Blessings for the Birds That Left

It's not farfetched to imagine a time when there's no habitat for migrating birds in South Florida. Joey Hedger's speculative elegy does just that. Let Osprey it never happens.

Illustration by Stephanie Silver

To the pelicans that one day took flight, forming one long V over Tampa Bay, and then kept going, soaring over smokestacks and onion domes, over bulldozed swamps, and flooded coastlines, over hunters preparing for war against invasive pythons and indigenous black bears, over airports, theme parks, fading reefs, alligator zoos. The state of Florida went on shrinking beneath them as new pelicans joined in, always adding onto the V until it grew to the size of a city—Sarasota, Fort Myers, or maybe even Orlando—then flew off completely. 

Bless you. 

To the roseate spoonbills that all climbed into trees and eventually stopped being birds; even though they had climbed trees before, their bodies resembling pink berries in the branches, they did not come down this time, nor spread their wings to take flight, nor plunge their spoon-shaped bill for fish while wading through shallow rivers, nor rifle across their colorful plumage. Yet while scientists guessed their shrimp-pink feathers would eventually change due to the adjusted diet of acorns and Spanish moss, that metamorphosis has yet to occur.

Bless you.

To the hummingbirds that turned into bee because we’d already rid the land of the bees, and the flowers needed help. Despite the fact that we had gotten so good at killing bees that when the hummingbirds landed on our windowpanes and car hoods and lawn chairs, we soon dispersed them, too, using pesticides and repellants, sent them away, let them collapse and die on our porches and behind our bougainvillea. 

Bless you.

And to the anhingas, of course, that turned into slithery river eels and vanished beneath the springs where the water was clearest. Maybe they learned to breathe through gills, or maybe they found sunken limestone caverns and empty aquifers where they could form a new life in the dark. To those who were never good at flying in the first place.

Bless you as well.

To the Muscovy ducks that went on a rampage, devouring our dogs and cats, chasing our children, fending off cars and streetlights and pedestrians until it got so bad that we hunted them down, killed them purposefully. Sent their bodies to taxidermists, sold now in off-highway tourist shops with oranges and gasoline and keychains and alligator heads. 

Bless you.

To the wood storks and the sandhill cranes that once strolled haplessly across golf courses, going from green to green until they too transformed, donning coats and caps and tiny pencils and irons, becoming retired golfers themselves who stand about and clap for each other’s scores, then continue on in a never-ending circle of nine holes.

Bless you.

To the osprey that rose and rose then nested in trees and telephone poles that grew so high they could no longer be considered part of Florida at all and made a life far above our heads, so the only proof we have of their continued existence are bits of fish and saltwater escaping their talons on their trips back from the Gulf or the Atlantic, skeletons dropping on our rooftops and coat backs like horrible, horrible rainfall.

Bless you, too.

To the seagulls that float on the tide like buoys, watching the coasts and beaches closely for evidence that they could return, for evidence of French fries and litter and sandwiches and white claws and picnic coolers and sleeping beachgoers—the seagulls ominously waiting, threatening, hovering.

Bless you.

And to all the rest, the birds that simply left, because they had homes up north or south or east or west, because they could climb into trees or burrow through the dirt or occupy birdhouses and backyard feeders, could survive in forests, in mountains, in deserts away from their homeland. 

Bless you forever and ever. Amen.

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Joey Hedger is author of Deliver Thy Pigs (Malarkey Books, 2022) and In the Line of a Hurricane, We Wait (Red Bird Chapbooks). His writing has recently appeared in Daily Drunk Magazine, Variant Lit, McCoy's Monthly, Complete Sentence, Posit, and Flyway Journal. His poetry won first prize in the 2019 Florida Loquat Literary Festival. A Florida native, avid lover of nature, and amateur birder, Joey currently lives in Alexandria, Virginia, where he edits for an education nonprofit.

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