Ceci n'est-ce pas un pigeon mort.

Saturday evening, after trading the baby off to Shannon for her bedtime nursing, I glanced through the kitchen window and saw an odd lump on the backyard sidewalk. Going outside to investigate, it turned out to be a very dead pigeon, lying there with its neck visibly broken and a big dead-bird eye looking up at me. I was too creeped out and disgusted to do anything about it, so I went back inside for a few minutes.

When Shannon came down about half an hour later, I told her to look outside and, when she exclaimed, told her what it was. We talked for a about five minutes about the oddness of it and about the time we discovered three dead squirrels in our yard a few winters ago, and then I steeled myself for the corpse disposal and went back outside.

The bird was gone. Totally gone. A few stray feathers were still marking the sidewalk, and there were a few more on the lawn, but the dead creature was totally gone. I waited for the Hitchcock music to start, but it didn't.