
My own lawn -- a flat, sandy square with sparse, seasonal grass -- is rich with drama. Lizards defending their turf, ant-lions excavating their circular traps, spiders trapeze-ing around, the odd turtle cruising through.
This week, when the sun was out, I happened upon an enormous grub crawling out of the ground. Pale, translucent, squirmy, better than two inches long. I wish I could un-see it. Why was it on the move in the middle of winter? Scientific curiosity muscled aside by revulsion, I flicked it onto the shed roof so that a mockingbird might make a meal of it.
Crossing the sandy lawn, I spot a mess of feathers by the mailbox: a single flight-feather, big handful of curled coverts, and drifting snowflakes of pale down. The scene is bloodless, but it must have been a massacre. A Cooper's hawk probably, taking a mourning dove at speed.
Not to brood on the "nature red in tooth and claw"* character of wildlife, but there's this:
Was this -- like the fried chicken bones left in a pile along the sea-wall -- the remains of an alfresco picnic? Wings, after all, not being the most nutritious bit of bird?
Did someone or somebird perform the dismemberment for vengeance? A bird-feud, a bird-vendetta? Were the wings left as warning? Surely the owners of these wings did not just keel over and land there, did they?
I've never seen it a second time, but the mystery haunts me.
(*"Nature red in tooth and claw" is a quotation from Tennyson's "In Memorium," a long meditation on doubt and the afterlife.)