Art Pact 206 - Birds Eye View

The ground glided along underneath me, green patches of garden interspersed with the red-tiled shapes of houses, all bound into neat little plots that were themselves separated by the grey-black rivers of tarmac. I flew through the thin columns of smoke that wafted up from barbecues, through patches of faint perfume that had spread out from flowerbeds until they were almost too weak to detect, through the little eddies and whorls that spun away from the exhausts of central heating units. I looked down on a little gathering that from this height looked like ants.

I swooped down a little closer. Yep, ants. I landed.

Ants are funny things to eat. You have to peck at them quickly, which takes a stable stance, but you also have to do a little dance while you're standing there so that the little buggers don't climb up your legs and start biting your privates. It really is quite uncanny how they know to have a go at you under the wings or around the edge of your cloaca. I suppose they've got that way over millions of years - the ants that didn't bite their attackers in the what-nots got eaten, so only the what-not-biting species continued. Are you following me? It's a little idea I've worked out, it's a bit complicated but it seems to fit nicely with everything I've seen. There could be other explanations, of course, but that's the one that presented itself to me. I've tried to explain it to the other birds, but they just look at me blankly. I think they get all confused if a sentence doesn't start with "You're looking at my things".

Anyway, you look like a right prat eating ants, but they're still popular. I jiggled around for a few minutes, kicking out one foot for a second, then the other, then pecking at the ground and maybe (one time in four, I think) getting an ant as well as a mouthful of dust. These ants were plump and juicy, the kind you really want to save up and have with some berries and some cage fat, but berry season was many months away yet, and the houses round here don't go in much for cage fat, just that horrible cage seed stuff - ugh, I have never got the hang of it. My mother used to swear by it - or I assume she did, because she kept trying to get me to peck at it despite my calm but utter refusal - but I've always found the taste to be dry and boring, and the after-effects... Well, the less said about them the better. Suffice it to say that a clear head is one of the things I insist on maintaining, so the fuzzy-brained thinking that follows on from a cage-seed binge is all time wasted for me. I'd always told my mother that I'd eat them if I was starving, but I don't know whether I necessarily would. I mean, fine, sure, it would keep me alive - but would it be a life worth living?

When I'd had my fill I hopped up onto a nearby fence and - filled with exuberance and ants - let out a sharp belch that I deftly turned into a song at the last moment. Perhaps not the most graceful piece of music ever uttered, but it was better than just sitting there burping. There didn't appear to be anyone else around but you can never tell with women. They're pretty good at hiding.

I picked a few stray soldiers out of my quills and ruffled up my plumage - the sort of habit I've developed as I've grown up despite my best efforts to control myself. To try to distract myself I flew up to the roof of the big house on the corner, disturbing a couple of collared doves who fluttered nervously to the other end of the gables and eyed me suspiciously. I've never been able to work out doves - they're obviously even more stupid than the rest of the feathered idiots I'm related to, but they seem to have a sort of idiot-savant sense for the uncanny, which makes them avoid me as though I were something dangerous. I don't know what it is they see in me, but it's something that other blackbirds can't spot until I start talking to them and they go all googly-eyed. I suppose shuffling away from me with a scared expression is better than going straight for my eyes (sadly the most common response from other members of my species), but it does make me wonder whether this is another example of the thing I was talking about earlier. What if over time people like me have been dangerous to doves, so doves have only survived if they were blessed with a heuristic to avoid us?

The thought is troubling. Will my apparent gift for oration turn sour one day? I mean, sourer than it already is, since it's done me no good in the traditional sense of winning me either territory or mates. Not that that's what I want, you understand, but I suppose it is if nothing else a yardstick along which one can measure one's success in the wide world. Perhaps this is how it starts - to consider the possibility of evil in one's nature is to let a little of it inside in the form of bitterness.

My morbid train of thought was interrupted by a buzzing noise that I had come to associate with anger. I jumped from side-to-side and scanned the surroundings. There - at the front of the corner house's garden, the man with the hedge-cutting machine. He was standing on top of a shiny folding ladder, with the orange cable that powered his machine dangling loosely from the crook of his right arm and disappearing in through the open doorway. He was also distracted. I took the chance - leaping off the roof I swooped down as fast as I could, pulling up just before I hit the back of his head but raking the bald spot with one solid peck.

Got him!