Science fiction and fantasy plays a lot of "what if" games. What if a certain technology was never invented, what if it was invented 500 years earlier? What if someone turned left instead of right, or someone didn't die when they did?
I found a young bird, yesterday, in my driveway. So new to the world it did not know to be scared, it did not flinch at the honk (light honk) of the car horn. I had to chase it off the driveway into the bushes so I could leave.
Today that bird was by my backdoor. It let me walk right up to it. It had its mouth open a bit. Hungry, perhaps? We thought it was ill (maybe it was), but a bird rescue person told us that newly fledged birds did not know how to fly. We left, confident that the parents would return to feed their nearly-adult fledgling, and in a day or two it would be soaring through the sky.
I came home today. An hour later, while doing some yard work, I found the young bird lying dead in the grass. There were no teeth marks. No blood. I can only guess that it died while trying to fly.
Then an awful thought occurs to me. What if it had been learning to fly and made it into a tree? What if my pulling into the driveway scared it, and it leapt, unprepared, from its tree branch, and being too new to flying, fell to its death?
Young birds die all the time — from predators, from illness, from accidents. Odd how one bird, encountered twice, could come to mean so much. I don't know if I scared it. It may have simply been an accident, simply one of many young birds that never quite make it into the air. But I can't get the idea out of my head of "What if I scared it? What if I had returned home at a different time?"
I buried it under the lilac bushes near where I first saw it.
What if I'm crying over a different bird?
Baby bird season is hard. They're so fragile, and I, at least, never know whether to leave them to their parents or try to intervene. But I am sure you had nothing to do with it leaving the nest. Sometimes they just do that.
Posted by: Erica | June 18, 2004 at 11:28 AM