Eye on the Sparrow
By Sonya Spillmann
@sonyaspillmann
“Don’t go into the carport,” my husband, Chris, tells me. He sees the silent question on my face in response and answers, “There’s a baby bird that fell out of its nest.”
“Did you … ” I say, not knowing how to finish my sentence. Move it, help it, save it?
“No,” he says. “It’ll die,”—all male and honest and matter-of-fact.
I close my eyes. Exhale. Drop my shoulders. Don’t go outside. Okay, I can do this.
***
Our house was built in 1968, when the winters were mild and cars were a fraction of the size they are now. Meaning: instead of a garage, we have a carport. We’ve parked in it once. Maybe. Instead of sheltering a car, our carport serves as a garage—housing a herd of bikes, shelves of shoes, trash and recycling bins, and a sports equipment “organizer” where we keep everything from camp chairs to kick boards—all for the neighbors to see. The carport connects to our front porch, where I hang two ferns every spring.
The first year I hung the ferns, not ten minutes later, two pairs of red finches started flying around, beginning what was the avian equivalent of a bidding war for this desirable spot to build a nest. Why each of them couldn’t just use one fern I’m not sure, but animals seem to have a way of knowing what’s best. For years now, red finches come each spring—within minutes of us hanging the ferns.
We also have a robin that builds her nest on a high beam under our deck. Where the wood meets the roof in our carport, sparrows build their nests in near constant rotation.
All this is to say: we have a lot of birds around our house.
***
I have to leave. I tell my kids, the younger two, to go straight to the car. It’s not that we can’t handle it, it’s just that no one needs to see a dead baby bird right now. Chris, doing yardwork nearby, hears me walk out the side door and says, “It’s under the cooler.”
“Still alive?” I ask.
“Yes.” So, of course, we peek. A small, pink-skinned bird with just the fledge of feathers has its mouth open, but becomes quiet as we come into view. Somehow, it had crawled under the cooler to a space both hidden and protected. I assume it will be eaten or die from the heat in the next few hours. Despite the little feather buds, it couldn't have been ready to fly. Walking to the car, we hear it begin to chirp again. Presumably, naturally, for its mom.
Later, after we return home, the three of us approach the cooler. Quietly. Tentative. But the baby bird is gone. We have foxes in our neighborhood, though they’re rarely out midday. Yet this was my explanation to the kids. We walk inside, just a little bit heartbroken over the cruelty of the natural world.
***
“Mom,” my youngest says to me hours later, “I hear it.” We’re standing in the kitchen, and I hear the chirps too. Another bird must have fallen out of the nest. How am I going to explain another death to her today? I follow her outside as she rushes to investigate.
The chirping stops, but my daughter is persistent. Looking, searching. “Here!” She points to a bright green shin guard on the ground, then gently lifts it up. There, once again, is the same baby bird. My son walks out of the house to see what's going on.
“Oh, the bird’s still alive?” he asks. They look from the bird to me and suddenly I can’t help myself.
“Go get me a paper towel,” I blurt out. My youngest runs in the house and then rushes back out, arm extended.
Going against all the animal husbandry advice I read back when I was my daughter’s age, I used the paper towel to pick up the fledgling with my hand. The kids gather round to look closer. The bird's eyes are still closed. Its skin is pink and almost translucent, neck outstretched, beak open, desperate for food or water. “Go get a worm,” I tell my son, and without hesitation, he runs to the flowerbed in front of our porch by the ferns. What am I going to do? Chew it? My son quickly returns with the world’s smallest worm, and I take it from him, dangle it above the chick’s beak, all while knowing this is not how chicks eat. “You want to chew it for him?” I ask my son. He looks at me as if I’m crazy. “I’m kidding.”
The little thing is chirping away, breaking my heart, and I don’t know what to do. But then there is more chirping, and it’s not coming from the bird in my hands. And not coming from the nest up above. By now, my oldest daughter has joined us. She’s home from college for the summer, nearly grown. Her feathers all in, so to speak, freely flying away but still returning to the nest.
“Where is it?” she asks about the second one.
“I don’t know,” I say, and we all start to walk around the carport, stepping over cleats, around bike tires and fishing poles, with our heads tilted, ears alert.
“I think it’s down here,” she says. She lies down on the cement and reaches her hand underneath a bin of basketballs and footballs. The chirping stops. She stops. My other two stand frozen. “I see it, I think,” she says.
