Sparrows

There are three baby birds underneath your treehouse. I hear them before I see them, their cries only becoming audible as the wind drops. Gentle cheeps coming from the grass somewhere below me. I use each squeak like a blip on a radar, homing in on them. They’re tucked round the back, hidden out of view from the house, underneath the nest that has fallen on top of them.  

I crouch down and gently lift the mishmash of twigs and leaves away, revealing the three creatures below. They can’t be more than a few days old, with only a few feathers growing on the top of their heads. One of them - the biggest of the three - tries to stand up, straining under the weight of it’s skeletal body. It takes a few steps, but a gust of wind sends it crashing onto it’s back. 

I hear the scrape of the patio doors open behind me. “Go on then.” Your mum says as she lets Betty free. I scoop the birds into my hands and place them back in the nest at the sound of the spaniel snuffling in the grass, lifting the nest just in time as she catches the scent of the birds and comes running at me, barking. She jumps up on her hind legs, trying to use my abdomen as a launching bad to see the squeaking creatures. Your mum runs over and grabs Betty by the collar, pulling her away. 

“Where did you find them?” She asks, trying to hold the blood thirsty dog back. 

“Just here, under the treehouse. Wind must have knocked them down.”

“I wonder where their mum is?” I think back to this morning when, following the early wake up call of Betty whining by the bedroom door, she’d gone out for a wee and come back with a gift for me. The gift that was now in an old shopping bag in the wheelie bin out front. 

“I think Betty might have brought her back to me this morning.” 

“Poor things.” Your mum said, tutting. “What are they?” 

“I’m not sure. Sparrows, I think.”

“Jamie would know.” And it’s true, you would. I think back to all those mornings where I would let Betty out and find you, already sitting in your treehouse, binoculars out and ‘Britain’s Encyclopedia of Birds’ in your lap. It got to the point where I would grab a blanket before I opened the door for the dog, knowing that you more often than not would be sitting up there, shivering, but not seeming to notice. 

Your mum takes Betty back inside, locking the door behind her. The treehouse is about five or six metres off the ground - its a wonder that the nestlings survived the fall - and I haven’t a hope in hell of reaching that high. We don’t have a step ladder in the house. For a moment I consider throwing the nest like a frisbee. But realistically, I know there’s only going to be one way to get the birds back up.

I have to balance the nest on my shoulder, using the side of my cheek to try and hold it in place. The nestlings seem to jump back in fear as a wall of whiskers suddenly comes towards them. With the nest ‘secure’, I climb the ladder. 

My knees are well past their prime, years of sunday league football getting the better of them, and the rusty joints squeak with every rung I climb. At one point I feel the nest wobble, and then feel myself wobbling as I try to catch it, and only just recover before myself, the birds and the nest go toppling back to square one. But eventually I make it to the top. 

“Here you go fellas.” I whisper, placing the nest in the angle of one of the lower branches. I’d only cleared the branches around a metre from the base of the platform. The plan had been that, as you got older, we could clear more branches as we needed to - but it seemed pointless to strip them away unnecessarily. 

The tree we’d chosen for the treehouse was, obviously, the biggest one in the garden. A great oak that came up in a relatively thin trunk but then spread out into a mushroom cloud of branches, it seemed like the perfect one. It was tall enough and far enough room the house that you could feel a bit of freedom away from your mother and I, had a large enough canopy for plenty of things to live in, and was big enough to build a decent sized platform on. It was the sort of tree that, by not building a treehouse in it, you would be doing it a great disservice. 

The nestlings are still crying. They must be starving, probably won’t have eaten since this morning. What do sparrows eat?

Your book must be in the house somewhere. I climb back down the ladder and head back inside, passing your mum on the phone in the kitchen. Your boxes are all sitting outside your bedroom. I have no idea where to start - your mum packed these ones - so I just tear open the one on top and start rummaging through. 

It takes around five minutes, the opening of most of the boxes, and one giant mess before I find the book. 

