The Garden of Wings: Episode of a Sparrow

  

          I carry the bag of sunflower seeds by hand out to the feeder. A warm day, even by my soft standards. The first time I've felt that, said that, since I don't know when.

         Approach the raspberry thicket, leafless all winter, to pass between the branches the ten feet or so to the feeder. I stop as the flutter of nearby wings scatters the local brunch crowd, the rhythm of small, brownish birds darting to the feeder, then darting back to the safety of densely branched, overgrown shrubs.

            But one of them heads the wrong way, landing on a bare raspberry cane a few feet away from me. One of the sparrows.

            Brown, as ordinary as a bird can be. Yet at this distance fascinating. I stand perfectly still.

            Then my eccentric bird hops-flies -- not away, but toward me -- to land on a bare horizontal-tending branch directly in front of my stomach, inches away from my body. Nearly touching me.

            I imagine myself a scarecrow.

            I am not a living creature to this bird. I cannot be, or he would fly away as his ancestors learned to do millennia ago, if they wished to go on being birds.

            Instead I am, perhaps, a shadow. A large, blank stillness, blocking his view in one direction.  

            The bird adjusts its spatial orientation a little to one side, and then to another. It turns its constantly-scanning head to one side, and then to the other. As birds do. Watching for the signs. Watching to see how the others are moving. Or not. Or have hidden somewhere out of sight.  

            The way all small birds seem to do, continually looking out.

            Where are the others? Where are the signals that would clue its next move.

            But though my bird moves his head continually, and I can see his greenish eye searching the world, he does not see me. He sees perhaps a wall. A grayish shadow.

            Perched on the horizontal branch, his tail feathers, angling one way and then the other, are about two inches from my fuzzy-clad stomach.

            I am tempted to extend a finger and touch those feathers. But I do not wish to frighten my wild visitor away. I watch its eyes as its head moves back and forth,

            I have never been this close to a bird in the wild. Its habitat, its world.

            Does this bird's vision have a blind spot? Not fatally, at least not yet, since it is alive. And in all other visible respects it appears to be identical to all the other sparrows who enjoy pecking at our feeder, and perching nearby, with great regularity.

            This is a 'special' bird, perhaps. Running, flying, surviving with its cohort. Mainstreamed with the flock.

            All the other birds give me the conventional wide berth when I approach their whereabouts. They are not pigeons, or domestic fowl, who might gather around a human feeder dispersing the seed.  

            Still I am motionless. Still 'my' bird looks from side to side, but does not move away.

            I have never examined a bird at so minute a distance. I can see strands of brownish-color feather in wings that otherwise appear a single unified, feathered wing. Its color, for which I continue using the 'featureless' word 'brown,' reveals itself as a complex mass of variations in color. Intricate patterns. Lighter, darker, tan, black-brown; arrows, diamonds.

            Its perfect little head, the needle-sharp beak.

            And that unreadable eye that fails to see 'me.'

            I try to examine that eye for a flaw. Even at this range it's too small for a human eye to name its color, or parts. I sense something greenish, brighter than what I see at ordinary distances.

It's still looking 'around' me. For something behind, or through, me.

            I'm not 'there' to it yet. As a creature. Something that moves and is best kept away from.

            I am tempted again to lift a finger, slowly, and try to touch this bird. But it seems more respectful to wait and watch what it does.

            It sweeps its head, yet again, from side to side. But nothing is moving in its world.

            Eventually it flies, or jumps -- the distance is so short that 'flies' doesn't seem the right word -- the three or four feet of distance to land on one of the feeder perches.

            Unmoving, I watch as its beak jams into the seed-hole and pulls out seed after seed. And then -- chews? The beak somehow grinds down on the sunflower shell sufficiently to loosen it. I have never observed this act closely enough to see this detail. Little bits of shell go flying out of the beak. Somehow that narrow tiny instrument is breaking the shell from the seed and discarding the chaff.

            It keeps pecking and eating. Left alone, it pokes and grinds. Is it hungry? Do birds' gullets know when they've had enough?

            Finally I cannot go on spoiling the natural sequence of events. What ordinarily happens is a bird abandons its feeder perch because another arrives too near. But nobody is coming now because I, the threateningly large creature, am standing there.        

             I take a half-step toward the feeder. This movement apparently wakes 'my' bird to the presence of a large creature and it makes the swift and sudden leap and fly-away that I observe more often than I can count, day after day, all winter.

            My close encounter? A chance in a thousand?