It’s an unseasonably warm day so you decide to have your morning coffee outside. You walk through your backyard, kicking up leaves and making note of the little projects you’ve been meaning to get to. The rosebushes need trimming, and the paint on your shed is peeling, and you never really liked the loud purple color it came with anyway. But the apple tree is doing great, and the birdhouse you hung up held a whole family of finches this past spring. But as you walk past you hear something rustling around. Strange, there shouldn’t be anything in there this time of year. You walk up for a closer look and as you approach you hear unusual sounds. You peer into the hole and inside you see the impossible. The hole leads to an entire city somehow contained in the birdhouse. You see tiny buildings and tiny cars driven by finches. Two finches in little suits are standing on a tiny sidewalk right at the entrance and they look at you, startled that you’ve interrupted their meeting. A manhole cover opens near them and something rushes out. Poking you in the eye for gazing into something you weren’t meant to see is: The Podcast Inside Your House.

I have cowbirds in my yard, and they creep me out for a multitude of reasons. Their chirps are wet and gurgly, so they sound like tiny dinosaurs with pneumonia. It gives me chills every time I hear it. They’re also bold and they’ll fly right up to me when I’m working in the garden, plus I know the little fuckers are eating my tomatoes. Probably the thing I find most unsettling about them though is that they’re brood parasites. They’re like the lesser-known cousins of the more famous cuckoo bird. They lay their eggs in other bird's nests, and have them raise their young. They hatch sooner, grow faster, and get bigger to compete with the bird’s actual offspring, and if the mother bird dares throw the cowbird hatchling out of her nest, the cowbirds come back with a vengeance and destroy her eggs. 

The only good thing about cowbirds is that they can lead you to all kinds of other birds. During the spring especially, they stake out other birds nesting grounds. I’m a photographer by trade, and I’ve made a point of focusing on birds every nesting season. Birds are cute, they’re colorful, and the prints sell fast because they’re a decidedly neutral addition to any home decor. 

This past spring while I was just beginning my bird stalking sessions, I found something that was, pardon the pun, truly fucking foul. I’m finally ready to share my story. 

I normally don’t venture off-trail when I’m hiking, but my little corner of the world has been getting more and more crowded with each passing year, and I was having trouble getting any good shots. So I decided to explore a bit. I started walking along creeks instead of paths and ventured much deeper into the woods than I normally would. I’d spend whole days getting lost, and it was interesting to think that I could be seeing spots in the metro parks and state forests that humans hadn’t visited for years, decades even. 

The first cowbird I spotted that day looked different. He was a bit bigger than I remembered them being, and the brown of his head was more muted. He looked almost blue, and the shade from the branches gave the impression of some kind of striped markings. After a few blurry shots of him flying, I got a gorgeous shot of him backlit on an old pine branch. I didn’t have long to admire the picture though, he was on the move. 

He was going away from the creek, and I decided I could follow him for a bit without getting lost. The part of the country I live in has a lot of variety in the woods, so it’s easy to find markers and keep track of which way you came from. There are old-growth forests here and there, younger deciduous trees with thick undergrowth, and pine forests that all kind of flow into one another. Plus an abundance of caves and rocky outcroppings. 

The cowbird took me away from the lush undergrowth and grasses around the creek, into an older part of the forest. The trees were bigger around, and they blocked out more of the light, leaving the forest floor easier for me to walk through. I thought I was only following him for maybe a few minutes. 

The bird soon met up with a group of other cowbirds, and I snapped a few pictures of them while they made their creepy dinosaur sounds. It was only when I got a picture of them together that I realized something was wrong. Compared to the others, he was almost the size of a bluejay, bigger than all of the rest, and what I had mistaken for shadows earlier were actually markings. In fact, he looked almost like a hybrid between the two. Half cowbird, half bluejay. Birds don’t work like that though, I figured he must have just been some obscure bird I’d never heard of.

The birds were flitting about, so I stopped for a minute and clicked back through on my camera to the good picture I’d gotten of him earlier for a better look (No I’m not enough of a hipster to use a film camera). As I looked at the picture and listened to the garbled cowbird calls, and his call, which was decidedly not that of a cowbird, I started to feel uneasy.

He looked wrong in a way that instantly made me feel on edge. It was unnatural. He had longer claws, thicker legs, and something that almost looked like fur covering his feet, in fact, the texture of his head looked fuzzy, rather than feathered. His eyes, well those were the worst part. There was a distinctive line down the middle, almost like a slit pupil. Birds don’t have that. Birds don’t have fur. 

They’d settled down a bit now, and I snapped another photo of him on the branch with two other birds, I tried to get a second picture after, right as he spread his wings, then quickly examined that photo. It was blurry, but his wings looked a lot more solid than they should have. The feather pattern was there but didn’t taper at the ends at all. Almost like it was just the pattern of feathers stretched over a membrane. 

He was on the move, and I weighed my options between going home, or following this miracle of nature. I chose the latter because when you first see something impossible, your mind doesn’t really believe it. I didn’t actually think anything was seriously wrong with this bird. I figured it was probably some bizarre disease or mutation, and I wanted to document it. I followed him again as we passed through a small pine area, quiet and dark and almost foreboding enough to make me change my mind and turn back, but I didn’t.

He stopped abruptly and I pulled up my camera, but just as I snapped the button he was gone. I followed him down to the forest floor in my viewfinder and took a picture of him in front of a raised hole in the mud. He looked right at me for the next shot, but after I snapped it, I felt a bit uneasy about the way he was looking at me. 

