During a season of stifling heat and animal mortality, I tried in vain to teach my daughter about the Circle of Life…
A friend of mine once asked why it was rare to see a dead animal on the streets of London, given the teeming population of creatures with whom we share the city.
The obvious answer is that these corpses are very quickly consumed by other animals. To me, it still seems a kind of everyday miracle that nature cleans up after itself so fastidiously.
In early August 2020 we returned from a weekend away to find a dead bird in the middle of our back garden. This happened amid the hottest stretch of weather that London had seen in nearly 40 years.
I went outside to see how our lumpy, weed-studded lawn had fared in the heat, along with our tiny vegetable trough, in which a few small carrots had been clinging to life.
The body is discovered
A cluster of dark feathers stood out against the parched grass. I momentarily assumed they must be the result of a small skirmish between avian suitors.
Closer to the patio at the rear of the garden, I discovered the little brown bird – a young rook – laying on its side, beak agape, its skull and eye socket already visible, in contrast to the greasy, unplucked breast and wings. Despite the heat there was neither an odour nor any flies.
I was surprised that the bird hadn’t been consumed overnight.
The disused and inaccessible playing field at the end of our road is home to a den of foxes. They thrive on locally sourced produce, whether it originates from a tossed takeaway container or a meticulously sealed compost bin.
I’ve encountered a couple of memorable fox corpses recently
Now foxes are arguably more likely to be seen dead in London than other wildlife, given their status at the top of the food chain – there are no bears or lynxes around to eat them. I’ve encountered a couple of fox corpses in recent years.
One was a fresh and majestic piece of roadkill that I discovered during a walk in the hours before dawn. It lay glittering on the asphalt, visibly unharmed but for a trickle of blood from its muzzle.
The other unfortunate specimen was stuffed into a canvas shopping caddy and abandoned on the pavement in defiance of dignity and public health.
Carcass clearance
For the remainder of that sultry August day I resolved not to move the bird’s remains, and to work around it where I had to. I pegged our laundry out at the far ends of our washing line, trying to create a level of clearance around the cadaver that might prove acceptable to my wife.
Her audits of germs and particulate threats around our house are scrupulous. Depending on her mood, they can lapse into something akin to divination.
I’ve learned that it’s important to anticipate and honour these standards, however inscrutable they may appear. After some brief contemplation, I settled on a good two metres of social distancing on either side of the carcass.
I also made some quick calculations about the priority order in which to arrange the laundry on the line. I gave preferential treatment to certain items – face cloths, our preschool daughter’s clothes – that seemed to have the strongest case for avoiding the pall of mortality.
The wisdom of Mufasa
That evening, my daughter returned from the childminder and joined me in the garden. She soon set to work, mixing Chrysanthemum petals, sand and soil into an exotic back-garden chow. She hadn’t yet noticed the dead bird and eventually I decided to point it out to her.
I hoped to expose my daughter to the harsh reality of nature
I’d hoped to expose her to the harsh reality of nature: it isn’t always pretty and sometimes it leaves a mutilated body in your back garden.
She wasn’t repulsed by the corpse, but nor was she particularly curious. Her reserves of morbidity had been tapped out by endless playtimes in which she reenacted the fratricidal drama of The Lion King.
With this in mind, I tried to contextualise the corpse by invoking the Circle of Life: when the lion dies, he becomes the grass, which is eaten by the antelope, who is – in turn – eaten by the lion.
“Maybe this bird will become the grass?” I whispered softly.
She humoured me cheerfully for a moment and went back to making the most of the late sunshine, before the last call for milk and a bedtime story.
After a wretched night of sleep – eked out in the muggy air, accompanied by the screaming and gekkering of the foxes in the road – I rose to find that our horticultural inventory had been reduced by one dead bird, and several carrots.
