PriorBlog

Yesterday when I got back to the house after taking the dogs for their morning walk, I noticed what I thought was a female house sparrow carcass against the stairs leading up to the back deck.  The beagle was all over this find, scratching and clawing towards it.  Luckily I was able to keep him away, and after I got him situated in the house, I returned to the bird, who it turns out was still alive.

I don’t know if I ever picked up a wild bird before yesterday, but I can definitely say I have now.  I tried picking up a cardinal with a broken wing once, but he wouldn’t let me get a hold of him.  At my old squirrel friendly apartment, I had the opportunity to touch plenty of squirrels (paw to hand contact as I gave them peanuts), but a bird’s different.  This bird was pretty easy to get a grasp on.  Her little talons or whatever gripped onto my finger, but the body seemed to waver back and forth as though she had lost her sense of balance.  Holding the bird gave me a new perspective on these little creatures who I see so much of.  The most interesting feature to me was the eyelids falling over the eyes.  I had never really been close enough to notice this aspect of a house sparrow.  The bird’s blinking became slower and I began to wonder what to do with it.  I felt that she was about to die, that she must be in some kind of pain, but I didn’t really want to crack her neck, or whatever manly horror is required of this kind of situation in Bruce Willis-type movies.  At the same time, I had to get to work.  I’m still new at my job and I am not sure how far an excuse like “I had to wait for a house sparrow to die” would, ehem, fly.

Finally, I decided to make some sort of odd compromise.  The best place to put it would be underneath my neighbor’s birdfeeder.  Was this a reasonable thing to do?  No, but I was thinking on the fly, I was panicked and, if you want to know the truth, if you want to know how absurd my thinking was at this point in time, the idea ran through my brain that if it was close to the other birds, they would know what to do with it.  Obviously, I am well aware that house sparrows do not have hospitals or even a basic understanding of their own physiology, but I grabbed onto this scrap of bad faith in order to rid myself of the dying bird.

But as I got to the fence that divides my pile of weeds and dog manure (read my yard) for my neighbor’s laboriously maintained flowerbeds and bird slash squirrel feeding station paradise (read his yard), I had second thoughts about this plan of action.  Mainly I was concerned with the image of my neighbor seeing me poke around his yard in the morning, and then him finding a dead bird back there in the afternoon.  He would probably think that I had decided to begin dumping my excess bird carcasses in his yard.  And so I just sort of crouched behind the fence waiting for the future, whatever it held.  Out of nowhere the bird suddenly chirped to life with a start and a runny shit that ran into the palm of my hand as it flew away.

I think if the moment had happened sans shit, it might have filled me with an exhilarating affirmation of the mysterious power of redemption, but because of the shit, instead of an intense inner feeling, the thought that occurred to immediately afterwards was: I guess I can blog about it.