A Particular Bird

Heloise, the little warbler bird who had hatched her eggs in the birdhouse on our front porch, has flown away, and her fledglings have left the nest. One little bird didn’t make it. His remains were left on the front porch, underneath the rocking chair, and downy feathers showed up in the litter box of our cat Kato. After weeks of watching Heloise and then hearing the chirping of her babies, I was saddened. But I know, of course, that there was no malice on Kato’s part – no more than I have when I eat chicken wings or a pastrami sandwich.

In his book Out Walking: Reflections on Our Place in the Natural World, poet John Leax writes about finding a fledgling mourning dove with a wounded wing, and knowing it had a very slight chance of survival, given the presence of five cats in his neighborhood. He writes about our ability to be moved by the plight of one individual animal. He remembers how our entire nation was fascinated a while back while watching TV news stories about three whales trapped by ice in the Beaufort Sea. “Why,” he asks, “were we so concerned about those particular whales? Why, after nearly eradicating whales for profit, were we spending so much money to rescue three?”

The human imagination, Leax writes, is particular. “One whale, facing imminent death, has more power to move us than a species facing extinction.” But nature is not particular:

The issue is learning to extend our care from an individual to a species. But taken by itself it is not enough, for it does not comprehend the harsh reality of nature’s apparent indifference. Nature, like it or not, is not particular. It struck me . . . that perhaps I needed to learn, not nature’s indifference, but something of her larger concern, something of how particular deaths (even mine) fit into a pattern of exchange and nourish the health of creation.

Finding the remains of Heloise’s fledgling reminded me of a poem by Byron Herbert Reece, the North Georgia poet who lived from 1917 to 1958:

Whose Eye is on the Sparrow

I saw a fallen sparrow
Dead upon the grass
And mused to see how narrow
The wing that bore it was.
By what unlucky chance
The bird had come to settle
Lopsided near the fence
In sword grass and nettle

I had no means to know;
But this I minded well:
Whose eye was on the sparrow
Shifted, and it fell.