It was spring, and we’d just finished sheltering a clutch of (uninvited, but welcomed) starlings on our back porch. One of the baby birds had been pushed out of the nest and we’d discovered it, dead, the next day. My husband and I, being sentimental about animals, gave it a funeral worthy of a Viking. This was not that bird. This bird was found while driving back from the grocery store. We’d parked and I was just closing the door when I saw this figure on the asphalt. Another baby bird; also dead. A sobering moment, more so than the first had been. It was a reminder of the casual cruelty of nature, that for every one bird we’d ostentatiously-buried there were thousands of others being born and dying before their eyes even opened.