walk slowly, bow often
windows, walls, and the illusion of safety
Hello. This post is about Death & Birds
Last year, I saw a Toucan—in the wild. We were in Costa Rica, a place embarrassingly rich with life and colour, and there was a rustle in the trees above us. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I saw its beak before anything else and my hands instinctively shot up to cover my mouth, suppressing the excited squeal that wanted to escape. I got Davids attention and pointed to the impossibly proportioned bird. One of my favourite things in life is watching Davids face go from ‘slightly-frowny-concentrating’ face to ‘wide-eyed-seven-year-old-brimming-with-wonder’ face, and our colossally-billed friend prompted just that.
I later learned that what we saw was a ‘Keel-billed Toucan’, sometimes called a Rainbow Toucan, for obvious reasons—their beaks feature strokes of red, orange, yellow, green and blue. Toucans enjoy using their beaks to playfully sword fight with one another and (because we as a species do not know how to appropriately respond to the miraculous) their population is in rapid decline, due to habitant loss and hunting.