It was almost vulgar the way that it was just so pronounced, how innocent they were. —photojournalist Lynsey Addario, 3.15.22 On the front page of the newspaper this morning, there was a photograph of a mother and her children killed by a Russian mortar round as they tried to flee across a ruined bridge. They lay as if a strong wind had blown them down, and I thought: They look like dead birds. Later, on the ramp behind my office, I found a dead woodcock, also known as a timberdoodle, bogsucker, night partridge, brush snipe, hokumpoke, or becasse, and once thought to winter on the moon. I studied its cryptic plumage, the richest thing I had ever seen, an earthworks, a stone tracery, a selvage, with tuftings of the softest gray down, like dawn coming up on the world or the filling torn from an anorak, and a row of dark eyes that did not blink, rimmed with salt when some infinitely mild touch lingered along its side before leaving it to the viaticum of its wounds and their copious blood — since the woodcock is hunted as game, “best cooked pink, and just a little bloody.”
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence