House sparrows pop in, forever on the scrounge for scraps. Photo / 123rf
House sparrows pop in, forever on the scrounge for scraps. Photo / 123rf
OPINION
It’s that time of the year again, bird-in-the-garage time.
Way back when, on the Fens in eastern England, they used to trap ducks using a long and netted tunnel. The entrance to the tunnel was wide and tall, maybe the size of a hockey goal. In swam the duckat ease, unconcerned by the netting far above it and to either side. Then the tunnel took a turn to left or right and at the same time the roof lowered a little and the walls closed in. On swam the duck, trusting that at the next bend the roof and sides would open out again. They didn’t.
Driven by hope and a rising sense of panic, the duck turned a final bend and found a small netted pond where other ducks were already swimming and there they’d stay until evening when the men who had built the trap arrived, with clubs. My garage operates on a similar principle.
It doesn’t curve and it doesn’t shrink, but it is a long narrow garage. It stands open most of the day and birds habitually fly into it. The swallows that nest nearby come in to rest on a wire that’s strung across the ceiling. Fantails come in to hawk for insects in the cobwebs. And house sparrows pop in, forever on the scrounge for scraps. And all these birds have learned to leave the way that they came in.
But at the far end of the garage are two large windows. I have never washed them and they’re hung with cobwebs, but still they’re made of glass.
Nearly 1,000 birds died after striking the windows at McCormick Place convention centre, Chicago on October 5 2023
Credit: Lauren Nassef Chicago Field Museum
Recently in Chicago they laid out side by side in rows the corpses of the birds that died from flying into the glass walls of a single skyscraper on a single day. There were over a thousand birds. The display looked like an old-fashioned poulterer’s window.
This time of the year there are young birds about. Chance and curiosity bring them into my garage. They find nothing there of interest because we people banish from the places where we live the weather, water, soil and all the things from which life springs. And then the birds see the windows ahead of them and they fly on.
In my study next door to the garage I hear the thud. I get up to find the bird lying stunned on the sill. Cradling it as one might an ancient porcelain vase, I carry its near weightlessness out into the sunlight and sit with it as long as necessary for it to revive. And I like to do so. It feels like a privilege to study the beak, the eye, the brilliant layering of the feathers, the fuse wire of the legs and claws.
Other birds fly into the glass but are not stunned; merely thwarted, bewildered. One such was a young blackbird this morning. I heard it hit the glass and then, a short while later, I heard it fluttering frantically up and down the window, baffled by transparency. I waited. Sometimes they find the way out for themselves. This one didn’t. I went to help.
My one ambition was to to free the bird from its plight, to return it to the world where it belonged. Yet at the sight of me it went into a panic so extreme that it skittered up and down the glass and against the frame that was furthest from me, and then it caught sight of the second window and flew straight into that, and fell to the sill, but roused itself again, was frantic against the glass until it somehow trapped itself between a shelf, the window frame and a pot of green paint.
I reached in and folded its wings against its body with my hands and bore it out of the garage, its tiny heart beating like an alarm clock, and there in the big wide world I opened my palms and it took off with desperate energy, intent on putting the maximum possible distance between itself and its benefactor. Why? Where does this dread of our species stem from?
There’s a poem by Thomas Hardy in which a baby watches a wagtail sipping from the edge of a stream. A bull wades through the stream. The bird eyes it but does not fly away. A stallion passes by, then a dog. The bird eyes them but does not fly away.
