Over at Emma Tree there’s a great story about a recent bird muse. This is my bird muse.
I used to have a next door neighbor named Betty – Betty was in her 80s and she was awesome. She went rockhounding every Thursday, had been everywhere, would clip articles out of the paper of things that she thought would interest us (we were new to Albuquerque then), and loved my son. I spent many an afternoon in her house or out in our front yards talking to her and listening to her fabulous stories.
She died suddenly a few years ago and her house was bought by a “house flipper”. Our street is very close and we all poked around the house peering into windows to see what they were doing to “Betty’s House”. One day I went around back to see what they were doing to her sunporch. A bird had apparently flown right into the window and smacked itself rather hard. There was a perfect outline of the bird! I immediately grabbed my camera and took several shots. Over the next few days I took all the various neighbors over to the house to see the “ghost bird”. We were all agreed Betty was keeping an eye on her house still.
This is the image I took and digitally altered in Photoshop. You can see individual feathers! It’s crazy how perfect that image is!
LOVE this image! The weird thing is I had this happen also – glass front door, a couple of years ago. A bird flew into into it, from the outside, and was able to fly away – no real harm done – but oddly enough, left a bird imprint on the glass. It was not quite as detailed as yours, but when the sun was in a certain position, it looked exactly like a ghost bird, just as you said. I didn’t wash that glass forever, and eventually the rain & weather “disappeared” the image.
And PS – Love your new blog!
Debi