✷ Birds in the airport
Recently I was traveling through an airport and the sound of birds chirping caught my attention. I had gotten to the airport early, so I decided to spare some time to find the source of the noise, and realized that some sparrows had flown into the airport.
This particular airport has a partition between the area where anyone can walk in and the lower level, which is past security --- for security reasons, there is a wall dividing the levels, with a metal grate extending all the way to the ceiling such that nothing can pass through the levels. It is baffling, therefore, to see birds swooping down from the airport’s tall ceilings --- if they got in through the automatic doors, how could they have gotten through this area without going past security the way humans do?
I stood and watched the birds for a minute, and watched them perch at the bottom of the metal grate, then come out the other side. I realized that the space between the wall and metal grate has a tunnel, parallel to the wall, just a few inches high. It’s at the wrong height and angle for a human to notice it, but to a sparrow, it is just the right size to pass through.
It’s easy to only look at the world from your own perspective, but when we do that we miss so much about what else there is in the world. Little passages that curve at the wrong angle for any useful human purpose are exactly what a sparrow pays attention to, since they are exactly what the sparrow needs.