I discovered a tangle of disarticulated entrails in my backyard at dawn one Saturday late last summer: a tiny squiggle of digestive tract and an alien-like blue, bulbous, kidney-bean-sized blob. My first guess was an extraterrestrial encounter gone wrong, until I spotted a tiny paw waving up from the grass that Google suggested was rat-like or possibly squirrelly in origin.rule the alleys and postage-stamp backyard gardens of Albany Park.
In late February they claimed their turf with a shower of pigeon feathers and bloody bones on my front steps, and from then until the end of the summer, you could occasionally spot their mangled leftovers around the neighborhood. When they weren’t terrorizing the local fauna, they perched on the highest branches of the tree and shrieked at each other all day long. I loved them.
It wasn’t just their occasional crime scenes that allowed me to embody the forensic pathologist I was always supposed to be; they provided a reminder that occasionally something uncommon and wild invades the gray, human-enabled Chicago ecosystem, scattering the house sparrows and reminding theUsually when I stopped to squint up at them this summer, I was wrestling with my laptop, trying to wrench out some words to describe some analogous incursion into the city’s foodscape.