The Breast of Humanity

Bird on Ice

So, a lot of people probably think I am a dork for this, but I read birding magazines. I enjoy birding almost as much as I enjoy a good espresso, which is a bunch. I have especially enjoyed the stories that people mail in about their birding experiences. You know like in teen magazines they have embarassing stories about how they walked into clas with a tampon stuck to their shoe or in RC's geek magazines they have stories about how they fragged someone or pimped their rig (that is their computer). Anyway, you get the idea. I love hearing about exciting close encounters with birds. I have always wanted a story for myself. I have especially wanted the kind where someone helps out a bird and it comes back to say "thanks". Like the story about the woman who helped a wren get out of her house and it came back and landed on her shoulder "as if it were trying to say tahanks". There are so many of those stories, it some times makes me wonder how much of it is fiction. Sometimes there are photos accompanying these cute stories. But once again the sceptic in me wants more proof. Yesterday we had a very bad storm pass through. It started pretty suddenly. We were outside playing in the pool and the temperature dropped, not a dramatic drop like in The Sixth Sense, but enough of a drop to let you know that it is raining somewhere nearby. I went ahead and brought the little man inside. By the time I had gotten him dried off and put clothes on him it had started to sprinkle. I started some popcorn because I was a tad munchy. The rain got steadily harder and since it was coming in from the North East it started leaking in the back of the house into the kitchen. The popcorn forgotten, we dashed about madly trying to keep it from going everywhere. The bug man showed up to spray. And by that time it was coming down really good. Within a matter of ten minutes or so it was hailing sporadically. As hail so often goes, it was soon coming down quite hard. The little man was a little bit scared because of the banging noise it made when it hit the windows. It got to be about quarter sized and then just as suddenly as it had started it began to slack off. This was all within about an hour. Since the wind had blown stuff around and knocked some things over, I ran out to do a damage assesment. I was also taking pictures to document this catastrophic event to send to my dad, since he is out of town. In the last picture of the set that I took, I noticed a small thing on the ground. It was a sparrow laying in a puddle of hail and freezing water with it's head up in the air to keep from drowning. I ran inside and put my camera down and ran back outside to grab the bird. It never moved except to shiver more violently than it already was. I wrapped it in an old rag of a dish cloth and put it into a butter dish and took it back outside so that when it came to it wouldn't be fluttering all around in the house and break it's silly neck trying to fly through a window. I set it down in a pretty well protected area so that the rain that was still coming down wouldn't get it more wet than it already was. I must say that running around in a slick hail covered yard in bare feet isn't a good idea. My feet were frozen by then so I came back inside to warm up and to email some pictures. So the reason for me telling you those two seemingly unrelated things is because I must say I am a tad disappointed. I haven't been thanked by that ungrateful bird for saving it's miserable life. If it were my dad he probably would have just stepped on it, because he hates sparrows. And the moral of the story is: Don't believe everything that you read, or: don't expect birds to say thank you.

posted by Jedi Master Deba Sing @ 3:59 PM 0 comments