Birds as Individuals

When you go on a walk you may see a Song Sparrow sitting in a bush, and then a little further up the trail, you’ll see another one in a field of tall grass on your right, and still another in the blackberries on your left. You might think all these birds are pretty much the same, but they may not be the same. One of those Song Sparrows may be seven years old, and if there’s a Song Sparrow in your neighborhood that’s lived through seven seasons, it has an immense amount of wisdom. That would be a bird to watch.

I spent seven years going to the same Secret Spot, and over time I became familiar with certain individual birds that I saw year after year. I began to recognize that some of those birds knew things that no other bird in the forest knew. So birds are very different from individual to individual, in terms of awareness of the world. You especially see this emphasized among the begging juvenile sparrows, which are killed frequently, versus the sparrow of seven seasons who is the first to notice the hawk or the weasel.