There’s a bird on the back porch. More specifically, there is a female red finch with a nest on the back porch. She made it out of jasmine clematis that Mom planted around 10 years ago. The flowers smell divine in the summer, but the vine can quickly take over if you’re not careful. The bees love it too.
The finch’s home is nestled behind the porch light, between the wall and the glass of the light. On the other side is the downspout, and a few feet away is a large lilac tree at least 40 years old. It’s not a bad spot for a home, in my opinion. That said, the bird and I are struggling to find harmony. It’s dark when I come home and most of the natural world is sleeping — including Mrs. Finch. I approach quietly, keeping an eye on the area of the nest because I know two things will happen. First, I am going to startle the finch. Second, the finch is going to startle me by being startled.
Last night, she watched me approach from the edge of the nest. “Don’t freak out. If you don’t freak out, I won’t freak out, and everyone will be fine,” I told her quietly. She didn’t listen. She freaked out and flapped towards me; I freaked out and dropped my keys while apologizing to a bird.
Thinking about it, I have that conversation a lot with wild animals — big and small. Sometimes, I’ll even throw a please in there. “Please don’t freak out. Because if you freak out, I am going to freak out, and it will end badly for all parties.”
When the bird isn’t making a home, the back porch at night usually has a copious amount of spiders. I’m not really afraid of spiders, but I generally don’t like them in my vicinity. I avoid killing them if I can because they are helpful to the ecosystem. I repeat the same conversation with them that I have with the bird. They usually listen. Unlike the bird.
When I was a kid, my mom’s dad, Paps, put up nets around all the cherry trees in the front yard to keep the birds from eating the cherries. I was playing outside and came across a bird tangled up in one, flailing about wildly. I pulled an old white table over to the tree so I could reach it and, as carefully as I could, untangled the bird. It was a sparrow. Mom and Mams, mom’s mom, often used to say to each other while watching the birds, “God loves his little sparrows, doesn’t he?” I found Paps sitting in his chair under the tree and yelled at him about the nets and how the bird could have died. I told him they were just hungry. He took the nets down and never put them back up. But that didn’t stop him from sitting outside with a BB gun. (I don’t think he ever shot any, but the sound was enough to scare them off.) You can’t win them all.
Around the same time, I found a baby bird on the ground under the lilac tree. We couldn’t find a nest, so Paps helped me take care of it. It stayed in a cage in the backroom on top of the washer for a good while. He taught me how to feed it and how to handle it. I remember coming over after school one day to find the bird gone. Paps said it was ready to be released, but part of me wonders if the bird didn’t die, and he was just sparing my hopeful heart.
Last year, around Easter, someone visiting tore down the finch nest and smashed the eggs.
I don’t think I’ll ever understand the cruelty of man. There’s a poem by Rudy Francisco called “Mercy.” In it, he writes about a woman asking the speaker to kill a spider. The speaker says instead, they find the most peaceful weapons they can — a cup and a napkin. The spider is caught and placed outside. He writes, “If I am ever caught in the wrong place/ at the wrong time, just being alive/ and not bothering anyone,/ I hope I am greeted/ with the same kind of mercy.” Althea Davis wrote a poem called “Kinder than man.” She writes about deer hit by cars, moths to porch lights, and mice in traps. The last stanza reads, “If I am ever killed/ for simply living/ let death be kinder/ than man.”
I’ve noticed that we humans tend to kill things just because we can. Because they’re a nuisance, because they’re scary, because we don’t like them, because we’re afraid, because we want to tell the world we killed a bear. Maybe we do it because it’s easy. The life isn’t human, so it doesn’t matter. I’m not sure I have it in me to live that way. After all, I get sad when I see roadkill.
Nature can already be so cruel; why would I want to be?
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