I Shot the Sparrow

The time, as I now recall some 43 years after the fact, was the spring or summer of 1964, the year I graduated from high school. The place was a farmyard on the outskirts of Galien, a small, rural village located in extreme southwestern Michigan.

I had pulled into the driveway of my girlfriend’s parent’s house early one evening to pick her up for a date. I was immediately greeted by one of her younger brothers who was in the front yard plunking away with a BB gun at the omnipresent sparrows (Passer domesticus) and starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) that are the hallmark of any farmstead. Knowing of my love for birds, he challenged me to shoot one.

At that point, my adolescent male hormones must have kicked in. To put what happened next into context, you have to understand that I had not been brought up in a family of hunters, so the thought of killing things was rather foreign to me. Heretofore, my experience with “hunting” had been limited to shooting at the ground squirrels (we called them “gophers”) (Spermophilus tridecemlineatus) that burrowed beneath the tombstones in the local cemetery, an activity engaged in by several of the neighborhood boys.

Well, I grabbed that BB gun and said something like “Sure, I can shoot that bird,” as I pointed the barrel at a nearby sparrow perched on an overhead wire. Aiming in the general direction of the bird, but not really knowing how to sight down the barrel and knowing full well that I would soon embarass myself with a wildly inaccurate shot, I pulled the trigger. To my utter shock and amazement, that sparrow fell from its perch and plummeted straight to the ground—dead. I recollect feeling shock, sadness, and remorse at this senseless deed, even if it was only a sparrow.

Needless to say, the brother was astounded at my incredible display of marksmanship. I think I went up a couple of notches in his eyes. My girlfriend, on the other hand, was chagrined that her kind, gentle, bird-loving boyfriend would be so cruel as to shoot an innocent bird. It took more than a bit of coaxing from me to convince her that I really never intended to kill that sparrow, that it was merely a lucky shot—lucky for me, but not so lucky for the poor bird.