I collect dead animals. As in, I make art with them. As in, it’s an easy ‘fun-fact’ during an icebreaker. As in, you will always know what to get me for my birthday. As in, I learned how to articulate a rabbit skeleton from a tumblr post fifteen years ago. As in, I know how to tell the skull of a fox apart from that of a coyote. As in, my eight-year-old niece excitedly bringing me a plastic bag with an eastern tiger swallowtail she found and wanted to give me. As in, don’t ever try to whiten bones with bleach. As in, “hey, I found a [insert rodent] on the [driveway, sidewalk, parking lot, alley]. Do you want me to bag it for you?” As in, “yes, please!”

But also as in a deer torso that has been macerating in the same tub of water for almost three years. As in a special pair of scissors in the garage that is only for cutting flesh. As in a pair of opossums wrapped in cloth, labeled, and dated in plastic containers; categorized on a shelf like some kind of macabre library. As in half-completed shadowboxes and bell jars displaying meticulously arranged animal remains and foraged plants. As in opening the entomology adhesive in tears while repairing the wing of a bumble bee I just tore on accident. As in I keep a high-vis vest, latex gloves, and plastic bags in my car just in case. As in so, so many maggots the first time I tried macerating something. As in looking through veterinary syringes & needles at the farm store as if I am not about to inject a baby bird with an alcohol fixative to preserve it in a jar forever. As in I already have a weak stomach. As in I hate blood. As in I don’t cry every single time. As in a lot of times I do.

The first time I internalized the concept of death was when my aunt’s black cat was hit by a car. I have no memory of this cat alive. Just a vision of a woman knocking on our door, the sound of crying, a car idling in the road in front of our house, and a limp, black cat in her arms. Drooping in a strange, weightless way that cats shouldn’t droop. I don’t know if this memory is real or not but it resurfaced in middle-school when I had to bury my own pet for the first time. While wrapping my dead parakeet in a kitchen towel, I noticed how his head seemed to flop over just a fraction of a moment before his body. I think I actually wiggled his body back and forth a little bit in my hands, transfixed by how his neck lolled with a weight that was distinct from the heaviness of sleep. Drawing on the memory/not-memory of the cat, I realized that this particular way of drooping indicated something was missing. Something that keeps us upright, alive, embodied, was gone. Like a wilted plant, perhaps. I considered if my body would droop like that. Suddenly, it felt wrong holding him in my hand while the earth was desperately pulling its little body back to the ground as if to say, “this is mine, now.”

A core part of “Vulture Culture” is the ethical sourcing of animal remains to collect, process, and preserve them to display. There are rules, though. You should treat the creature you have found with respect and sacredness. You must be knowledgeable and mindful of conservation regulations. One must exercise judgement rooted in an understanding of reciprocity before taking an animal from where it died. Most important of all, the animal must already be dead when you collect it. No hunting, no trapping, no baiting. This usually is agreed upon in the community as sourcing animals that have died from “natural causes,” sourcing them “ethically,” but we’ll get to that in a moment.

I collect dead animals. As in, “why do you do all this?”

Art-making with animal remains felt like the natural thing to do when I started collecting bones back in high school. My friend gave me a goat skull she found on her property and I remember being so concerned with figuring out how to best display it. Nothing was beautiful enough to give it another life in the way I imagined I could. Over time, I put time and creative energy into making these displays much more intricate pieces that felt like something alive. There was an artistic intention to preserve the remains of these animals in a way that rendered them in a dreamlike state of life and death. It felt worth the effort.

And I really do mean effort. Sometimes, the remains I found would still have gummy bits of flesh and muscle, chunks of fur, the creature it’s from indiscernible until I can get home and research it. Macerating in a bucket of water is the quickest way to get something that is mostly-bone to entirely-bone. Hence my almost three-year-old tub of water with an entire deer torso in it. It’s a set and forget, replace the water every so often, scrub out the gunk, plug your nose, and you get nice clean bones pretty quickly. It’s also pretty common to bury a find, usually in wire or something to keep predators out, and wait a few months before digging it back up. Some folks are lucky enough to have a tank of dermestid beetles they can just drop their bones into. These little dudes are super effective at cleaning animal remains down to the bone while leaving cartilage in tact (such as in a spine or between jaw bones). This keeps the structure of the creature together, which is much more ideal than sorting through a bucket of wet squirrel bones trying to figure out which bits go where as you attempt to assemble a tiny rodent foot back together.

This is why I prefer bringing home animal remains that are, or nearly are, just bone. Easier to clean, easier to store, and just all around easier to work with. I appreciated that I could take the remains after nature has ‘taken its course.’ Finding just the cleaned bones of a creature feels like coming across just enough pieces of the past to imagine the animal alive while maintaining enough distance to keep you from wondering if there was a favorite tree these same bones once rested beneath. Ethically collecting animals that died from ‘natural causes’ evokes images of moss-covered antlers found deep in a forest on a hike or coming across the small skull of a mouse that was a bird’s dinner. Unfortunately, this is not usually the case.