“That was the RSPCA, they say - what are you doing?” Your mum stops when she sees me, surrounded by books, boxes overturned, cross legged in the middle of my mess.

“I couldn’t remember what sparrows eat.” I flick through the pages until I find the entry on house sparrows. 

“So you thought you’d feed them Jamie’s library?” 

“No, I was just checking in his bird book.” Sunflower seeds, apparently. I jump up and head towards the kitchen, leaving your mum in my wake. Most of the cupboards are bare now, but I know for a fact that your mum had them on her porridge for breakfast. 

“Honey, where are your sunflower seeds?” I ask as she comes back into the kitchen, dumbfounded. 

”Mike, we don’t have time for this today.” 

“No, no, it won’t take long.” I say, as I rip open one of the boxes on the floor. 

“Mike, stop, someone from the RSPCA is coming soon, and we really need to finish off this packing -”

“Yeah yeah, sure, I'll come help you in a bit.” I say as I find the little bag. I run back out to the garden, leaving a trail of sunflower seeds behind me, much to the delight of your mother. 

I didn’t know that birds had different calls for when they’re happy. But as I feed them one by one, I’m sure that I can hear the contentment in their chirps. They remind me of you in fact. I can almost imagine them dancing round the kitchen with a mars bar in hand, letting out little contented “mmms” with each bite that they take.

Your mum comes out to see me - I’m not sure how long its been. 

“The RSPCA are on their way.” I feed another seed to the littlest of the birds instead of responding. I can hear her footsteps on the rungs of the ladder but I don’t turn around to see her.. 

“Jamie would love this.” She says. Another seed for the little one. It needs to grow bigger. “You can’t keep blaming yourself, Mike.” She says. I give it another seed. It’s siblings are chirping at me. It needs to get bigger. It deserves to get bigger. “It wasn’t your fault.” You deserved to get bigger.

”I need to look after them. Jamie should have been here to look after them, and if she can’t be then I need to.”

“Mike, the people from the RSPCA can do it.”

“No, I need to do it.” 

“Mike…” 

”I need to do it.” 

I keep feeding them until the small bag was empty. I look through the kitchen window a few times and see your mum sitting with the lady from the RSPCA. Each time, they catcht my eye. Each time, I turn back to the birds. 

I hear the truck pull up outside, and your mum talking with the men from the moving company. I listen as they began piling the last of our furniture, the few bits and bobs that we hadn’t already moved to the new house, into the van. I listen as the door to the van slammed shut and they drove away. I hear the patio door open again.

“Mike, it’s time. The new owners will be here soon. We need to go.” I turn to face your mum. 

”What about the birds?” 

“The RSPCA will take them. I’ve been chatting with Jane all afternoon - she’s an expert with birds. She’ll know exactly what to do.” 

“No, I can’t. I need to take care of them.” 

“Mike.” Her voice got quieter. “Jamie’s gone. You can’t keep blaming yourself for what happened to her.” She’s right. I know she’s right.I sit down on the treehouse, collapsing against the trunk, the birds squawking above my head. Your mum climbs the rungs of the ladder and sits down next to me.

I hadn’t meant for it to happen. I was just standing chatting to one of the neighbours while you were playing in the front garden. Neither of us had seen you open the gate and run across the road, chasing after a bird that had flittered across the garden. Neither of us had seen the car coming down the street.

“I was supposed to be looking after her.”

Jane is very nice, and seems to know an awful lot about birds. She’ll take them into the sanctuary, she says,for a couple of weeks until they grow more of their feathers. Then they’ll try and release them into the wild. Your mum does a quick final check around the house as I pack the very last of our bits into our car - just the things that we will need in the new house this evening. It doesn’t take long, and soon the estate agent is here to collect the keys from us. 

Your mum says she’ll do the driving. I look back at the house as the sun is beginning to set, the summer glow radiating between the leaves of the oak tree. I take a last look at your treehouse, and the now empty nest sitting in the tree above it. 

“I hope they’ll be okay.” I whisper to your mum. She smiles at me. 

“They’ll do just fine.”