Home is Where the Sparrow Builds her Nest

Cornwall, VT

Saturday July 9, 9:05 am

If one day I see a small bird and recognize it, a thin thread will form between me and the bird…Every time I see and recognize that bird the thread strengthens. Eventually, it will grow into a string, then a cord, and finally, a rope.

From What The Robin Knows by Jon Young (quoting a San Bushman)

A Chipping Sparrow pecks frayed threads from an old twine rope tied to our split-rail fence. I don’t remember what the rope was for, but I will not forget this bird—smaller than my palm, weighing barely half-an ounce—bobbing her ginger cap to and fro over the twine before carrying a beak-ful to a high cedar bow. There, she prepares her second nest of the breeding season. She is the sole architect. Having delegated the raising of the first brood to their father, she will do little else for the next four days but weave the weedy teacup nest that will cradle four blue eggs the size of my thumbnail until the chicks within them fledge.

A “usual suspect” in my yard each summer, the chipper is visually unremarkable. An “LBB”—little brown bird, like its sparrow cousins. In fact, before the Covid pandemic, I couldn’t tell you such a sparrow existed, much less call it by name. Back then, my fascination with charismatic, unusual birds eclipsed my interest in the usual suspects. I didn’t watch the rarities so much as chase them. The brighter their plumage, the farther their winter home, the more I pursued them.

On March 9, 2020, I hiked through the Cloud Forest Preserve in Monteverde, Costa Rica, in search of the highly threatened, ultra-charismatic Resplendent Quetzal. Pandemic panic hadn’t reached Costa Rica yet. Ensconced, along with my family, within those tropical mountains 4,000 miles away from home, I felt safe. How easy it had been, in the span of a plane ride, to forget home in my search for this rare bird.

Why not? Hadn’t I done it before?

I was three when my parents and I left Soviet Ukraine—fleeing oppression, poverty, antisemitism—for the safety of the USA. It was 1979; the Cold War raged between the east and west, compelling us to abandon the language and customs of our former home for fear of being lumped with “the enemy.” There was no hope of returning to Ukraine then, and clearly, no hope of returning now, besieged as my birthplace is.

I think this severing of ties with my first home, and the ensuing feelings of rootlessness, must be why I spent my twenties and thirties zigzagging the country, the world, in search of a place to put down roots. Ten years ago, even as we made Vermont our family home, I still couldn’t locate myself, feel my roots. The conviction that I belonged anywhere but here had taken hold of me on a cellular level.

When I hired Phillip, a friendly Tico biologist, to take me, my husband, and my two small children hiking up and down the mountains of the cloud forest at 6:30 am, I thought I was taking us on a search for the quetzal. Little did I know my search was for something much more personal.

Hefting a spotting scope and tripod on his shoulder, Phillip strode easily past strangler-ficus vines and climbing-fern fronds, stopping every so often to hear birdsong. “That’s a black-faced solitaire,” or “there’s a slate-throated redstart,” he’d say before locating the bird and offering us a peak through his spotting scope. In between bird-sightings he pointed out dozens of endemic species—from lichen to arachnid—matching each to the bird that uses them for food, cover, nesting material.

Three hours into the hike, I realized that the quetzal had barely crossed my mind. In fact, for most of the hike I’d hardly given the subject of “birds” a second thought. Instead of dissecting this forest into species and subspecies of bird, I suddenly found myself more curious about how the various microcosms Phillip pointed out, like puzzle pieces, coalesced to create the single organism that is the Monteverde Cloud Forest. Even more so, my awe of Phillip’s relationship with this place—How did he guess which palm bow would host the black-faced solitaire? How did he know which song belonged to which bird?—had overshadowed my hunger to hunt the elusive Quetzal.

At the end of our hike, just steps away from the trailhead, Phillip finally heard a quetzal. Spotting it with speed and stealth, and without flushing it, he lowered his tripod to give us a look. The radiant, ultra-rare bird in all his green and red iridescent glory skulked within the forest interior, pecking out a nesting cavity from a snag trunk. We oohed and aahed for an allotted time before making way for the tourists behind us.

I had done it, had checked the box next to “Resplendent Quetzal” on my life list, but it only left me feeling hungrier than before. I thought I had been searching for a bird, but I was really looking for what Phillip had—a bond with the bird, cultivated by a deep knowledge of one’s place, one’s home.

A rope.

I wouldn’t know the true gift of the Quetzal until after we returned to lockdown, when the only birds to observe were the ones in our own yard, here, in Cornwall. I learned to recognize the Robin by its song, to predict the place and time the Eastern Bluebird would dive from its wire into the grasslands below to forage, to find flocks of sparrows by their hop-scratches in the leaf litter. It appeared to me that—the less I pursued, the more I watched—the more my backyard neighbors accepted me as part of their landscape. We were strengthening the thread among us all, weaving it into string, then rope.

I didn’t have to pursue my trilling, chipping neighbor who—despite the risk to her brood—reveals, to me, her secret home.

I am in awe of her trust.

Even with so much at stake, she carries on in front of me. She knows me, knows we share a home.

I know my home the same way Phillip knows his—by the thickness of the invisible rope that ties me to the birds that share it.