I wonder sometimes whether birds experience jealousy, as when I recently saw an American goldfinch looking dashing in its spring regalia, balancing on the lip of a backyard birdbath. Looking curiously across at him was a house sparrow, who appeared to be wearing an old burlap sack.
Surely the house sparrow knows something isn’t right. Something doesn’t add up. Here is this brown smudge of a bird, this dirty bird that could be mistaken for a dead leaf. And meanwhile, the American goldfinch with a spot price of more than $2,000 an ounce. This bird of such inherent nobility that it is born with a name already embedded with two things Americans love to see in our backyards: Americans and gold.
And the American goldfinch, though beautiful, is by no means even the most beautiful of birds. Lord, no. There are mountain bluebirds and Mandarin ducks, birds of paradise and the painted bunting, for god’s sake. And then there is the house sparrow. And the ignobly titled brown-headed cowbird, which looks like a turd. And there is the gray catbird, also little more than a turd bird.
For every astonishing display of mother nature there is the bird conceived on the day mother nature just could not be bothered. Her paints spilled, ran together and mixed among themselves, pooling at the edge of her easel to drip, drip into a brown dollop that flies away before she can say, “wait, I didn’t mean for you…”
If I were the house sparrow, I would sidle up next to the goldfinch at the birdbath and push his head under the water until he began to float.
It’s too late, though. The sparrow has flown into the world and cannot but come across such shocking comparisons of color so as to be led to the inevitable question, “Why could not even a brush stroke have been spared for me?”
And then onto the scene waddles the mourning dove, this frumpy character who seems to not have a clue as to where she is going, but plods along anyway in her old gray overcoat. And when she speaks she whispers an answer.
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