Gone to the birds

You know what I don't like about this time of year? No, it's not the insane heat and humidity. It's the dead birds. I just chased my dog through the house to retrieve (one by one) a mouthful of bird feathers. I'm not about to let him bring the avian flu into my house. This is the third time in two weeks that he's brought bird feathers into the house. I did just walk the entire yard twice looking for any "leftovers", but I didn't find anything. So, either it was only feathers that he got into or the feathers he brought in were the leftovers. Gross. Of course, this is not to mention the decapitated dead bird that M found Otis skulking around in the backyard a couple of weekends ago.

This time last year, we had a couple of bird-related incidents. He ate one bird on a walk in one gulp- before we could do anything to stop him. He was a pretty small puppy at the time, so it freaked us out. It never really seemed to bother him, though. A few days after that, he found an enormous dead black bird in the yard while I was home for lunch. It was disgusting, and I won't go into detail. It took me about 15 minutes of running around the yard in the late summer heat on my lunch hour to get the mangled thing from him. That will ruin your day in a hurry.

I understand that my dog is part retriever. I know that it is instinct for him to go after dead animal carcasses (not to mention chasing the live animals in the yard or the park). Just the same, it's not something that you expect to deal with when you get a puppy. I guess I should just be grateful that he doesn't exhibit all bad behaviors associated with poodles and labs. Either way, I have to go clean up where he just puked. At least children throw up normal things like food, right? Not grass and bird feathers? This is going to be an awesome day!