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On a late afternoon as September drifted toward October, Lee Trott and I came out of the Food Lion in the Town Center Mall in Warrenton. The mall hummed with activity as people went about their business. I was reminded of the organized chaos I had observed on a busy ant hill.
Lee sa*v the dead bird on the pavement first. She stopped, pointed, and asked “House sparrow?” I started to agree and move on. After all, House Sparrows and Starlings — and pigeons — are the birds I usually see in a shopping mall. I looked again and noted the delicate size of the limp pile of grayish brown feathers. This was no House Sparrow. In my hand the bird, under five inches long, seemed weightless. There was no smell; death had been recent. It was surely one of the native sparrows. “Little brown jobs,” bird watchers call them. They are confusing, elusive and difficult to identify. The bird in my hand was no longer elusive; death had seen to that.
The fine streaking on the upper breast with a background of a delicate buff stirred a memory, as did the gray on the sides of the bird’s head. I had seen this bird before and knew its name.
I looked up at Lee and said, “Why, it’s a Lincoln Sparrow!” This sparrow is rare; I had only limited experience with it but knew it from years of pouring over paintings and photographs of birds in books and one exciting encounter.
Had there been heavy cloud cover the night before? I couldn’t remember, neither could Lee. When the night sky is obscured in September, birds fly below the clouds at an altitude much lower than their usual 7,000 feet. Migrating birds orient themselves by constellations of the night sky. Had the little sparrow confused the bright lights of the mall with the stars, and flown toward one to its death? Being so close to bright lights on earth during migration has confused birds before. They become disoriented and fly toward the lights as if to an unexpected sun and collide at high speeds resulting in broken necks and death.
Before lights were regulat
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