Wings don’t always help fly

Amrinder Bajaj

NEVER again will I use the phrase ‘free as a bird’. Over the past year, I saw enough to learn that they too paid the price of living as humans do. They were not free to do as they wish but were as bound to the vagaries of life and the inevitability of death as we are. 

A pair of pigeons graced me with their presence as illegal occupants of the ledge outside my first floor window. Unlike the near-extinct sparrow, they won my admiration for adapting to the modern world. I watched them court, mate, nest and lay eggs. After diligent incubation under warm feathers, emerged two rather ugly bits of flesh loosely covered with skin. Within a few days they sprouted yellow down. Their clamouring increased with their strength and size; I liked being woken up by them at dawn.  

The chicks soon turned into fledging, ready to fly the nest. It was then that the first major obstacle became evident. How could a first flight span the height of two floors? If they had nested on a tree, the fledglings would have flown from branch to branch till they became adept at flying longer distances. The inevitable happened. The first one fell with a thud on my car roof while the second lay stunned on my driveway where a cat made a quick meal of it! 

Soon after, there was another pair of hatchlings in the nest. A crow got a whiff of a delicious meal and ate them up in their very home! Having found a veritable storehouse of protein, it took to eating the eggs. Just once a fledgling grew almost as big as an adult but could not muster the courage to take such a dangerous first flight. To my surprise, the parents started a new family right in front of its eyes, neglecting it completely.

I had become so involved in their lives that it began to interfere with mine. I forced myself to resign to the fact that cats too had hunger to satiate and crows too had families to feed. 

I left it at that, till a new development shocked me. Another male fancied this female and viciously fought with her partner. There was much flapping of wings and locking of beaks. Then, to my horror, the intruder pecked the two tender offspring to death! I had seen such things on Discovery channel, but they happened to cubs in a pride of lions when a new male took over, so the females could carry forward his genes. But pigeons! It was more than I could bear. I had had enough. 

With tears streaming down my cheeks, I dumped metal wires on the ledge so the pair could never nest there again. I could not bear to see the tragedies they lived. True, the star-crossed pair taught me perseverance and a single-minded perusal of goals despite horrific setbacks. They also put my ‘overwhelming’ troubles in a perspective, but I had learnt my lesson well and needed no more practical classes. 

And wings, wings I learnt were merely means of locomotion and did not necessarily spell freedom.