The Wonders of Nature.

So, i work two jobs.  I work a regular eight to five desk job during the week, and then on the weekends i work at a grocery store for a little extra cash.  This post doesn't really have much to do with that, but it's just to set the stage.

So, it being a Saturday, i had to work at my grocery store job.  While i was about half way through my day, one of the managers made a comment that a pigeon had struck the building front and that it's corpse was lodged between two of the letters of our sign.

I walked out to the front of the building to see if maybe the poor little thing was reachable so that it didn't have to be on display like some kind of strange public execution victim.  Surveying the front of the store, it was pretty much impossible to reach the little guy, as the sign is mounted on a spire of sorts making it unreachable from the standard roof.

It was then that i noticed a second pigeon sitting next to it in the hollowed out piece of the lower case "e".  At first i just figured that it was just some other pigeon mindlessly posted coincidentally next to it's fallen brethren.

As the day wore on, the story of the dead pigeon became a sort of "special of the day" topic with the employees.  Employees were going in and out all day casually checking out our own little casualty.  What was odd, was that everybody was also mentioning the second bird near it.  The fellow pigeon was either in the "e" or someplace else, but it was always near the little dead one.

I began to think, that maybe it wasn't just a coincidence, but that maybe that was the poor little fallen pigeon's mate.

In a strange way, that idea both depressed me and fascinated me.  I thought that if it were true, and this was a pair, how sort of simplistically noble it was.  I kind of feel like we, as people, just don't give animals enough credit.  I don't think pigeons in general are the most genius of creatures, but i just can't shake the thought that this little bird had just lost it's partner, and there was either some really basic lack of understanding that it's mate was gone, or there could be some instinctual mourning going on.  The second bird sat there for over four hours near it's lost friend, and it was still there when i left work.

It's hard to say why animals do the things they do, but something told me that i was witnessing a sense of loss from one of the earth's lesser creatures.  It was weird seeing a small creature exhibit more human emotions than most humans do.