I was watching the Cubs game when I heard a BONK. Should’ve been a bat connecting with a pitch. But it wasn’t. (In all fairness to the Cubs, they do occasionally hit the ball. But, again, that wasn’t what I heard.)

From the next room my wife said “Aw, a bird bammed into the window. Come see.”

This has happened before. Our back windows face a pond. Sometimes birds see the reflection and fly into it. After hitting they either rebound and take off. Or get knocked cold and take off later.

But sometimes they don’t survive.

I downed the rest of my beer, left the Cubs to their own devices, and went outside to see what caused the BONK. It was a Phoebe, unmoving. I picked it up. “See anything?” my wife asked.

“A Phoebe.”

“A who?”

“Phoebe. A kind of bird.”

“Hmm. Don’t know that one.”

She’s not alone. Most people would call this little grayish bird a sparrow. But it was an Eastern Phoebe, and it was where you find Phoebes: near water. Eastern Phoebes are similar to other flycatchers, but unlike the difficult empidonax group, they have no wingbars.

And their tails wag. This is a good way to know a Phoebe. Look in the field guide; you’ll see.

There are other Phoebes, too. The Black Phoebe and Say’s Phoebe are found out west. Not sure how you pronounce “Say.” But I’m assuming it’s “Cey.” As in former Cubs third baseman Ron Cey, also known as “the penguin,” an entirely different bird that’s easier to identify.

Cey makes me think baseball again. And I gotta get back to the Cubbies. But first I took a good look at the Eastern Phoebe in my hand. It didn’t make it. No movement.

I’m in bright sun and take a moment to study the bird. I think about the unappreciated intricacy of its hard-wired design. The template for its color pattern. Its bill, built to catch bugs in flight. Its high forehead giving it an intelligent look.

Studying this Phoebe, close up, I had the thought: this is a really complicated piece of work. Eyes with moist movable lids, feet engineered to hinge and lock. For something so small, it was a helluva machine.

And it had been running fine. But now it was out of the game. Whoa, a heavy thought. Where’d that come from? I needed another beer. I set the bird down under a bush and went in. The complexities of biological clockwork and the irrational inevitability of death are not subjects I wanted thrown at me.

The Cubs were looking good in their blue uniforms, and Wrigley’s green vines were looking good, too. I wanted to get back to the mindless comfort of baseball and beer. And I sorta did. The Cubs were still in the game. But, c’mon, I had no illusions about where they’d wind up.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 28th, 2010 at 6:26 pm and is filed under "Daily Sightings" A Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.