July 06, 2007

The Bird Sanctuary of Canada is hidden in a nondescript building in the middle of the fields outlying Port Rowan. Behind the building there’s a whole pasture filled with chirping birds that leads down to Lake Erie. At sunset on a long weekend, the whole place is alive with birdsongs and devoid of people.

And because everything was so delightful, we let the dog run free through the fields. She chased birds for a while, her tail waving high above the grass. Now and again she would stop to sniff the air or the ground.

And then we saw her disappear in the grass, her head bopping up and down as though she were eating something.

“Oh no. She’s eating poo again,” I said. You see, Ryder has this thing for poo.

I ran up to her just to see that the thing she was eating had a long tail, which hanged from the corner of her mouth. Somehow, she found a dead rat and proceeded to chew on its bloated, rubbery belly. I shouted at her, but that only made her run away with the rat in her mouth, stopping only long enough to shove it deeper down her throat.

I cursed, I flailed my arms, I rushed from here to there, and eventually I caught up with her. At this point she prudently shoved the whole thing in her mouth. There only thing hanging out was a bit of and some guts from the perforated belly. And then she started chewing on the carcass with short, intense motions. Dead rats as it turns out are particularly crunchy.

While I usually try to fetch things from her mouth, this time I didn’t. I just walked away and let her digest the thing.

Later, she ran back to us all happy and licked our faces.

More: Here’s a map of our trip, and a Flickr album if you’re in the mood for that.