Dead Bird, Dead Bird!
A while back I mentioned in my post "Roadkill is animal cruelty?" that it reminded me of another story. This is that story…
Lets hop in the wayback machine and turn the dial to I believe 1984. I worked that summer at an amusement park where I was a "Grounds Lead" on second shift. Basically I was a working supervisor with a 8 man garbage clean up crew. We're not talking about walking around picking up stuff with a poker or claw. Nope, we're talking about turning 8 guys with moderately heavy machinery loose on a 200 acre site. Bear in mind that all but one of these guys were in the 17-22 age range. Life was about fun daring adventure, not safety! And scarier yet was that yours truly was in charge! Our primary job was driving tractors to pickup these roughly 5x5 foot solid steel dumpsters on wheels that were located at the various restaurants and shops through out the park. These could be hitched together into what basically amounted to a rolling death train. I could tell many very lengthy stories about this four year adventure, thus today it's the short story of "dead bird"…
Unless we were really busy we would generally get together in the early evening for dinner. We'd gather at the compactor "pad", pile in a pickup truck and head off to dinner. After dinner it was back to the pad and back to work. Because there was lots of garbage scraps strewn around the pad, there were always lots of birds. Generally blackbirds and seagulls, but a reasonable contingent of robins. They were quite annoying and persistent about getting a free meal, and we were quite persistent in harassing them. We would chuck rocks at them, run after them, chase them with the tractors, etc. It was a common accordance for us. One evening while driving back to the compactor with the full crew there was a robin picking at something in the road. So my natural instinct was to scare it off… So I yelled "Dead bird, dead bird!" and swerved at it. But unlike the countless number of times that I had done similarly before, this one didn't move. Nope, not an inch. And as such its fate was reduced to dull POP! "I didn't mean to run it over!" I said. But it fell on deaf ears as I endured an endless litany of verbal abuse from the boys for heartlessly killing this unfortunate and obviously stupid bird.