The Sad Sparrow

She scanned the ground from her perch beside the birdbox in Joe Ammons’ maple tree.

She darted to the corner of the yard, came back with a tiny insect in her beak, chewed it up and popped it into one of the three red, upraised mouths in the box.

Then she went back to her perch.

Everything was fine. The days were sunny, the insect-hunting was good, the perch was safe, the nest was well built.

She was proud of the nest, if sparrows can be said to be proud. At least, she was satisfied.

She was no mere straw-and-grass sparrow. Somewhere in the Diana Drive neighborhood of Joe Ammons, she had found a fine, long length of nylon thread.

With infinite skill and care, she had wound the nylon thread in her nest. It was like the frosting on the cake, or the single red cherry atop a sundae, or the bright chrome strip of an automobile.

The nylon thread was something shiny and something extra, and it distinguished her next from every sparrow nest in Sedgefield.

With the nest thus well built, she had taken turns with her mate sitting on the eggs, and when the three young sparrows had hatched, she spent hours in search of food.

She was so busy with the search, she didn’t notice when the thread began working itself loose. Or if she noticed, she decided the nest’s usefulness was almost over anyway. Soon, the young birds would be making their first awkward attempts to fly . . . .

She came back to her perch yesterday to find the nylon thread caught around the neck of one of her young. It had strangled him.

A piece of straw or grass would have snapped under the strain of the young bird’s struggle. The thread, the fine white thread that she had laced into her nest, only tightened.

She could not have been expected to understand that.

She fluttered about in the tree yesterday, flying down to the nest occasionally and then back to another limb.

Her mate stopped feeding the other two birds, and so did she.

Today, she is gone.

The birdbox is empty, except for the three dead birds and the long, fine thread that made her nest different.

Charles Kuralt's People (Kenilworth Media, copyright 2002)
ISBN 0-9679096-1-9 | Hard cover | 384 pages with photos | $25.95

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