David Hughes discovered himself depressed and homeless early in the pandemic. He was robbed two times on the street. He says he was threatened by individuals who were on meth and challenged by others utilizing heroin. He hesitated he would regression, or get seriously hurt.
Finally, he made his method to a camp under a bridge crossing Brush Creek where numerous guys reside in a loosely structured neighborhood with guidelines governing drinking and drugs. It’s fairly out of the method, and Hughes says authorities don’t appear to mind a couple of individuals living there.
But Hughes was far from material.
“The first thing that I missed when I became homeless was having a pet,” Hughes remembers. “It just feels really good to make a connection with an animal of any kind. And not having a pet was a real problem for me.”
‘She really stood out’
A couple of days prior to Christmas 2020, a bird that plainly did not belong amongst the flock of Canada geese appeared on Brush Creek. Hughes says a homeless Marine Corps veteran he understood saw it initially.
“He just got real excited, grabs me. He goes, ‘That is an Egyptian goose!’ And he, you know, points to this black bird that was in the midst of all these Canada geese. She really stood out.”
Hughes says the bird appeared to discover him, too. A number of weeks after the sighting, Hughes awakened in his sleeping area along with the creek to see the bird examining him out.
“I look in the water and there frequently would be a lot of fish and a few ducks just cruising by, but this what I had been told was an Egyptian goose, was right there floating and looking at me, just sitting there,” he says.
‘It’s lonesome and frightening to be out here’
Before long, the bird began sleeping beside Hughes under the bridge. He developed her a little house utilizing contributed clothing and other things he’d discovered. She reorganized things a little and relocated.
“She didn’t want to be alone. I’m convinced that she came to me looking for safety and companionship, which was the two things that I really needed,” he says. “It’s lonely and scary to be out here. And I didn’t know anybody.”
Hughes thinks about that winter season, the following spring and early summer season living under the bridge with the buddy he’d called Ahmed “the golden age of homelessness” (he later on found out Ahmed was a Muscovy duck, not an Egyptian goose).
Even after he discovered a more steady location to live later on that summer season, he would still spend hours a day socializing with the duck, gathering and consuming her eggs.
“I would come back every morning and when she would see me, she’d make a beeline for me. She still totally wanted to hang out,” he says.
Lost and discovered
That continued for the rest of 2021 and well into the list below year. Then, on March 9, 2022, Hughes appeared for his everyday go to and Ahmed was gone.
For months, he browsed the creek and neighboring ponds every day searching for her. And he started to discover a modification in himself.
“I began to really, really get in touch with what birds are here, what they’re doing. And it’s like this gift that she gave me,” Hughes says reverently. “Ahmed gave me this gift of seeing what birds do, what their whole gig is. But there’s this entire world, love, death, reproduction, everything going on, all around you. And you don’t really realize it until you just kind of stop and look at it.”
Hughes is now a passionate birder, and most likely the primary professional on the wildlife on Brush Creek from Troost Avenue to Main Street. He illuminate discussing his brand-new pastime.
“I’ve seen pied-billed grebes, northern shovelers, blue-winged teals, bald eagles and an osprey, blue herons, green herons. A whole variety of ducks. That’s a blue jay. Just this morning I saw a brown thrasher,” he says with a smile. “We’ve got beavers, otters, possibly minks bobcats, foxes…”
A coyote makes the rounds every night.
Brush Creek, where Hughes discovered anxious haven at one of the most affordable points in his life, has now end up being a location he likes to check out.
“You would never know that you’re at the corner of 48th and Troost. There’s all these trees and there’s beavers and there’s otters and there’s all the birds and the ducks come right up to me,” he says. “A couple of the geese come up to me now too, and it’s, oh man, it is a mental health kick in the ass! I can’t tell you how much I look forward to doing this every day.”