I pulled my camera away, opened my other eye, and what I saw froze me in place. The hole in the mud was actually part of something much bigger. There were dozens of other birds looking at me, surrounding and perched on what I can only describe as a massive hive. It was at least twice as tall as me, with holes all over, and it was made up of mud and pale branches. They were mostly small birds, but not all cowbirds, there was also a cardinal, some finches, and even a crow perched near the top that looked at me with its unusual eyes. 

Something felt very wrong, and alarm bells were going off inside my head telling me to turn back. The hive was unlike anything I’d ever seen, and staring into those dark holes I felt like I was looking at something that wasn’t meant for me. But of course, while I was thinking that, the rational side of my brain thought I was being silly. I’d photographed dangerous animals a few times in my life, and if there was something seriously wrong, if this was some kind of disease, it couldn’t be anything worse than photographing grizzlies in Alaska or alligators on a flimsy boat in the Everglades. The problem was that I’d felt those feelings before, and I knew you had to fight through them to get good shots, so that’s what I did. 

So I softly murmured “Hey there birdies” and rustled some leaves, to show I wasn’t sneaking up on them. It worked and a few of them did turn away, going about their business. It looked like some of them were adding to the hive, scooping up mud with their unusually thick legs and beaks that were a bit too long and bringing it up higher to cement in some of the pale sticks. A few kept watch, but seemed more at ease, and I felt myself relax with them. Whatever weirdness I’d stumbled upon, they were just animals after all, and a lot smaller than me. 

I started snapping pictures. I tried to get the crow first, but it squeezed itself into one of the tunnels that looked too small for it to fit into. Then I settled for the finches, managing to get one of them with its wings outspread, and I stopped to get a look at the wing up close. It had ridges where something stuck out and it wasn’t as translucent as it should have been either. It’s hard to describe, but the bits sticking out almost gave it the look of a bat wing. 

I found my original friend, the cowbird, who didn’t look quite like a cowbird. He had his claws dug into the mud wall outside one of the tunnels, and I got a snapshot with the tunnels partly in focus. The birds had made some kind of pattern with their sticks lining the inside. Tiny pale branches arched along the tunnel ceiling, almost like support beams in a mineshaft. 

The crow came back out and I zeroed in on him, getting one picture right as he went to caw. I saw he had something in his mouth. So I took my eyes off the spectacle in front of me. The picture wasn’t entirely clear, but there was something yellowish-white lining the underside of his beak. The rational side of me thought he had something stuck in such a way that it almost made him look like he had teeth. The irrational side of my brain was thinking darker thoughts, but I ignored it. 

I glanced up, realizing that the birds (or whatever they were) had grown quiet. They weren’t looking at me this time though, they were looking at a fox. She’d crept up on all of us and was only a few yards away from the hive, but the birds must have heard her. They watched her approach but made no attempts to escape or hide in their tunnels. 

She got close to a little yellow songbird resting on the forest floor, and though all eyes were on her, they made no move to help their tiny companion. She pounced, and the instant her paws wrapped around the yellow bird, it was over. The rest of the birds, and dozens more that crawled out of the tunnels, swarmed her and she screamed, while they remained silent, except for an awful wet crunching noise as they attacked. 

It was difficult to tell over the writhing mass of bodies, but it looked as if their claws were longer, like they were retractable and only now being put to their full use. Though most of the creatures were too small for me to get a good look at, the crow glanced at me while it had one foot jabbed over the poor creature's eye, or what was left of it. Its beak looked shorter somehow, almost like it had been pulled back, and sticking out past the beak, was something long and fleshy, that parted with two white rows in the middle. Teeth.

The fox made awful mewling screeches as they dug deeper, pulling off bits of flesh, and then snapping sinewy tendons. The lighter-colored birds turned red with blood, and it took me a minute to understand what I was seeing. They were eating it. 

There were so many, and they moved so fast that at least it was over quickly. The fox stopped screaming as they ripped into its neck, but it didn't stop struggling until it was little more than a skeleton held together by ragged muscle and sinew. It stayed upright past the point when it surely must have died, and I found myself wondering if it had happened so fast, that its brain didn’t yet know what had happened. The birds started tearing the carcass apart, pulling a leg off, and as its body fell to the ground so did I.

I vaguely felt something puncture my arm as I fell, and when I glanced over, I saw a splintered bone jabbing into it. The bone was accompanied by a handful of others that must have belonged to a deer, or something large. Larger than me.

They looked at me, the creatures who weren’t as focused on their meal, and all at once I realized that those were not sticks in their hive, and whatever these things were, they were not birds. 

I ran, and only after I ran out of breath did I realize that I left my camera, and my backpack behind. I thought about going back, not just for the camera, but for my water too, but decided I’d rather risk dehydration than meet the same fate as that fox. 

By some miracle, I remembered the way I came, but it took me almost an hour to get back to where I’d branched off from the creek. It was another hour from there to get to my car, and as I walked I thought about what had just happened, before I got back to civilization and my mind returned to finding rational explanations for things. I’ve thought of all kinds of theories since then, ranging from aliens to a dehydration-induced hallucination, but the one I keep coming back to is that they’re just some kind of animal. 

The woods are so vast, and we think we’ve cataloged everything in them, but if it was something that could hide in plain sight like that? Something that looked enough like another animal, or several animals? I don’t know that we'd even know what we were looking for. 

When I got back I hired someone to cut down the cherry trees in my yard that the birds were so fond of. The cowbirds still came though, there are countless places to nest in in our neighborhood, but at least I don’t have to see them as often. And when I do, I try not to look, afraid that I’ll catch a glimpse of slitted eyes or fleshy toothy beaks