fowl deeds

I love a good mystery.

When I lived in Britain, one of the first plays I saw in London was The Mousetrap -- Agatha Christie's contribution to putting tourist bums in seats. Despite knowing the play's limitations, I went because I had seen most of the Agatha Christie works that had been filmed. And Then There Were None actually made me a bit anxious when people would leave a room claiming they would be "right back."

Each morning, I bring my computer out to the patio table to chat with you. Instead of finding an empty table this morning, I discovered -- a clue. Several clues, really. There were seven feathers massed together in the center of the table. As if some devil cult had been performing its rites outside my bedroom door. 

I discarded that possibility as unlikely. But, why were they there? And what had happened?

Having asked the questions every mystery writer asks, I went into Hercule Poirot mode. The feathers were easy to identify. Six of them were pinions -- wing feathers that provide lift for flight. The seventh was a lighter body feather.

The source of the feathers was just as easy to identify. They were dark brown with a tinge of reddish-brown at the tips. They had once belonged to a ground dove. And based on the small size of the feathers, it was a very young ground dove.

With a quick look around, I found four more pinions on the patio floor and three on the stairs that lead to the upper terrace. That would indicate whatever happened to the fledgling rock dove occurred over a wide area of the patio.

I get very few points for detective work up to this point. There are two ground dove moms that have been sitting on eggs in two of my four cup-of-gold vines. I would occasionally see one of the chicks that was too large for the nest, who would hide in the tangle of the vine while I did my landscaping cleanup.

That fledgling is no longer hiding in the vine. It is possible it has flown off, though the avian detritus on the patio would indicate other possibilities. So, what are those possibilities?

Agatha Christie would have a quick answer. It was murder fowl. Some unknown being dispatched the young dove.

The strewn feathers are certain evidence of a struggle. The little dove thrashing so desperately to avoid the clutches of her attacker that she shed her newly-developed flight feathers. The body feather shows that the predator had a tight grasp on the little dove's body.

What was missing was the body. Mystery writers have great fun by distorting the corpus delicti rule into a mythical "no body, no crime" outcome. But murders are occasionally prosecuted without the discovery of a body. The case is merely difficult to prove. Not impossible.

Now, to the question of who was the predator. Who would remove the body? To what end?

We are without clues at this point. A cat would be an obvious culprit. I saw one slinking through the neighbor's garage last night.

But it could have just as easily been a raccoon, a hawk, or a coatimundi. I will give the opossum a pass. If the crime was egg theft, he would be heading the police line-up.

On pure speculation, I would arrest Señor Gato, though I lack probable cause. And cats are notorious for not breaking under interrogation. They usually blame the dog, and dogs will admit to things they have never done because their first ancestor was Catholic.

But I have a far different theory. Based on the same set of facts, and putting Occam's Razor to an eccentric purpose, I have a theory.

Having heard that my house was a nursery for ground doves, a wandering wizard slipped onto my patio last night in the faint glow of a waning crescent moon -- a most propitious time for matters magical. He coaxed the young dove to the patio table with his witty wizard ways ("Do you come here often?; "What's your sign?"), held out his wizard staff, and -- poof! She was transformed into a hairy hobbit who would go on to star in an interminable series of films that make some viewers ask: "Why couldn't this be about something interesting? Like a fledgling ground dove."

Now, I do not know how scientific my alternate reading of the clues is, but I am certain Agatha Christie would lobby for the police to confiscate my computer before I did further damage to her work.

But, if this really was a Christie parody, I would have withheld the most important clue until the salon denouement when the identity of the murderer is revealed. I am not going to do that for two reasons. First, I find the technique to be nothing more than reader manipulation. Second, there is no revealing clue.

This is not a contrived novel. It is musical comedy. No. It is not that, either. It is as Elliott ironically retorted in ET: "This is reality, Greg."

And so it is. Of course, Christie gets the last word because it is true. At least, for that ground dove nest, then there were none.