It's a Process
Disclaimer: Graphic images below. Bird lovers proceed with caution.
Food for thought as we go: ". . . Just one thing: forgetting what lies behind but straining forward to what lies ahead, I continue my pursuit toward the goal, the prize of God's upward calling, in Christ Jesus." - Philippians 3:13-14
While practicing the annual discipline of reflecting on the past year - from silly times to Hurricane Harvey to graduations to deaths in our family and more - I remember the celebrations, the joys, the milestones, yes; but I also swallow hard as I recall our family's losses this year and the whirlwind of changes that have swept into our lives because of them. And our family has experienced much less loss than many others, so I am not complaining. It's during these pre-New Year days, however, that I often look to nature and find a source of grounding from the changes in the simplicity of creation and well, ranch chores.
Therefore, today I chose to transplant my reflecting mind and busied self out of the house and onto the ranch to help Robert, and I'm grateful to have had such an option! With the ranch owners lodging here for the holidays and steadily quail hunting (Bob White Quail), it's "game on" time - Robert and the guys stay busy. Between quail hunts back-to-back and other events, he has precious little time to eat.
Earlier today, he flurried in momentarily for lunch to scarf down a tuna sandwich before the next hunt and realized that he and the guys would have zero time to finish cleaning the quail from the morning hunt. In his conversation, he pleaded, "We need a bird boy."
My head turned toward him. "I'll be your bird boy."
"Aw. I couldn't do that to ya."
"I'm serious. I'm your 'bird boy'. Right now. That's it. It's done. Teach me. It's been a while."
We squabbled a bit more, but I reassured him that the work would be "therapeutic" for me.
"Okay," he sighed in a final surrender.
The last time I cleaned birds was for Dad and when I was about twelve. He had a truck bed full of dove from a hunt in Mexico and started me on it by promptly teaching me to rip off their heads. My childlike fragility was shattered at that very moment and has never returned.
I am still emotionally squeamish, however, toward handling bird carcasses for one simple reason; I am a bird LOVER - to a freaky degree. We communicate without speaking - me and birds - and I foster their lives by cleaning their cages, feeding them, singing to them, you name it. But not in a long, long time have I thought to rip them apart and dissect their frame by the process they call "cleaning". No. Not until today.
The fortitude to clean quail came from nowhere and like a surge that had been waiting until the proper moment for its arrival. It was time. Time to handle the birds. From the house to the field and into my hands they would go. And then, of course into the freezer and onto a plate as a meal for others: their final end.
Also, because I am a public school teacher who is on break, I saw this as the perfect opportunity to get out of the house, to learn something new, and especially to help my other half from drowning in quail guts.
The process was nothing short of nasty, perhaps more so for me because I had "conversed" with such creatures while they were living and felt an almost spiritual attachment to them. Each tiny carcass lay in a sacred mound on the crude wooden slab like tiny jewels waiting to be polished (see picture below). With pity as my guide, my ready hands were now determined to transform them from bloody messes to the delectable and rare treats they were bred to be, but this would not be easy. Like life, it would be a process - a messy, stench-filled process. In fact, it would be much like parts of this past year. And similar to the Bible verse above, I just had one thought: Bring. It. On.
Although it was a messy process, it was oddly satisfying. In total, there were sixty-three quail and one pheasant in that batch that were followed by one more group this evening which will be followed by one more tomorrow morning. For the ones we'll catch and put out at the Sunday morning hunt tomorrow, I cringe at the thought that this is their final night to coo; yet I also know that they are blessed to have been purchased by someone who fed them so well for so long and who allows the ones that get away to be left to breed at will on this 3,500 acre ranch, which we have actually had happen last year!
One day last spring we were all outside and two quail came waltzing by our front window with a waddling string of seven little babies behind them. They became so tame, that couple did, that we named them Ma and Pa. They did disappear at some point though, and who knows where or how. Quail have a lot of prey in nature - ants, hawks, dogs, coyote, cats, raccoon, and more. Robert says they are the shrimp of the ranch. That's a fact, but they are the cutest doggone shrimp I've ever worked with.
Back to the gory part - the cleaning process awakened me to a whole other side of their brief existence. In essence, I equated the whole organized mutilation of some parts and careful trimming and processing of other parts to be much like the aches and pains of 2017. As I stated earlier, it grounded me to work with nature today. It brought it all home for me. With every snip of a neck bone or tail I was reminded of how each were no longer needed and had served their purpose.
Their new purpose was simple - to obediently fall into the gut bucket of skins, feathers, hearts, lungs, and other remnants as a decadent meal for some living animal to consume. It is a comfort, in this process of the life cycle and such, to know that nothing is ever wasted. With that thought in mind, I am moving forward from this experience a bit changed. I am reminded by it that it is never meant to end there. It keeps going and moving forward as does all of God's creation and things living, including us.
As we press on into the New Year, I hope to remember a few things about the process of life (and hope you do too) so that I don't get too "drunk"on the world nor too disheartened by it:
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| The Williams Family Nucleus - (left to right) David, Christie, Robert, Landon |
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| The Aviary - aka The Quail House |
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| Robert and Landon - Post-hunt quail cleaning with helper dog Josh |
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| Christie - cleaning quail for a first time in decades after merely cleaning their cages and fostering their lives for the past four years - reluctantly learning to handle their carcasses |
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| My sweet husband was nice enough to prep the quail for me by cutting off their darling little heads, wings, and feet to ease me into the process. |
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| Do I really have to cut that tail? |
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| Yes. Yes, you do. |
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| And now to cut its cute little (Crunch!) - Oh, somebody help me. Eeeew. |
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| Guts. Those are guts. Deep breath - |
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| The first rinse bucket where they can chill in peace until the final part of the process. |
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| Seriously? A lung? I have to squeeze off lung remnants? How many are like this? This is good for me. This is good for me. This is good for me. |
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| Finally - the salt water dip. Lean and clean. Done, son. |
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| Put y'all to rest on ice. And I'm out! Not exactly feeling Texas Tough, but hey. I done did it. |
