Me + God's little creatures = Death

Last night I walked outside my apartment at about midnight, and much to my surprise there was an abnormally large pigeon sitting on the balcony rail. In Utah. At midnight. A pigeon. Our balcony rail.

What really surprised me is that although he was wide awake, I've never seen any wild animal care any less about having a human right next to it, looking at it and flashing lights in its eyes.

As you can see, I got very close and flashed my camera at it, and the most it did was look up for a second and be like, "dude. seriously? I'm a pigeon."

I can only assume that he's been tamed in some way or another because of the tag on his right leg.

I typically try to avoid moderately small animals as I have a habit of killing them on accident. To date, I've ran over three animals with my car:

• My dog Molly, who developed a habit of sleeping behind the car while I was away at college, unbeknown'st to me. I still feel bad about that...
• A suicidal cat that jumped out of the bushes into my headlights one night when I was the only car on the road for miles. He had to have seen me coming.
  
• A little bird that flew in front of my car a couple weeks ago on Center Street, as birds often do, but he timed it horribly wrong and went under my tire instead.

I also managed to kill a small bird while in Oaxaca. I was in an area where the birds would pack themselves onto these telephone wires at night. We were walking to the bus station at about 5:30am, and I was carrying a small lemon that I picked from our lemon tree. Here is a picture that I took a couple hours before sunset. By night time, there was never a single space in between these birds.

So what would you do? Better question: what would you do as a 19-year-old, carrying a small lemon? Naturally I threw it, thinking that they would all see it coming and scatter, then quickly forget the experience and return to their business.

Well I forgot to take into account that birds sleep at night, just like the rest of life on this planet. My lemon throw was a remarkably nice shot, which clipped off a single, innocent, slumbering bird, silently, and the rest of them didn't move a single feather.

The bird fell to the ground and died. I felt bad about it for the rest of the week. In fact I still feel bad looking back on it, which is why I now try to avoid small animals.

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