Three Birds in a Net

Let me tell you a story.

This story begins three days ago, last Thursday, when a neighbor asked me to take care of her house while she was at the beach for a week. Okay, I said. No problem. This responsibility would involve ensuring that the guinea pig and rabbit had food and water, emptying the dehumidifiers, and watering her plants, of which she has a multitude. The story actually starts earlier, when she actually asked me, but we aren't talking about that. Thursday was when I got the tour, so Thursday is when the story begins.

Part of her grounds, for there really isn't a better word to describe all of the flowers that she has planted, includes a garden in the back. A garden? I asked in disbelief when she first mentioned it. If this is the garden, then what's all the rest of it? She laughed, and told me to water the squash, and the little plants which would grow up to be something similarly edible, and the tomatoes, and not to worry about the things that had flowered because of the early heat. And that I could feel free to take as many blueberries from that tree as I wanted, since she wouldn't be there, and if I didn't eat them the birds would. She kept netting around the tree to prevent birds from getting the berries, but it didn't always help; in fact, she had to cut one out of the netting at one point.

You can perhaps see where this is going.

This evening, I didn't worry about watering, since it rained last night. Mom wanted to come along, as the neighbor's garden really is beautiful, and she wanted to see how it was doing.

As I gave the guinea pig its daily vitamin, Mom came over from the backyard, where the garden was. There's three dead birds in the netting, she said.

Shit, I said, though not out loud.

I went on the hunt for gloves and a plastic bag. After all, I would have to water back there again, and if I didn't deal with them that evening, I would have to deal with them later--only more rotted. The gloves were easily found, the plastic bag only slightly less so; while the neighbor isn't very organized, the neighbor's husband is. And I went on a quest to free the dead birds from the netting.

At first, it wasn't so bad. I was sad for the birds, that they ended up choking to death in a plastic net that really shouldn't even have been there in the first place. I started trying to untangle the first, most easily accessible one. It wasn't my netting, and I wanted to damage it as little as possible.

Then I turned the bird over. There were little short white things. At first I thought they might have been intestines or something, which, while gross, would not have been completely intolerable.

Then the white things moved, and I realized that I was witnessing maggots in their natural habitat. Then I went to find shears.

Long story short, I cut those suckers out of there, netting be damned. The birds went into the trash bag (bright pink) and the trash bag went into the curbside garbage bin.

Possibly the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in my entire life. I am not eating rice again in the near future.

I no longer feel like they're crawling all over me. At least, not much. This is because I took a shower. A very hot one. And I still don't want to touch the clothes I wore. It feels kind of like it did when I got a tick--absolutely gross against everything my mind tells me. I know intellectually that I was wearing gloves, and didn't even touch the bird for very long. I would know if I had maggots.

Emotionally, I'm still twitchy. I probably won't dream about moving rice any time soon, but I'm not going to forget that image in a hurry.

Eeeeeeeeeew gross gross gross gross ewewewew.