I grew up in an apartment and I lived in apartments all the way until we moved here to Spånga, 6 years ago. Although I did spend all the summers of my childhood at my grandmother’s sommer cottage in the country.

I knew that a house would bring all sorts of new responsibilities. All sorts of renovation projects, shovelling snow and raking leaves – no big surprises there.

One thing I wasn’t quite prepared for was the amount of death, or perhaps the closeness of it.

In an apartment one may find dead house plants, and flies and spiders, and probably nothing higher up the evolutionary tree.

Here, we have had birds kill themselves by flying into our windows. We’ve had strong circumstantial evidence (of the olfactory kind) of a dead rat/mouse and then another poisoned rat under the house. And in the past two weeks we’ve found two dead young birds in the garden.

Ingrid found the first one. She didn’t want us to just throw it in the garbage so we buried it, and planted a primrose on it grave. When we found the second one I gave it a less ceremonial burial. Now I’m thinking I should maybe mark its grave somehow after all, because otherwise I might get an unpleasant surprise if I ever try to plant something there.

I wonder how long it takes for a dead bird to be reduced to its skeleton under the ground.

I found dead birds surprisingly hard to identify. They do not look like they normally do at all. Posture is a big part of birdness. However based on their size and colouring, I guess they might have been young blackbirds – probably taken by cats.