Most of the bones I collect are from wandering into the brush a few hundred feet from the shoulder of a back road. This makes reckoning with the phenomena of roadkill really challenging for me. If I know I’ll be back in the area, I will try to scooch them to the side of the road and wait a week or two to see if it’s still there and hopefully more decomposed. If not, I just keep driving and consider how unfair death is. Undignified, twisted, mangled, and rotting in the man-made heat until a county sanitation truck scrapes them up or they eventually get pulverized into the asphalt. Smooshed, nasty, bloated, not-yet-decomposed roadkill has made me reconsider how ethical my bone collection actually is. Nature certainly cleaned them, but is the cause of death still natural just because I didn’t personally hit the animal? Where in the mess on the concrete is there room to debate the ethics of removing this animal to “preserve it” in any form of art?

I am moved by an eternally enraged reverence and a pervasive awe every single time I get in my vehicle. It is not often I can go through a day of driving without seeing an animal in some state of decomposition on the side of the road. If you know the awkward weight of something deceased in your arms, then you know the heaviness my heart feels driving past a stain on the asphalt without stopping and apologizing on behalf of all humankind. Is it just a matter of fact that the light of wild-beings will be stolen during an inevitable meeting between steel and flesh?

A wild-being that once breathed the same crisp, winter air as I breathe now. A mouse. A pet dog. A fox. A deer. A rabbit. A cat. An armadillo, once. So many raccoons and opossums. Raptors. Imagine the most graceful, majestic wild thing you can and try to condense it into a blur of viscera on the side of the road as you drive past at an incomprehensible speed. Consider, to whom would you offer condolences to? What door would you even knock on, cradling what’s left of a body to your chest to say “I am so sorry, I just didn’t see her until it was too late.”

I collect dead animals. As in, who am I to ascribe human morality and funerary practices on the non-human dead? Who am I to be enraged?

But I can’t help but grimace every time I see a massive, freshly dead bird on a freeway shoulder. So bizarrely out of place, something that must have just happened as loose feathers still are being swept across the eight cement lanes of I-5. Was he on his way somewhere, just like all of us on the freeway are? Was someone waiting for him on the other side? I think I’ve seen three whole dead birds of prey on the side of the road since the start of this year alone. It is hard not to imagine that somewhere a nest is empty. A herd is one member lighter. A den is a little colder.

Staring into the black of a dead animal’s eyes, how am I supposed to decide what is ethical when none of this is natural?

Do I take them, anyway? I mean, I do sometimes. When opossums run out into the road, they usually get struck by a car in their torso, so their skulls are often in tact if you wait a bit and go back for them. Is it awful to know that? Is it awful to weigh how gross it would be move the mess someone else made before making it my problem? When it’s just bone, it feels like there is less of an ethical decision to make. But when I drive by the body of a whole coyote that must have just been struck, it feels wrong carrying her away from where she died. The road was cutting through her forest, so really, shouldn’t I just leave her there? Would I be a hypocrite admitting that I probably would have taken her body if it was just bones? Does it even matter? Can you tell I’ve been spiraling? The spiral goes further– what about collecting one of the over one billion birds that die every year in window collisions? What does it matter if I bury it and frame it’s little bones, if I bag it and throw it away, or if I just leave it for someone’s dog to find. I really don’t know.

I want a way to preserve remains without capturing them, but I don’t know if that’s possible. I have considered recreations– painting, collaging, writing, art making informed by how these things make me feel without having to dig into the viscera myself. The idea of recreation came to me on a walk at the Nisqually Wildlife Refuge as I kept mistaking various shadows for birds. I thought I saw the tiniest nuthatch on a tree stump and smiled at how impossibly tiny it was until I kept walking and a different angle of light revealed it was just a stick. There was a giant owl-shaped blob of lichen and moss hanging from a tree branch. Does it matter if it is or isn’t an owl at all? If I kept walking without taking a second look, that owl has to be real in the way that if I painted what I thought the owl looked like in that pile of moss that would be real, right? As a simulacrum?

This doesn’t help my internal debate between actually taking remains to do something with or just representing them. I can’t quite find what I want to pull out of all this. It makes me reflect on the undignified resting places all these dead animals have in my garage, in tubs of water, in half-done projects, until I get to “turn them” into something artistic. What about the mangled state they stay in until I have time to do something with them? Where is the dignity in that? What is that a representation of if not the way humans take and use for their own purposes? And again– does it even matter?

Last Thursday, while on my way back from watching a sunset out near mount Tahoma I saw the unmistakable wing of a barred owl sticking out of the ditch on the side of the road. I pulled over, put my hazards on, and ran towards it. An absolutely stunning thing lay there in the dirt, absolutely still. Cars whizzed past me as I crouched in the ditch in the near-dark. The bird’s three-foot wingspan spread wide as it lay on its side, wing in the air, talons curled into its body. His soft brown eyes stared into me, feathers around his head and neck matted. I probably got too close considering the spike in avian flu, but never had I seen an owl this big, this close. My first thought was god, what an insane find.

