The window is thick plate glass. It needed to be. The flicker hit with a bam like a baseball and dropped into the tall grass trembling dead. By the time I walked outside to see, the bird was still and limper than limp. I picked it up by its silver feet. The feathers that looked copper-colored in flight were beautiful translucent orange. For some reason I acted quickly, digging a hole in the garden to bury him in. Through the act of his dying he’d become one with the family, and I wanted him close by.

A rather large bird
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Tags: death, Llano Quemado
John Hamilton Farr lives in Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. As New York Times best-selling author James C. Moore tells it, John is “a man attuned to the world who sees it differently than you and I and writes about it with a language and a vision of life that is impossible to ignore.” See BUFFALO LIGHTS, TAOS SOUL, ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE, and THE HELEN CHRONICLES. He has been publishing online since 1996 (Zoo Zone, Farr Site, MacFaust, GRACK!, FarrFeed). This JHFARR.COM site is the master online writing archive. Links to all current sites including NFT collections at linktree. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on About page.
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I always feel bad when birds crash into the windows. We had a goldfinch go kamikaze this fall, and I buried him next to the flowering quince. Sometimes the birds glance off and don’t kill themselves. The flicker was beautiful. I’ve never seen one up close like that. Poor thing.