Without fail, during this time of year in Carroll County, the men and boys greet one another with, “Hey!” A long pause, accompanied by a stare with the person’s head cocked to one side, follows. The stare, akin to that of a teacher looking over his or her reading glasses, implies that deep disappointment will result if the wrong answer is given to the question about to follow. When the silence breaks, the greeting is completed with, “Ya gitcha deer?”
I’m sure that I’ve said before on my blog that I find the whole messy business of hunting exceedingly unsavory. I freely admit that my position is almost wholly hypocritical because I will devour my favorite cut of beef, sirloin, about as quickly as anyone I know. But I deplore the thought of killing anything. I’m uncertain if that makes me a conscientious objector or not, but it probably emasculates me in the eyes of the kind of person who chooses to open a conversation with an inquiry about killing large mammals. I’m okay with that.
But I was reminded of hunting yesterday because, in addition to this time being the end of deer season in Arkansas, I heard a short blurb about starlings on NPR. The person who discussed the birds thoughtfully noted that the birds are not native to North America. She said that they were, in fact, introduced during the late nineteenth century by a wealthy New Yorker named Eugene Shieffelin, who happened to be a Shakespeare aficionado. According to legend, one of Shieffelin’s lifetime goals was to insure that New Yorkers were able to see all the birds mentioned in the plays of Shakespeare. Whether or not Shieffelin was motivated by Shakespeare, the starling has, at least in part because it aggressively competes with native birds for nesting areas, thrived in North America.
In fact, when I was an adolescent, starlings were plentiful on my parents’ farm. While discussing the birds one day, one of our neighbors armed me with the knowledge about the nature of starlings. In particular, she told me about how the starlings compete for the nesting areas of bluebirds. For whatever reason, I decided that bluebirds should be held in higher esteem than starlings and made it my personal mission to eradicate the starlings then living on my parents’ property.
At first, I had a great time. In fact, the best part about it, I believed, was that I didn’t have to clean up after myself. No one on the farm cared if the starling corpses rotted on the ground. So, after shooting them, when the bodies fell to the ground with a muffled thud, I took no further action. It was all sport and no work.
Until, that is, one day when I decided that killing the birds was too easy with my .22 caliber rifle. To increase the challenge, I decided to kill some of the birds with an air-powered pellet gun that my grandmother had given me a few years earlier. In order to fire the gun, the lever on the gun had to be pumped numerous times to build enough air pressure to force the pellet out of the gun’s barrel and propel it toward a target. The first time I went through the fairly lengthy process, I immediately began to question my logic. Before that day, I had always shot old Coke cans or paper targets with the air gun. Because I guessed that I would need more power to kill a bird, I pumped the gun’s lever about twice as many times as I would have for an inanimate target. When I took aim at a bird and squeezed the trigger, nothing happened.
“Missed,” I thought. I reloaded the gun and started pumping the lever again. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something moving on the ground a few feet from the tree where the bird had recently been perched. My intended target was on the ground, walking in a wobbly circle, dragging one of its wings in the dirt. Clearly, I had winged the poor thing.
I increased the speed of my pumping. When I finished, I took aim again. When I squeezed the trigger, it was clear that my pellet hit the bird. But the merciful release of death didn’t come to the bird. I reloaded and started pumping again. This time, I decided to walk up to the bird to take full advantage of the pellet’s barrel speed. When I did, the bird’s instinct overcame it and it flapped its one good wing a few times in a fruitless attempt to fly away. Unsuccessful, it ran away a few feet. I walked toward it and the bird picked up the pace.
Having pumped my gun a few more times, I stopped, took aim, and clearly hit the bird again. But it didn’t die. To no one in particular, except to the starling, I suppose, I exclaimed, “Unbelievable!”
In the end, I chased the bird almost a quarter of a mile. Robbed of its ability to fly, it ran every time I approached. Every few feet, in keeping with its instinct, it tried to flap its wings and take to the air. In the end, I had to shoot it three more times before it was dead.
The whole experience was heartbreaking. I couldn’t believe that, during the last few minutes of this beautiful creature’s life, I had taken the wondrous gift of flight from it. It was the last time I killed any animal for sport.
When I was back in Carroll County around this time last year, and an acquaintance whom I hadn’t seen in years asked me, “Ya git much time outa office to do much huntin? I got famly what sez there’s lots of deer in L.A.”
In an attempt to change the subject, I ignored his question about hunting and, even though I already knew the answer, I asked him, “What do you mean L.A.?” He said, “Lower Arkansas. Ain’t ya ever heard that b’fore?” Then, without waiting for an answer to his obviously rhetorical question, he asked, “Ya gitcha deer?” I ignored him and turned to speak to another mutual acquaintance. A few seconds later, I heard him ask, “Well. Did ya?”
