Photo by Carlos Quintero on Unsplash
By Geoff Carter
“We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.”
–William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act V, Scene ii
I was sitting in my kitchen the other day, doing some writing and looking out our picture window at the backyard occasionally. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon. The peonies were just starting to bloom, and the backyard birds were busy building their nests. My eye was caught by a crow landing on the telephone line running across our yard next to our grove of arbor vitae where a host of sparrows had been nesting since the early spring. The crow suddenly reached into the bushes, poked around a bit, and then pulled out a newly hatched fledgling. I watched in horror as the tiny pink creature wriggled in the crow’s iron grip. The predator sat impassively on the wire, unmoving, until it finally flew off with the live fledgling still clutched in its beak.
Part of me was horrified. I wanted to rush out to intervene but realized immediately that I would be too late to save the little bird. Even if I scared off the crow, it would simply take the fledgling with it. It was out of my hands.
Another part of me was fatalistic about it all because I know this sort of thing happens all the time. We’d run across bodies of fledglings in our own backyard before this. Crows, jays, snakes, cats, and raccoons are just a few of the predators that raid nests and even invade birdhouses. After all, predation is part of the natural order. And, as anyone who watches nature shows will tell you, it’s usually the very young or very old that get picked off first. It happens.
After the crow had flown off, a number of sparrows gathered on that same telephone line. One female kept flying in and out of the same gap in the hedge where the crow had taken the fledgling. I wondered whether it was the mother checking on her other offspring or perhaps tenaciously checking back to see if her child had been miraculously restored. Since that time, there have always been at least two or three sparrows sitting on that telephone line, perhaps standing guard. Or I’m probably guilty of anthropomorphizing these creatures.
A robin built her nest on top of a mounted heater near the ceiling of our front porch this spring. It stood maybe fifteen feet from our front door, and we had a good view of it from our front windows. We watched the mother robin sitting, and then we’d catch an occasional glimpse of a baby’s head poking over the edge of the nest. In an incredibly short time, not much more than a couple of weeks, the fledglings had grown so large they were literally overflowing out of the nest and then—out of necessity—began to leave. I saw the last one standing tentatively on the edge. She flapped her wings, descended, bounced off the railing, and landed in the bushes. I’ve seen them around the neighborhood since; they’re still growing like crazy. Having watched these robin fledglings grow into teenagers made seeing the death of the sparrow that much more depressing.
The death of that baby sparrow stayed with me. As I was doing errands the next day, I saw a dead deer at the side of the road. While on a walk, I saw a curled-up body of a dead rabbit just off the path. I felt a pang of regret for the wriggling worms I accidentally sliced in half while gardening, or even the ants I accidentally trample every day. The sheer volume of life—and death—in our existence boggles the mind, and a lot of it is part of the natural cycle. Some creatures need to kill to live. That’s the way things are. Some of it is accidental or incidental but we are surrounded.
While crows, wolves, and foxes kill to survive, it seems an inescapable part of human nature to kill, or to be cruel, just for the hell of it. Kids fry ants with magnifying glasses or pull the wings off flies; “hunters” kill for sport; and our vehicles eradicate untold numbers of nearly every species known to man, everything from squirrels to raccoons to deer to bears.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as Horatio is trying to dissuade him from dueling with Laertes, Hamlet says, “We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” (Hamlet, Act V, Scene ii) which is taken to mean that a divine power rules our fates and that there is nothing anyone can do to know it or to prevent it and that the smallest occurrences, even the death of a sparrow, are part of that plan.
We like to think that humans are masters of their own fate, that we can control ourselves and our environment, but this is at least partly an illusion. Part of us is ruled by biology. We need to eat and, not like our friend the crow, we kill to do it. It’s unavoidable. Even vegetarians or vegans, for all their compassion, must kill plants to survive—and even though they’re not cute or cuddly, plants are living organisms. The houses we live in are built from the wood of thousands of trees. We can shrug and say, “So what?” Trees aren’t people. No, they’re not, but there is growing evidence that they are sentient beings that can communicate with each other, and yet we destroy them for little or no reason. They might obstruct our view or shed too many leaves or block our landscaping plans. The human animal is ruled by biology, but cruelty and thoughtlessness also seem to be an inherent part of our make-up, the part of Hamlet’s providence from which we can never escape.
We might fool ourselves into thinking we are compassionate and merciful beings who might rush to help save a baby bird or rescue an injured animal, but we do this only as it suits us—typically when we are blinded by puppy eyes or cute otter babies or something else that appeals to our peculiar human tastes, but in the end, we are killers. And we are cruel. I don’t believe any other living creature gets the same perverse thrill for killing or torturing other living things—even our own kind—as we do.
It can be argued that we are also merciful, compassionate, and loving, and we are—when it suits us. We’ll watch little birds in the nest and talk about how adorable they are, but when we push comes to shove and we need to move that nest or take out Mama Robin, we’ll do it. It’s in our genes. It’s our fate. We can see it in the fall of a sparrow.