Jane Doe: An Eastern Phoebe

Found the body of a bird in the grass 

Beside a 6-story bank downtown 

An Eastern Phoebe, lying low 

With a cracked wing and a bent crown

A band around its ankle

Tells me its death won’t go unknown,

Thank god for that little tracking band, 

Thank god I’m not grieving alone.

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*Note: this poem is a fictionalized (or should I say poeticized?) version of a story I was told by a bird conservationist, and the unfortunate number of songbirds that are killed each year flying into glass windows is more than staggering. For more information on how to prevent these types of tragedies, I recommend visiting Cornell Lab's "Making Windows Safer for Birds" article