One recent morning, I noticed two sparrows on the ground. I first saw them because my dog saw them. He got close and they fluttered but did not fly away. Because there were two, I wondered whether some kind of bird blight was going around crippling birds from the inside out (now where could I have internalized that idea?). But as I watched them, I realized that they were fledglings. That this was likely their first unsuccessful attempt from the nest.
Once I put the dog inside, their mother flew down to encourage them. She gave them bits of food and modeled what flying up to the top of the wall looked like. But the little sparrows couldn’t do it. They’d get about a fourth of the way up the wall and grab onto the faint ledge between cinder blocks and hop a little more before tumbling to the ground—all rocks and fallen yellow Palo Verde blossoms.
I worried for them. And I worried that seeing them as I did that morning was the universe offering me a metaphor—possibly for all my own dogged ineptitude.
But Helen MacDonald, in her latest book Vesper Flights, reminds us that “Animals don’t exist in order to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves.”
I read MacDonald’s first book, H is for Hawk, years ago—long before I took up my current enthusiasm for bird watching. It is a memoir about how she raised a goshawk amid the grief of her father’s death and it was beautiful.
Vesper Flights is even more so. It’s a series of essays about birds and grief and life and our complex relationship to nature. MacDonald has become one of my favorite naturalist writers (possibly tied with Robert Macfarlane) and she writes without any kind of smugness or certainly or ever falling into the temptation of environmental lecturing. Her essays are genuinely curious and self-reflective and often stunning.
Even if you don’t walk the neighborhood with binoculars in hand, if you feel even the least kinship with the natural world, I can’t recommend this book enough!
Cheers,
Lacy
P.S. But if you do walk the neighborhood with binoculars in hand, I’m lately loving the Merlin Bird ID app from the Cornel Ornithology Lab. It helps you identify and track your birds and your input, in turn, helps the lab collect data. Nerd-level win-win!
P.P.S. Later that morning, the fledglings were gone. It was obviously the universe wanting me to know that dogged ineptitude sometimes pays off.
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Loved this post so much, I just ordered Vesper Flights. ❤️