His Eye is on the Sparrow (or Junco)

E came to me in a dither yesterday after playing outside for a little while to report that she thought she had found a dead bird. She had indeed. It was most certainly dead. Thoroughly dead. A little Junco from the back yard. Her mind immediately went to the Cedar Waxwing we found on campus last year that apparently was part of a mass kill-off, probably from ingesting ice-melt. So she posited that it had eaten "poison" from a neighbor's yard (neighbors who are notorious for spraying and sprinkling noxious substances on their lawns, sometimes with a down-wind effect on our yard/family/flowers).

Here's the (late) bird:

We wondered briefly what to do with it. They knew not to play with it, since I had told them the story of my bringing home a dead bird as a child and being scolded for bringing a yucky, dead, stiff, no doubt pestilential bird into the house. We decided to bury it in the garden (the circle of life and all that). They wanted to use a push broom. I opted for a spade.

Then the girls wanted to memorialize the poor bird:

Then M's sign got more specific:
The final product:
Tooie decided today he wanted to dig the bird up and "just take a look at it." Fortunately, I distracted him.