Let us begin with the spikes.

You put spikes on the ledge outside the bank. Fine. It is your ledge. But you did not remove the ledge, which is the thing that made the ledge a ledge, and you did not stop the ledge from facing south, which is why we were there. You spent money to keep a warm stone warm and empty.

Every one of us understood the message. None of us understood the reasoning. We moved eleven feet. That is the entire result. Eleven feet, at whatever the invoice said.

Second. The netting under the bridge. The netting works, in the sense that we cannot get in. It also cannot be removed, in the sense that nobody has, and there is now a section of it holding a plastic bag, a length of ribbon, and a bird who did get in and did not get out.

He has been there since spring. We have stopped discussing it. You have never discussed it.

Third, and this is the one. You call us rats with wings. Rats do not have wings. That is the joke, you think — but consider what you have actually said. You have taken a creature you tolerate and a creature you do not and combined them into one thing you can dislike without effort.

This is not zoology. It is filing.

We were carried here. That is the part nobody says out loud. We did not arrive. We were bred, for centuries, to come back to a person — and then the message stopped needing us, and the person stopped coming outside, and here we are, still coming back, still standing in the plaza at the hour we were told, waiting for a hand.

The geese get the ceremony. The geese get cited — improper disposal, a whole paragraph in this newspaper. Nobody cites us. A citation would at least be a record that something happened.

And do not think we have not noticed the awards. Riverfront Excellence, fourteen years, black tie, on the bridge, forty feet above a raft of bottles. We attended. We attend everything. We are the only continuous observers this city has, and we have never once been asked.

One more. You have a great institute of mathematics in New York named nearly what we are called, and every year people go there to study how things change while staying themselves, which is the only subject we have. Nobody thought to ask the birds.

Fine. It is fine.

The ledge is still warm. We are eleven feet to the left.

Come see us sometime.