“Go get tongs,” I say to my youngest, Viv, who—after a short explanation for what tongs even are—brings them out and hands them to her older sister. “Try to get it with these,” I say. My oldest lies with her full body flat, blonde streaks of hair falling over her shoulders, arm outstretched, with her mother, younger brother and sister all looking on.
“I got it!” she says and pulls out a second baby bird, this one bigger, eyes open, almost entirely covered in tiny feathers. She plops it into my papertoweled hand, right next to the other. We all stare at each other. What do we do now?
“Viv,” my bug lover, wood whittler, and collector of all things, “do you have a nest?” I ask.
“A nest?”
“With your nature stuff?”
“Um … ” she thinks, “No, no I don’t think so.” I chew on my lip. The baby birds’ chirps sound like crying.
“Go get the robin’s nest!” I say to my son.
“The what?”
“The robin’s nest under the deck.” It should be empty this time of year. He and Viv run off, but are back just minutes later with an empty nest. I take it from them and gently deposit the baby birds in the middle. They take a few seconds to rearrange themselves, but quickly fit together, both chirping wildly, mouths open to the sky.
“Do I … ” I ask, looking at the evergreen trees behind the carport, wondering if I can climb up to secure the nest high enough for it to be safe. But I know I can’t. I stand there, looking around—trying to think of what we can use. That box! I dump out all the cracked geodes my daughter has been “saving” then place the next securely inside. Next, I climb on top of a storage container to reach the farthest beam I can, towards the back of the carport, right in the corner where a wooden beam meets the eve of the roof. Here, it’s safe from the elements, high enough to be unreachable by predators, and hopefully has enough space for their mother to fly in.
We stand there, listening to the cheep cheep cheep, knowing this is all we can do.
***
I spend too much time looking out the small window in our side door the rest of the afternoon, watching the box with the nest for any sign of a bird flying in or out. The next day, we leave for church and the baby birds are still chirping. I haven’t seen Mom yet, and it’s going to be another hot day. How long can they survive? What the sermon was about, I don’t remember, save the preacher’s mention of how God cares for and feeds even the sparrows, and how much more will He then care for us.
But do you, God? I can’t help but ask. Care for the sparrows—do you really?
Some people believe it’s wrong to question God, but what else am I to do with my doubts? What do we make of the harshness in the natural world, let alone our human one? Yes, there is beauty and grace, love and hope, but at what cost? Too often, life feels too hard and so unfair. Look around. It’s painful. Sometimes, downright cruel.
Back at home, I don’t dare check on the birds. I tell myself it’s because I don’t want to disturb them. But really, it’s because I can’t quite bear to know that they’re dead. At some point, I’ll have to move them, but not now. Not today.
Running an errand that same afternoon, though, I pause in the carport to listen for chirps. Hearing none, I turn and quickly head to my car. An hour or so later, pulling back into the driveway, my mind is one hundred miles away. Car into park, I look up, out my windshield. A full grown sparrow flies out of the box—did I really just see that?—and lands on the handlebars of a bike. My chest melts in relief. I almost laugh. I rush into the house to tell the kids.
For the next day or two, I watch the box—while I sip coffee, when on the phone, whenever I leave the house for work—but I don’t see much activity. The kids ask if the babies are okay, and I answer with a casual, “I’m sure they are.”
Later in the week, I see an adult sparrow fly out of the box. Home alone, I open the door to the carport, then close it behind me. I climb up and stretch out my arm and reach my phone over the edge of the cardboard. Yet when I jump back down to the concrete and look at the photo, my phone shows an empty nest.
My heart sinks. Did they fall? But then it turns over and rights itself. Did they survive?
I climb back up, grab the box, and stare inside as if searching for clues. I scan the cement, behind the recycling bin, and the base of the nearby trees. There’s no sign of them.
I will wonder what happened to these little birds for a long time. But there, empty nest in hand, I choose to believe that they lived. Not because I can’t bear it if they didn’t, but because maybe this is exactly what it feels like to live by faith.
Sonya Spillmann is a nurse, an essayist, and freelance writer living in the DC area with her husband and four kids. She's incapable of small talk, loves red lipstick, and spends the majority of her afternoons driving children around in her minivan. You can read more through her Substack, Finding Feathers.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.