Mysterious Bird Death Chronicles started as a photograph that I took on a beach of a headless bird (probably a pigeon). See the picture below. As we walked along this beach, called Cave Beach, there were quite a few dead birds lying in state on the sand or tangled in decaying marine fauna, in various stages of putrification. All with one thing in common. They were headless. Completely decapitated. No skull stripped to the bone. No keratin beaks. No head whatsoever. Nothing. It was probably even a clean disengagement the head. I didn't poke around the bird carcasses, but I assumed that this was the case.
This struck me as being perturbedly interesting. Why would these birds have no head? Did something eat it? Does the entirety of their cranium totally disintegrate into the atmosphere? Is there some wild animal around here that only eats the heads of dead animals?
Also extremely and morbidly intriguing was the thought of the paradox of why this beach was a mass ornithological shallow grave. How did these birds die? Were they flying across the ocean, got caught in a storm then crash landed in the ocean, and then washed up on this particular shore? This is actually my preferred theory. Or that they got tired on their flight out at sea and in the ultimate self-destructive act to combat their immense burning fatigue, plunged into the caustic emerald-green depths. Or maybe they were being typical greedy flying rats and feasting on tasty fishing net debris, and got their heads caught in the mesh, yanked to get free and then faced the unexpected consequence of severing their head from their torso.
Ahh, I just made up that last one now, as I was typing. And I quite like it and it sounds vaguely believable.
I'll add to this list any other birds with unaccountable deaths.
Headless Dead Bird 1
Headless Dead Bird 2
Headless Dead Bird 3. There were more birds that I didn't take a picture of, as my girlfriend was asking me to stop as it was a bit strange for people to witness me taking pictures of dead things, like some gruesome fetish of taxidermy.
A few days ago I was at Sydney International Airport. There is a viewing platform which overlooks one of the runways. You can look down at some of the planes picking up passengers and waiting to take off. Pretty cool to see. I saw an A380 which was also pretty cool.
Anyway, while ascending the stairs to the Observation Deck I noticed that there were some pigeons ambling about on a ledge, to the right of the stairs. Close enough to jump on to and walk along. I didn't, but I noticed this feathery, bird shaped lump. On closer inspection (which involved me leaning right over the ledge and making people walk around my flailing, outstretched legs) I saw that this feathery bird shaped lump had a beak and slightly raised wings. The only difference from a bird and the bird shaped lump was that it was slightly more squashed. There were 2 things puzzling about this: there was no "dead bird juice" surrounding the bird and also what would a squashed bird be doing up here anyway??
These strange circumstance threw my brain into an instant search for a theory and possible plot synopsis. Was the bird actually some airside roadkill, squashed on the ground by a speeding baggage handler's motorised train, and then thrown up on top of this ledge 15 metres off the ground like a roadkill frisby? Out of sight, out of mind. Did the bird fly into a window at high speed, and the sheer force of impact compacted the bird so much that it hit the window and slid down, Wiley-Coyote-getting-squashed-like-a-pancake style, and came to rest on the window ledge?? Who knows.......and that's where The Mysterious Bird Death Chronicles originated.
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