Birds are dying

Last week I was walking on Florida Avenue and a guy calls out to me, he doesn't know my name, but he yells, "Hey newspaper guy!" I turn to him and he asks me what's up with the dead birds all over the place. I ask, "Dead birds?" And he says, yes, they are all over, and he shows me photos on his phone, which ironically brought back the fact that I had seen a dead bird earlier in the week, on Grand Avenue, I had forgotten about it, but the photos on his phone reminded me that I almost took a photo of a dead bird too, but then thought that would be creepy, and here he was with dead bird pictures.

What was even creepier, is that he was walking his dog, a large dog, and I didn't see anything to pick up the dog poo. So as he was telling me his bird story, I watched the dog do his thing near a tree and this guy did nothing to pick up after his dog. He just smiled at me and walked away, leaving the dog's stuff on the ground, on the sidewalk, near the tree. I had lunch with me in a plastic bag, I almost took the lunch out of the plastic bag to hand to him to use to clean up after the dog. I would have done it another time, but I ignored it this time.

Once these guys were next to me in a truck at a stop light and they threw a paper soda cup out of the window onto the street. I got out of my car, picked it up, threw it back into their truck window, and said, "You dropped something." I don't do things like that anymore. I'm getting mellow-er in my old age, I guess.

Anyway, I'm told the birds are dying because they are flying into glass. Can that be? I asked the guy if it could be spraying for Zika, he said no, it wasn't that. So there's the mystery - why are birds dying in that area of the Grove and there's another mystery - why isn't this guy picking up after the dog?