Small Broken Lightnesses of Being

A couple of weeks ago I was standing on our upper deck with my friend S. looking down at shrubs and bushes in front of our house.  In particular, we were watching a small brown bird, clearly a sparrow, which had landed on one of them.  He asked me what kind I thought it was, and I said, Maybe a song sparrow, though I wasn’t sure.  I told him that I thought a song sparrow had nested inside that bush the last couple of seasons, but we both agreed that the size of this one didn’t seem quite right.

S. had told me a while ago about sitting very still on their deck with some birdseed in his palm and having a chickadee light there to feed.  I like this meaning of “light” as a verb; it says so much about the kind of touch this small bird makes on the hand that feeds it.  If there is magic in the world, perhaps it can be understood in the lightness of this touch.  I also admire S. for his patient stillness and willingness to wait for the bird to come to him and for the pleasure he found in it.

I thought about this a few days later when I saw a small shape lying on our main deck in front of the tall windows.  It was a white-throated sparrow, or what is usually called a white-throat.  There is much that I love about white-throats, but the loveliest is its song.  It reminds me of climbing the granite slope behind our old cottage in Purcell’s Cove many decades ago and hearing the white throats sing up there in the jack pines.  I knew the sound long before I knew the bird and learned how to mimic the five clear and haunting notes of one of its characteristic songs.  I can never hear a white-throat singing without thinking of those times and that place.  You can listen to the one I can whistle here.  You can see and hear it sing its other lovely song here.

I picked up the dead white-throat and noticed how its head flopped in my hand, its neck clearly broken.  I marveled at its compact shape, the neatness of its small white bib, the variations of brown in its flight feathers, the poignancy of its legs and feet, and the lovely lightness of its small being.  I know that birds have hollow bones and bodies that are lighter than you think they are going to be, but I am still amazed at the feel of one when it is lying in my palm.  It is always a small wonder.

I know that our windows are a hazard because of their height and the amount of sky they reflect, and birds do fly into them, though not always fatally.  At times I have watched small stunned creatures recover and fly away, and when I find small smears of feathers on the windows, or on the glass panels of the deck, I always hope that these birds managed to survive their impacts. 

A few years ago I found a sharp-shinned hawk on a path below our house.  It was lying on its side in the space between the blueberry bushes with every feather seeming to be in place and no sign of what might have killed it.  I carried its perfect lightness of being up the path and buried it at the edge of the garden, thinking of the beauty of its flight pattern, the mottling of its breast, and the sharp strength of its talons.

And I buried the white-throat, also in the garden.  I whistled its song as I filled the hole.

Since then I have noticed another one perched on that same shrub in front of the house.  I have tried whistling to it.  I am still hopeful it will whistle back.