flashes of gold

wild heartbreak

Sparkle ✨ How she grew an entire tail in a fortnight, I’ll never know…

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

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As I write, I am being side-eyed by a baby Goldfinch. She’s not really a baby anymore, though she still chirps and wiggles like a baby when it’s time to be fed, a habit she’s slowly relinquishing. Not two weeks ago she was a ball of fluff, but now she looks more like a grown-up Goldfinch wearing a little fur jacket as her adult feathers make their way past her baby ones. One day, she will have a vibrant red face, framed by white and black markings which will accompany the flashes of ‘gold’ on her wings. I will not know her in that particular embodiment as she will be wild in time for her first moult, after which her final form will emerge.

The unfathomable privilege of caring for a wild being during their infancy, before they return to that entirely foreign place which we too once knew as home, continually stretches my perception of place and belonging. Sparkle, the Goldfinch, has been living with us in loco parentis for the last couple of weeks after being found out of the nest, on the side of a main road. For the first ten days, she needed to be fed every thirty minutes so, naturally, she has become quite familiar with my being. On a few tentative test flights, she has used my shoulder as a place to land and sit a while, affording me the opportunity to observe her extremely up close. The perfectly formed yet microscopic feathers around her eyes are some of the most beautiful things I have ever seen (and I’ve seen so many beautiful things).

When, of a morning, she stretches her wings, she looks like a tiny cathedral, the fractals and symmetry in her body nothing short of divine. With our difference in species, there is only so much I can teach her, and I find myself marvelling at how much instinctual wisdom she contains; how she knows to roll a seed around her tiny mouth in order to crack off its casing, and how to bathe in shallow water. Her singing, too, has developed from a simple two-note demand into a variety of multisyllabic, high and higher-pitched phrases (perhaps thanks in part to the many YouTube videos of European Goldfinches we’ve been watching together). Strangely, or perhaps not strangely at all, the Goldfinches who frequent our garden have started to appear daily, as though they are waiting for her—and soon enough their wait will be over, when Sparkle is handed lovingly back to her rightful realm; and I to mine.

I have recently come to see that I have a habit of disappearing. When I feel something is of great¹ importance, a thick fog appears and wraps itself around 340 degrees of me, leaving only a 20-degree window of hyper-focused attention. I become blind to what sits in the periphery—and to those in the periphery I am a soaring Bird; there, but entirely unreachable. This is, of course, an attempt at an apology, to any and all who are warranted one.

From within this small pocket of existence which Sparkle and I have been inhabiting, mirrors have appeared. At times, they reflect a woman quick to assume a posture of reverence and service in the face of wild perfection. Other times, they show a child breathless with terror that something is wrong, that this being she loves so much will die, and that it will somehow be her fault. I am unsure of how I might introduce these two to one another.

In this stage of her young life, Sparkle is changing daily. Yesterday she learned that she cannot fly while wet. Today she has learned how to make sharp, sudden turns on the wing. A most useful and impressive skill. Any moment now, she will come to realise that she no longer needs me to feed her, and that she now has every ability to provide for herself. And while I will so dearly miss the feeling of her gentle pecking at the freckles on the back of my hands (just in case they are in fact seeds), seeing her occupy the home to which she truly belongs will be a life-sustaining event.

And so, I am left to tend to this being while I simultaneously prepare for her imminent departure. A part of me wishes that I had not come to love her quite so deeply—though in truth I know that less love has never been the answer to anything. Some things are only available to us for a short amount of time, and yet we are asked to take the exquisite risk of daring to love them anyway—such as life.

Sparkle will leave me much changed; braver, certainly, heartbroken, undoubtedly, pondering whether bravery and heartbreak might be sisters, and nearer, perhaps, to the emergence of my own final form…

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Yours in aimless flight…

1. If you’re listening to the audio, that was Sparkle’s chirp. Pretty sure she knew she was being referenced.