Two of a feather

Some days ago I sat in my kitchen, grading some papers, when I heard a soft thud in the living room. It was tiny but, for some reason, I got up to investigate, and saw a few downy feathers, small and gray, sticking against my balcony door, on the outside of its glass pane. And then, almost completely buried in the soft snow, a small, trembling, grey and black and white bird.

I opened the door and picked it up in the cup of my hands. Later I looked the species up online and its name turned out to be 'nuthatch', a typical bird of this area. Strange how I see these little creatures around every day, and I don't think to find out how they are called until I'm holding one of them.

At first it was blinking disorientedly and not moving much, but after a few minutes it began to look around and flutter about some. I opened the kitchen window, and I had barely put my hands out when it jumped to the right, still not fully in control of its body. It landed on one of the house's wooden planks and grabbed onto it, perhaps a meter away from me. Perched in there it looked at me for a few moments more, in what I fancied was fear, swiveling its head about in that curious robot-like way birds have. Then it took off, flying up and over the roof, toward the fjord.

In contrast, yesterday afternoon Christoffer knocked on my door, and asked if my "cat could put a bird out of its misery". He was carrying (what I later found out to be) a yellow breasted tit in his hands, with a story similar to my nuthatch's: Chris had seen it fly into the window of one of the student residences and picked it off the floor, still alive and slightly twitching, but not reacting otherwise.

Thinking again of the long minutes it took the nuthatch to recover, I rejected the idea of feeding the tit to Mooshee, and carried it inside, to the warmth of my kitchen. The nuthatch would definitely have died if it had stayed buried in the snow, I thought, so maybe temperature was an important factor for such small bodies.

I stood for about thirty seconds by my kitchen window, again, but before I even had a chance to open it, the bird, which had been almost completely inert in my hands, shuddered and fluttered for an instant, opening its eyes and moving its head a little, enough to make me think that it was recovering. But then it went completely limp and, though I waited for a few more minutes, eventually I was convinced that the shudder had been death, arriving.

Never had anything died in my hands, before, other than an occasional ant or other bug, that died at them.

I opened the window anyways, and threw the yellow tit up high, into the gray sky. It flew in an arc and landed on the hill behind my house, among the dry brush of winter.

Another soft thud.

Reporte atrasado

Hace bastante tiempo que no escribo...

Quería reportar, de todos modos, un par de datos más que importantes:

Consuelo tendrá una hermana, según resulta de una ecografía del viernes 11 de marzo... El médico no debería haberse arriesgado a cantar un sexo tan pronto, pero aparentemente lo vio. En fin, que mi nueva sobrina se llamará Federica.

Igualmente, los mellizos de C. y L. ya tienen nombre, desde el miércoles 16 de marzo por la mañana. Son nena y nene, y se llamarán Laia y Piero.

Tres entes nuevos listos para tratar de experimentar la aventura de la conciencia.