Have You Ever Held A Tiny Bird?
Just a bit of fluff.
A tiny wisp of feathers with a beating heart, pleading terrified dots
for eyes – staring into your own heart.
Somehow connecting directly to your own soul, this mote of life wants
only to escape your cupped hands. And
yet you must hold it safe and uninjured long enough to move it to a place where
you can safely release it.
This has happened to me several times. A tiny bird gets into my house or office or,
once, in a School Library. The bird is
completely confused. Mystified to find
itself in this place where the open sky
is not up, in fact there doesn’t seem
to be any open sky. Some kind of a cloud, in the bird’s thinking,
that is hard and every time it tries
to fly up through it, it hurts.
“Oh, look a patch of blue,” thinks our tiny friend. Whonk! “What the ??”
As a bird, glass is a foreign concept. A window just looks like the space between
trees, or branches … maybe.
Next, there are number of big lumbering creatures trying to
catch it. Chasing it around, confusing
it even more. “Over there!” one of them
shouts. “Get a chair!” “It’s on the light!”
All that human shouting probably just sounds like dogs
barking, or bears grumbling. It would
take a look inside a bird’s mind, to know what a bird’s thinking. A bird
brain … I guess. Which sadly human’s
do not have the capability of doing.
Although when trying to capture, or help,
a bird trapped inside a human habitation, an awful lot of humans seem to get
kind of bird brained.
For the safety of the bird though, I think it’s pretty
important to try and get them back outside.
Yet, they definitely don’t want to be gotten. And their skills at
being illusive are quite amazing.
Generally it does take a couple of people. One person to distract the bird and the other
to sneak up on the little guy when
his/her attention is on the other person.
It has been amazing to me how many big ole people are so
afraid of the little guys though. Like
this half an ounce of feathers has any real capacity to be of even the
slightest physical threat. Believe me,
in my experience mosquitos are far
more of a threat than any sparrows and such, I’ve had to deal with.
So one time I was in a school library on the first really
nice day of Spring. A couple of the
doors to the outside were open and a sparrow (I’m pretty sure it was a sparrow) flies into the main room. The librarian and the teachers went into full
scale panic. Most of the students (kids) thought it was funny.
Adults all either running around trying to get away from
this creature that was smaller than your hand, or actually trying to swat it
with brooms or yardsticks.
Sure it might poop on your head, but I’ve had that happen in
a city park. You get a wet cloth and
wipe it off. It’s not like your skin is
gonna melt. It’s bird poop, not acid.
So one of these teachers calms down enough to help me corner
the little guy and I manage to scoop him up in my hands. Now he’s terrified, of course. If some giant got ahold of you in their
hands, you’d be terrified. So naturally
he’s trying to use all the tools of self-defense he’s got, which consists of
his beak. He’s pecking and pecking at my
fingers.
I took him outside and let him go … of course.
But I’ll never quite forget it, because I could barely feel
it. I’ve had sea crabs pinch me harder
than that. Tiny, tiny sea crabs as small
as a penny with more strength than that tiny sparrow. He weighed almost nothing at all. It was as though he was made from
sunlight. Less mass than a dust bunny.
As he darted off into the sky, all I could think was that
there was some kind of gift he had given me.
Such a marvelous piece of evolutionary genius and I had, for a just a
few moments, held it in my hands.
It gives me pause concerning our own lives ….
Dale Clarence Peterson © 2014 Hartfield, Va.
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without looking) at:
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