Michael Champlin

Peace Garden. Interior Courtyard.

Is a sparrow who kills a hummingbird in cold blood and proceeds to eat him a cannibal? Is he something else?

I am getting ahead of myself.

Peace Garden. Interior Courtyard. Brooklyn.

The sun is shining and there is a woman with a clipboard. I do not know who she is, and I do not know why she is holding a clipboard; I assume she works at the hotel, because why else does a person have a clipboard? She comes outside in something of a rush. She seems alarmed, but calm. She tells me that the sparrow has just murdered another bird and spirited the body into the bushes where it now pecks the carcass.

I know this story already, because it happened, is still happening, mere feet from me. I watched the whole thing. I stood up aghast, removing my glasses to get a better look. “I thought it was a bumblebee” I’d said. There had been the living thing, buzzing about among the petals of the forsythia bushes, and then the Sparrow, a gliding swoop that plucked it from the sky and pinned it helpless to the ground. There was a struggle. There was a great deal of buzzing. There was a retreat to the bushes, and a metallic whacking sound as the sparrow grasped the poor thing in its beak and bashed it against the metal wall of the planter. And then there was…well whatever came after. I’d had enough of watching. After that, it was the woman with the clipboard.

Where had she come from?

How did she know?

What else had she seen?

Artwork via https://www.audubon.org/birds-of-america/chipping-sparrow