A fallen baby sparrow’s journey through birth, life and death

Last summer our long-time babysitter Silene found a baby sparrow on the back porch. It had fallen from a nest in the eaves.

I didn’t know, or had forgotten, the look of such a thing. Featherless, furled and delicate like a scrunched tissue.

Thankfully, something else was visible: motion, sort of an intermittent flexing. The movement was feeble, but not sluggish; it suggested that alien quickness of birds, an essence of electricity.

We placed our little charge in a paper towel-lined tupperware bowl, then stood around it uncertainly. The trouble at our toes seemed very significant. This was an odd sensation, but also an old one: when Hamlet speaks of “a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,” it echoes the Bible: “Aren’t two sparrows sold for a penny? But your Father knows when any one of them falls to the ground.”

Speaking of parents, the mother-sparrow now appeared, bright on the porch railing. She was nothing if not intent. Her concentrated energy reminded me of the tip of a blowtorch — that slender flame with its twitching incandescence. Head in one position, then the next, eager eyes scouring every atom of the deck.

Then she was gone. Maybe she couldn’t imagine that her kin was in the purple object, or that the humans beside it were friend, not foe. So we propped the baby higher in the bowl and went inside.

Watching from the kitchen, the mother again lit on the railing, searched keenly, then flickered away. She had a good memory and was loyal. But her searches kept failing, and the intervals between them were getting longer.

One of my daughters was stamping in circles; another was teary-eyed. We had to try harder. I raised a ladder, and lodged the bowl in the gutter beside the nest. Up there I noticed something new: the hatchling was calling out — or trying to. Neck and head extended, beak opening and closing, but no sound.

I aligned myself to see what it saw. Latticeworks of sky, shade, cloud and branch, alive with heaving wind, skittering squirrels, darting birds. So many provinces, all in seething motion, and so many strangers, all nimble and busy.

Twenty minutes later, though, surprising news from upstairs: the mother was back, and feeding her youngster. We watched the busy bowl through a second-floor window. The baby looked almost vibrant, lifting itself toward the mother’s offerings.

Then night came, and the mother went away. Concerned about the temperature, my wife called our town’s animal control officials, who said to leave the bird outside; cool air would do no harm. Silene, on babysitting overdrive, had converted a shoebox into a bird-crib. But we set it aside, and instead battened the bowl, roofing it with cardboard for warmth, and to obscure its rustling resident from hawks.

That may have been a bad decision; who knows. In the morning the bird was still. I wondered if non-mammals like this doze particularly deeply (and coldly) and suggested that we check again once the sun warmed things up. But at mid-morning the bird was still still; a dim crumple, eyes closed with conviction.

I walked the bowl to a nearby wildlife preserve and, in a field of ferns, turned it over. The content was so light that on the way down it contacted the fern-field’s canopy and stopped there. At first this seemed fine, in fact good: the bird was aloft. But then I remembered the hawks, and jostled the ferns just enough.

An old poem, Ben Jonson’s “The Noble Nature,” reflects on the duration of life. When two friends died young — one in an epidemic — Jonson set quill to paper. Everyone wants to live “three hundred years,” he wrote, like an oak. But if not? His answer invokes a flower, though it means to apply to all fragile things, short-lived birds included:

A lily of a day

Is far fairer in May,

Although it fall and die that night —

It was the plant and flower of light.

In small proportions we just beauties see

And in short measures life may perfect be.

I love that poem, but as I walked home to face the children, I didn’t have the poet’s assurance about the situation. What to say about our sparrow of a day? I thought about how it might never have been born at all, and how its life was short but eventful.

Also, it had never experienced anything else; for all it knew, this is how it goes.

Considered that way, the sparrow’s story, while not perfect or just, did have a certain beauty: Hatched; inched too far and had a terrible fall; got cradled by giants to a purple nest; saw a teeming sky and called bravely into it; spent an evening with its mother, communing in pink light; fell asleep full and hopeful but in a growing chill.

David S. Clancy of Concord, Mass., is a part-time resident of Vermont. He is a lawyer in Massachusetts.