There are a lot of protected bird species in the United States under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, especially birds of prey. You can’t kill, take, possess parts of, or even touch protected species. That is, unless you get a taxidermy license and pay the federal and state government several hundred dollars to say you’re going to stuff the bird and do nothing else with it. Even then, its a hassle getting permitted and there are many species that the license wouldn’t cover unless it was for a museum or related to some kind of official conservation research. This is why for the most part, birds are off limits for those who partake in Vulture Culture in the United States. That doesn’t mean people in other countries wouldn’t snap this guy up in a heartbeat. That also doesn’t mean people in this country still wouldn’t snap him up and just not tell anyone about it. Does the legality of a decision impact how moral or ethical I think it is? What difference is the owl from the body of the coyote? The engine of a Ford F150 was probably the last thing they both heard before shedding their mortal bodies now heavy and cradled by the earth.

Owls and coyotes are both crepuscular, making them especially susceptible to being hit by a car during the hours around sunrise and sunset. I found the owl at 5:08pm after watching the sun set at 4:47pm. I was just on my way out. Had he just gotten up? Where was he going? Does it matter that I cried? That I called my partner and he cried with me? I’d like to think it mattered to the owl, but again, who the fuck am I to say? I know this is a really zoomed in perspective and I understand that nothing exists in a vacuum. Part of me feels like this is a pretty fucked up time to be considering the ethics of roadkill when my newsfeed is filled with stories of humans in communities I am part of and love that are being hunted, kidnapped, and murdered in broad daylight and the videos from Gaza haven’t ever stopped. Giving time to this moral quandary feels even more fucked up knowing the barred owl is actually invasive and there are lethal conservation initiatives being proposed to manage their population. Someone else could look at the owl I saw and say another one down!

But the thing is, I haven’t stopped thinking about the donkeys in Gaza that are also starving. About the horses being shot down. The cats found dead in the rubble. It’s not the owl’s fault he is invasive, and really the problem is a lack of habitat which wouldn’t be a problem if we didn’t destroy so much of the fucking forests for industry. It’s not his fault he eats the same thing as the spotted owl and it doesn’t feel like a fair fix because it will never address the root cause of the problem.

I can’t see an objective right or wrong answer. I think there are circumstances that feel more obvious than others– etsy stores and oddities convention booths filled with clearly dropshipped, mass-poached, trapped and farmed animals’ bones that appease the spooky aesthetic at a nice, affordable price. “Ethically sourced” feels like it should get blurry when there are twenty identical monkey skulls lined up right next to each other, perfectly white, perfectly clean.

I am absolutely going to derail here for a moment, but there is just so much spinning in my head about all this and it’s hard not to get into. Because it is at this point in my spiral that I call on my faith tradition and the way it informed my upbringing. I was taught never to cause undue harm onto any living thing. Catch the spider and let it out instead of squish it, swear at the mole holes instead of laying traps. The Islamic concept of stewardship, Khalifa, comes to mind as it expresses how humans must use their free will to be caretakers of the earth and the living things therein. There is a divine balance, Mizan, that we are required to maintain as we decide how to steward the earth and its creatures. How does one decide what tips the scales when the score is already so out of whack?

In the Qur’an, it is stated that just like human communities and cultures, animals, too, gather as we do. In their communities, Umam, we must respect their dignity and autonomy, too. They are in communities like us. How can I not personify them when I see them dead at the fault of our societal norms? If we can look at other ways to sustainably and non-lethally manage growing populations of humans by managing our resources in systematically different ways, why can’t we push for the same kind of dignity in managing the populations of non-humans? Is the mess we made just too big?

What would it look like to center our relationship with that which is not-human in the context of stewardship and care for the simple sake of? What dignity do we treat the earth with when we lay concrete, build roads, rip up habitats and section them off? Or even less obvious, what dignity can we say we hold when our species is literally killing migratory birds unintentionally in inane ways like light pollution from porch lights? How can I not feel responsible for all of this harm? You can’t blame me for thinking of all this as I kneel over the the grand loss that is this owl. This dead thing that had no need to die.

I collect dead things. As in I hope I never stop reflecting about it. As in I will still feel deeply about things that die. About everything that dies. As in there is nothing I can or could do, but it feels worth crying about anyway. As in I don’t know if it is worth preserving anyway.

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The Cattle (Qur’an 6:38)

وَمَا مِن دَآبَّةٍۢ فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ وَلَا طَـٰٓئِرٍۢ يَطِيرُ بِجَنَاحَيْهِ إِلَّآ أُمَمٌ أَمْثَالُكُم ۚ مَّا فَرَّطْنَا فِى ٱلْكِتَـٰبِ مِن شَىْءٍۢ ۚ ثُمَّ إِلَىٰ رَبِّهِمْ يُحْشَرُونَ ٣٨

All living beings roaming the earth and winged birds soaring in the sky are communities like yourselves. We have left nothing out of the Record. Then to their Lord they will be gathered all together.

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As in, is it worth telling the story anyway?