As I drove down the winding rural two lane that leads to my church Sunday morning, all around me the fields and woodland were encased in a deep hard layer of ice, a solid mass of frozen slush that had frozen and refrozen into a surface fully capable of holding the weight of a large adult human being.
The morning was bitterly cold, with temperatures in the low teens and a strong biting wind that tugged and buffeted our old van. A fit day for neither man nor beast, as they used to say.
I was reflecting on news of a dear friend's recent tragic loss when there was a sudden flutter of wings. A sparrow rose abruptly from the edge of the road, flew for a moment in front of the hood of the van, and then darted downwards. There was a small thump, which I took to mean it had flown directly into my front bumper.
A pointless death, I mused, with some lament. It didn't need to die, and I wished I'd not killed it. All it needed to do was flit upwards, or to the right, and it would still be living the life of a sparrow.
I went back to driving and meditating on loss, and was startled when just two minutes later, a second sparrow did the same thing. It rose up from the edge of the road, and in doing so, flew directly into the windshield of the van. There was another small thump, and a brief vision of a tiny tumbling feathered wreck.
"What the..." I muttered to myself, a little unsettled. Two bird kills in two minutes? I'd listened to a 1953 radio play of Daphne Du Maurier's The Birds with Mom that prior week (produced 10 years before the Hitchcock adaptation). This was starting to feel a bit familiar, and mirrored the sorrowful character of my thoughts.
I slowed down, and started paying more attention.
What I saw was that here and there along the roadside, sparrows were gathered in groups of a half dozen or so, pecking about in the exposed grass and startling upwards whenever a vehicle grew near. I realized that the plowed roads were the only place where grass was exposed, and thus the only place where birds could forage. The deep hard snow everywhere else would be impermeable to little claws and beaks, and after a week, the sparrows were undoubtedly hungry.
And cold. And quick to take flight, even if that meant flight into the path of fast-moving metal objects. Nature and the natural world destroy so quickly, and without mercy.
The words from a Cohen Brothers classic...themselves an homage to another, older film...rose in my thoughts.
"It's a hard world for little things."
It most certainly is.
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