The little bird

Tam-Tri Le, Phenikaa University (Hanoi, Vietnam)

January 1, 2023

At the edge of the village lived a normal family. The parents were always busy working to put food on the table. Their eldest son was about nine years old. Except for having to visit the local teacher every once in a while, the boy was free to play around anywhere.

One day he and his friends went out with self-made rubber slingshots to hunt for birds. They wandered all over the village and finally found a little sparrow. The boy took a shot. The bird fell from the tree branch. Frantically flapping its wings on the ground but badly injured, it could not escape.
The boy held the little bird in his hand. He could feel the creature’s warm body and the uncontrollable shivers out of fear. For a fleeting moment, he felt like a merciful God, looking down on a helpless, fragile being begging for its life.

The boy brought the little bird home and took care of its wound. After a month, the sparrow recovered and hopped around in its small cage energetically. The boy’s sisters told him to release the bird, but he did not want to do that.


Figure: A sparrow (AI-generated using Stable Diffusion, CreativeML Open RAIL-M)

It was then the end of winter, and the sky was dim and cloudy. The bird stood still in its cage. The boy sat and observed the creature for a long while. Apparently, it was sad, and the boy thought he started to understand its feeling. He opened the cage and let the bird fly away. Left alone behind, the boy was filled with sadness.

The next day, the boy put a grasshopper into the opened empty cage and waited for a miracle.

To his surprise, that sparrow did come back to visit its old “home”, ate the grasshopper, and again flew away into the dark winter sky.

Strange thoughts rushed through the boy’s mind. Was the bird his friend or his toy? In its eyes, did it see him as an angelic guardian or a terrifying monster? Why did it come back after getting its freedom? After all, what did this little bird really mean to him?

¤

If birds could live the lives of humans, I am sure they would tell strange stories about many ridiculous characters in their society [1]. Unfortunately, we can only look at nature and our own species through human eyes, with all the (vaguely instinctual) selfishness, (cognitively advanced) schemes, and (weirdly reasonable) excuses [2]. Our minds are information-processing systems that, to some degree, influence smaller systems and, to some degree, are under the influence of bigger ones [3]. Are we an illusion imprisoned in the cage of our own thoughts, or are we something much more than that?

*Acknowledgment: I thank my father, Ngoc-Dong Le, for sharing his memories of the natural world in the old days.

References

[1] Vuong QH. (2022). The Kingfisher Story Collection. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BG2NNHY6

[2] Nguyen MH, Jones TE. (2022). Building eco-surplus culture among urban residents as a novel strategy to improve finance for conservation in protected areas. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 9, 426.

[3] Nguyen MH, Le TT. (2022). Ecomindsponge theory: positioning humans in the ecosphere. https://mindsponge.info/posts/84