved, albeit very slightly, but still, she moved. The next few minutes were a heatedly debated few minutes in the lives of my brothers and I. Maya was clearly very, very injured and would die soon, yet we were obviously not going to bury something that was alive. On all levels, we were faced with an extremely difficult choice dealing with morality and ethics. Later on, Dana described the situation the best. He said that in school, they read George Orwell's essay "Shooting an Elephant" and he'd never identified with an author more in that moment.
I'm not at liberty to say what actually happened within those few minutes because my brothers and I decided to never speak of it again, but just know that those minutes are considered to be the darkest moments of our family history and there was absolutely no joyful singing of "Blackbird" at this particular funeral.
Bird Number Three | Baby Blue
Now, let's go back to Baby Blue, the baby bird imposter/murderer living in our wreath. After Maya's extremely untimely death, Jonny, Dana and I were feeling much more sympathetic toward the small baby bird killer for now, we too had killed a bird. And, besides, Baby Blue was pretty cute and all we had left of the original sparked excitement we had about the birds nest. That is, until the tree man came.
For some reason, the trees all about our property were being infested with an absurd amount of tiny worms. Not realizing the implications that this move would have on the future, we called in the tree man to spray the trees and get rid of the small worms that were terrorizing our trees. Within minutes of the tree man being here, worms were dropping like flies. All was well in the world until later that night when I, with the sole intent of getting more Instagram likes than my father, went to go photograph our small, lively bird and found instead a stiff corpse with a dead worm in its mouth.
The fact that we had inadvertently poisoned and killed yet another bird was too much for us and it was almost eerie how natural the bird funerals were becoming to our family. As we routinely went through the motions of burying Baby Blue next to its fallen counterparts while reciting verses from Leviticus, we all expressed the hope that this was the last bird funeral we'd ever have to be a part of. Something that had started off as a quirky joke was quickly becoming a serious problem for the Prandato's.
Shortly after Baby Blue's death and clearly unaware of the toll the bird funerals had taken on my brother's and I, my father came home from the store with a bird feeder. Jonny, Dana and I were horrified, thinking that we were about to not only have more bird blood on our hands, but also have to find more materials for future bird funerals, a difficult task seeing as we were averaging on three ceremonies every two weeks. We didn't have to worry though: for the rest of the summer, birds stayed clear from that bird feeder.
None of us had to wonder why.