To Birds, Not All Living

I would find the dead babies on the patio, beneath the mimosa tree. Featherless with blue eyelids, their heads always turned to the side. Clearly, this was not a failed attempt to fly; the baby bird was probably barely able to move. Sometimes, a broken shell nearby. It never even hatched.

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By Doug Janson (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL
(http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

A painted bunting landed one day on the grill in the backyard. My parents called the neighbors who quietly rushed over, coffee cups in hand and binoculars around. They didn’t say much, the kitchen table felt like a church. Whatever the prayer was, I couldn’t yet say it.

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Always the hummingbirds at the feeder near the window. They are at once not a bird, darting from flower to feeder, up and down, and also the archetypal bird, economy, brevity, a shine in the air as fast as a wish.

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Shades of Death park in Indiana. First we saw the wild turkeys, the crazy aunts and uncles of the forest, We stop at the bridge long enough to see the branches change, a sparrow here. A finch. And then the blue. Indigo bunting. In a year, we will be married, but we don’t know this now.

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Two sparrows dead in the road today. One on the walk with dog; she finds it before I do and I have to pull her away. The sparrow is whole, as if shocked to death, suddenly dropped. The other on my run, a sparrow, badly damaged, hit by car. I’ve dodged birds driving and they always seem to fly at just the last moment. What were you listening to as the car approached? What song held you right there, on the asphalt, so that you could not or would not fly? Every other day, you knew when to go. Not today. Not this song. I hope, small bird, whatever it was, it was the last sound in your ear.