It's Just a Little Brown Bird

© 2005 copyright Raymond C. Evans

It’s just a little brown bird, I don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl but it has been coming to our back steps for at least six months. It’s just a tiny little thing about three inches long, tail and all. It is all brown, just a few speckles on its breast, short tail. I think it most likely is some kind of sparrow. Shows up for breakfast and dinner almost always and sometimes for lunch too.

We put a few crushed peanuts out on the steps for its breakfast in the morning and then a few more for dinner in the evening. Sometimes it comes around in the morning while it’s still quite dark and in the late evening after most of the evening light is gone.

This is what I’ve been calling a “ground bird” for lack of a better description. When it flies and navigates over land and through the shrubs, seldom does it ever get over two feet from the ground. Perhaps it has Acrophobia like a lot of humans, (fear of heights) but that would be a poor excuse, the bird has wings. This is unlike a human who is fastened tightly to the ground by gravity. I personally am not afraid of heights unless it gets up over six feet, after that I hang on with both hands.

Most birds are like our airplanes, they want to reach for altitude as fast as possible. Not this bird, it just seems to like to taxi around on the runway. Perhaps the tower has never given it permission to really fly. The bird doesn’t seem to have Achluophobia, (fear of the dark) like the squirrels. We don’t see them at all until it’s very light in the morning and they disappear long before dark.

It does very little good to put peanuts out for this little bird in the middle of the day, the squirrels always get them before the bird can. I guess this is reason for the old adage, “the early bird gets the peanut”. Larrybelle, the mama squirrel, really doesn’t seem to care that much about peanuts, she would rather have pecans. Her kids make short work of the peanuts though.

We enjoy our little brown bird; really don’t much care whether it’s a girl or a boy, or even what kind of bird it may be. We just hope it keeps coming back morning and evening like it does now. We enjoy its innocence and its faithfulness in coming to breakfast with us and then its return for dinner in the evening.