Anxiety, it's for the birds

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I found another dead bird in my yard, this time a sparrow.

(If you didn’t read my post last week about my anxiety finding a dead bird in my yard, check it out here.)

What are the chances that two birds die in my yard in ten days? Well, my property is only 0.01 acres according to town taxes, so small in terms of physical space. But still, even though I don’t feed birds any seeds, a ton of them visit my garden. Five huge trees line the back of the property for nesting, and one tree gets full of whitish berries this time of year that the squirrels and birds love.

I don’t spray my yard with any chemicals, so there’s plenty of bugs and worms for them to eat. On a normal day, at least twenty birds show up in the morning and party in the birdbath. I dump and refresh the water each morning, and clean it thoroughly every few days.

It’s been bird paradise here until this week, when it turned into The Case of Double Bird Homicide. *Cue the Law & Order sound effect.*

Can you tell being lighthearted is sometimes my coping mechanism?

Thankfully, my anxiety didn’t spiral this time. I went into action, fix-this-immediately mode. My brain said, “Houston, we have a problem,” and my teacher training during Covid kicked in, and I thought, “Gather all materials and makeshift supplies. Time for a complete birdbath sanitation and shutdown.”

According to the Audubon Society, the best way to clean a birdbath is nine parts water to one part vinegar, so I mixed that up in a large bowl with a few squirts of Dawn soap. I found an old scrub brush in the bathroom that I was willing to part with afterwards, then donned some gear to protect myself.

Please visualize the ridiculousness of how I must’ve looked to any neighbor peeking through the forsythia hedge: I was wearing jeans and a Gilmore girls T-shirt that read LUKE’S on a large coffee cup background with YOU NEED COFFEE in block letters across the top.

Then I added oversized black sunglasses (since I read avian flu can spread through your eyes) with a black paper mask over my mouth, and then I covered my hands with gallon size freezer plastic bags for protection against the possible plague since I wasn’t going to ruin my garden gloves.

This is not the romantic dream sequence I imagined for my summer break. I envisioned gardening in floral dresses, sometimes barefoot, casually deadheading roses and admiring butterflies, not disposing of avian carcasses and scrubbing the crime scene.

Photo by Samantha Gades on Unsplash

I wondered if I should write another morbid post like this, because a gardener’s blog should be filled with gorgeousness and hope, not repeated feathery tragedy.

Except that’s not the truth. And I don’t want my posts to be like my Instagram highlights. I want you to get to know the real me, warts and all. Appearance versus reality—that’s the problem with scrolling the internet, isn’t it? It leads us all to believe the fantasy is possible if we plan and control the aesthetics. But the reality is, shit happens, and we have to deal with it in order to move on to better things.

So, I scrubbed the literal crap out of the birdbath.

Here is it, cleaned out and empty with a lone rock in the center. It’ll stay dry for now and I’ll empty it whenever it fills with rain.

Sorry birds, this joint is closed for now. It’s for your own safety.

Whether it’s the avian flu or a salmonella outbreak, or the drastic weather changes, I’ll never know, but it gave me something to focus on at least. It’s better to feel like part of the solution than part of the problem.

Umm, the birdbath is located pretty close to my vegetable beds. Ick. Should we eat the cherry tomatoes this year when they ripen? The basil? The garlic? I haven’t planted many edibles this year other than those, and some mini pumpkins and sunflower seeds.

Perhaps this season will be all about the flowers. Is that my anxiety talking? Hello, old friend. I haven’t seen you for, like, a whole hour.

On a brighter note, we’ve had two days with low humidity and a beautiful breeze in Massachusetts. My family and I also went to the movies and saw Inside Out 2. It has great anxiety rep and portrays the emotional changes that happen to kids during puberty. Really funny and sweet!

That’s all I have for now until next week—hopefully on a less gruesome note.

P.S. A relative asked me if the birds flew into a window, but I highly doubt that. I live in a cape with small windows that I never wash :)

Come to think of it, one morning this week as I was looking out the kitchen window, I heard a small explosion and a flash of light (not lightning). I ran outside to see if the second floor air conditioner had fallen and caused a spark. Didn’t see anything, though, but there are power lines that cross this area…

No, it couldn’t be…