About Birds And Stuff--Part 3
My beloved and I were, as is our custom, sitting on the patio at St. Arbuck's--she waging her daily war against the sudoku puzzle (and usually winning) and I reading about the continual collapse of the housing market and other good news.
Peering over the top edge of the paper I spied a sparrow--young by the looks of him--standing a foot or so away from a piece of bagel the size of my fist!
He seemed too stunned to even move.
I could almost hear his thoughts: "Dude, I've found the mother lode!"
I mean that bagel represented enough food to last the rest of his life; a piece of pastry that was larger by far than his own compact little bird body.
As I lowered my paper and sipped my coffee, he looked behind him, over the top of the bagel; he looked over at me as if to say, "Can you believe this?"
Then reality seemed to set in and he glanced upward toward the Mesquite tree's canopy.
He looked at the bagel, then at the tree, then back to the bagel, back and forth, back and forth.
Finally he hopped a bit closer to the gigantic food source and kind of nudged it with his beak as if trying to gauge its weight.
He couldn't even budge it, so there was no way he was carrying it up into the tree.
I could almost hear him thinking, "This is just wrong on so many levels!"
Unbelievably, all this time he had been the only bird in sight.
A bit of fluttering motion from off to the left and a birdie buddy dropped into the scene, looked at his friend, the bagel, his friend.
They both hopped over and nudged the beastly bagel, which, even with their combined efforts wasn't going anywhere.
Finally the original sparrow pecked at the bagel dislodging a crumb, which he immediately consumed.
His buddy joined him and before long they were both pecking away and enjoying a feast.
At one point he kind of looked over at me as if to say, "You want some?"
And of course I replied, "No, dude, I'm good."
Within another minute there were a half-dozen sparrows surrounding the bagel all of whom were following the first sparrow's lead, including a mother who would peck off a crumb, chew it for a minute and drop it into the waiting mouth of her very young baby bird.
It wasn't long before all those birds were kind of standing around looking at each other with bulging gullets saying, "I just can't eat another bite. You take it."
"Nah, man, if I have anymore I'm gonna' puke!"
The funny thing was, the bagel was hardly diminished at all from its original size.
Just then, the bully of the patio, a black bird, showed up to take over, only the sparrows moved willingly, slowly, aside saying, "Hey, knock yourself out big fella."
He looked at them hesitantly at first as if considering the possibility that it may be a trap, but within a few seconds he was pecking away at the beast, ultimately dislodging a portion that with his superior size and strength could be easily carried to the branches above.
Maybe I just need to get a life, but I found the whole episode amazingly poignant.
I mean it's highly likely that the bagel was more food than any of those sparrows had ever seen at one time. So much food that it couldn't even be stored. So what to do? Well, you break it down into smaller portions, eat it on the spot--you eat your fill. You enjoy every bite and worry about tomorrow when tomorrow comes, even going so far as to share the excess with a sworn enemy.
I looked at my wife and kind of shook my head.
She said, "What?"
"I love birds," I replied, returning my attention to the business section where I read about the dollar's continued slide against the Euro.
RG...out!
Comments
Great post.
It's so good to know I'm not the only one who creates thoughts for animals. You should have seen me in SF last week watching the sea lions.