Female Bufflehead in pond next to Falmouth bike path. Sunrise, 2021-02-23.
I went to a pond on the bike path this morning at sunrise to photograph birds. When I got home and pulled up the images on my computer, I started my usual routine of fretting over whether the pictures are sharp, something I assess by looking at the detail around the eyes. I noticed that the sunrise behind me when I took this female Bufflehead’s photo is reflected in her eye. The discovery made me stop thinking about image-sharpness and start thinking about the bird. The picture is a moment in the life of a small, fragile, sentient creature whose existence, just like mine, is a chance event in a big, complicated universe. We are fellow travelers in a lovely but scary place.
Buffleheads are diving ducks. They eat aquatic insects and crustaceans that they capture under the water. Today, those food sources are contaminated with the pollution added to the water by humans. Where I live, people in expensive homes soak their yards throughout the year with chemicals to kill “weeds” and “bugs” and to make the grass grow greener. It’s a thoughtless act of selfishness that is a defining characteristic of our species. These weed-killing, grass-greening, bug-killing chemicals wash right into the water around us, get into the fish, bugs, and mollusks living there, and then the birds eat them. Poison. Murder. Indifference. Human progress?
Bird populations around the world are plummeting because of human activity. Every time I go out to the Great Sippewissett Marsh, I have the same distressing thought: a thousand years ago, this place must have been covered with thousands of birds. The sound of their singing and squawking must have been gloriously deafening. Now, when I’m there, I see a couple of seagulls, a few ducks, and a smattering of some other birds, but there are plenty of times when a person might not even notice there were any birds if they weren’t actively looking for them. Shame on us.
Zoom in on this image and see the sunrise in this bird’s eye and recognize that we and her both have a right to exist, and if we’re doing things that harm her, we should stop.
Monte