`Rude Canticles'

Normally the blinds on the window above my desk at home are closed. The alcove where I work is lined with shelves and I don’t want sunlight bleaching the books. Occasionally I open or raise the blinds and look into a densely leafed shrub favored by hummingbirds late in the summer. The window faces west and the effect on a sunny day, late in the afternoon, leaves fluttering, dappled with sunlight, is a welcome entertainment, especially when house sparrows perch in the shrub. I told my kids the window is “nature’s television,” but they didn’t buy it.

To say house sparrows – Passer domesticus (the first scientific name for a bird I learned) – “perch” is misleading. They are never still, which accounts, in part, for their biological success. Old World birds, they are native to Northern Europe and Asia. They arrived in North America in 1852, fittingly, on the steamship Europa. According to Ted R. Anderson in Biology of the Ubiquitous House Sparrow (Oxford University Press, 2006), they now inhabit every continent but Antarctica. Anderson notes their arrival in Australia in 1863 (again, purposely introduced by humans) and South America in 1872 or 1873. They are the most common bird, except possibly for chickens, on the planet. Sparrows vibrate. They remain in constant motion, as individuals and as a species.

Moving slowly, leaning across my desk, I can put my face against the glass and stand eye-to-eye with the birds. Up close, they appear twitchy and anxious, ruled by a tyrannical metabolism, and resemble addicts in withdrawal. Their eyes are forever swiveling and refocusing. Anthony Hecht writes in “House Sparrows,” a poem rooted in close observation:

“They are given to nervous flight, the troubled sleep
Of those who remember terrible events,
The wide-eyed, anxious haste of the exiled.”

Hecht likens their seeming frailty – in fact, they are tough customers – to the skeletal survivors of civil war and genocide. Of course, survival implies strength of some sort, and dumb luck. Their energy is part of their adaptability. Hecht again:

“Yet here they are, these chipper stratoliners,
Unsullen, unresentful, full of the grace
Of cheerfulness, who seem to greet all comers
With the wild confidence of Forty-Niners,
And, to the lively honor of their race,
Rude canticles of `Summers, Summers, Summers.’”

Cheerfulness and “wild confidence” are admirable qualities in any species, man or bird. For Hecht, house sparrows are more than survivors, which implies mere continuity of existence. Rather, they exult in their being. Life’s a party, and they celebrate in their birdy fashion. Here, after more than 400 pages of detailed avian biology, are the final lines of Anderson’s text:

“As I watch live television news from Baghdad, Gaza, Jerusalem, or Kosovo and hear sparrows chirping in the background, I sometimes wonder what opinion, if any, the house sparrow has about the havoc wreaked by its human host.”