Walked by two agitated starlings. A third starling was on its back in the road, legs kicking. It looked like a fledgling, maybe fallen and couldn’t get up. I went over to pick it up. Red stuff had come out its head. A vehicle had hit it. The parents were hopping about, screaming. There was nothing I could do; nothing to pick it up with. Couldn’t dispatch it with sandals.<\/p>\n
I walked back to the verge. There was another starling fledgling hiding in the grass, a sibling maybe. It had soft grey nest-fuzz among its feathers, the wide yellow slash of a nestling’s beak. It ran close to me for comfort, then stopped. Not all moving things might be friends. We watched one another, the parents still screaming. I had to leave.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Walked by two agitated starlings. A third starling was on its back in the road, legs kicking. It looked like a fledgling, maybe fallen and couldn’t get up. I went over to pick it up. Red stuff had come out its head. A vehicle had hit it. The parents were hopping about, screaming. There was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[847,1967,1968],"class_list":["post-2096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cars-suck","tag-bird","tag-dead","tag-harrowing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQNZZ-xO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2096\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}