Today I Was A Bird by Aimee Seiff Christian

This morning I was a bird. My sparrow whined for me like I was her mama. House sparrows are cavity nesters, and this one is no exception. She snuggled in my palm and fell back asleep. We are one and the same, this bird whose nest fell under a bulldozer. She lost her mother like I did when I was born. I gave this sparrow a home; a better home than the one I was given when I was taken from my mother. 

My childhood home was too quiet for children. At five I asked for a pet to keep me company since my parents said no other child would come. We were not allowed to have dogs, and my mother did not want a cat. I persisted. On a visit from Florida, my grandmother walked me to the corner pet store and bought me the ten-dollar budgie who turned me into a bird person. I didn’t know then that a significant amount of money had changed hands for me, too. 

I gave my budgie the most beautiful name I could think of: Crissy. He learned to talk and chattered incessantly. He ate off my plate, preened my eyelashes, was my tiny green shadow. He was the first of many birds in my life. Avian orphans, taken from their mothers, barely cared for by strange, cold hands and churned through a lucrative pet bird industry. Others less lucky: plucked from trees with catchpoles and nets, shipped in cold crates to stores for sale. One of those came to me in my late twenties, a big green Amazon parrot in his forties, growling and biting so hard I wondered how many humans had betrayed his trust. I had bruises and broken skin every time he bit me, at first because I came too close and later because I dared go too far. He did not want to be alone, and I understood.

Now I am also a bird. Sort of. Less colorful. Fewer feathers. A lot bigger than most. I did not want to be alone either. Like these birds though, I am also used to it.

I felt hatched, not born. As far as I knew, I’d come from nowhere. My history, my ethnicity, my biological family, my identity, all a mystery. I’d been forced from my mother, and, like a rare and exotic bird, sold to someone I did not belong to. I withered, held in a place that was not my home. Unhappy parrots pluck their own feathers out with their beaks. Beakless, I used razor blades instead. 

Today, I am still skittish. Hollowed out, like the bones of a bird. 

I care for songbirds who have nowhere else to go. My sparrow girls, each separated from her mother by a human-made tragedy. A sweet canary I brought home from a shelter, dumped there because TOO MANY. An avian burst of fiery orange the size of my fist, born missing a foot. A very loud singer with a healed broken wing and back. My patchwork flock flies safely in their room all day, and when they need care, I am there.

It heals me to see them learn, play, molt, gain weight, and become the birds they were meant to be. I buy them new toys and perches and high-quality foods and I prepare daily smorgasbords of salads, seeds, and fruits all to see what they like best. 

A budgie with clipped wings and a broken leg unnecessarily amputated at the hip finds her way to me. Though she is young, her recovery is slow. She is all bloody feathers and bones when I take her home. I inspect her closely; she is too weak to put up a fight. Her chest and remaining foot have open, infected wounds. It’s clear she’d been dragging herself around the cage by her beak, up and down and across the bars, to eat and drink. How could the hospital have missed that, I wonder. I know the truth: they hadn’t looked at all. They told me they hadn’t expected her to survive the surgery. The one she didn’t need.

I name her Hope. A close friend, a nurse, treats her wounds. I keep her in a hospital cage for weeks because I don’t want her to re-injure herself. I carefully supervise her time out because whenever I blink she takes off and lands with a thud on the floor, re-opening her wounds. I feed her by hand until she’s a robust body weight and then teach her to eat delicious foods. I show her how to play with toys that are safe for her, ones with curved perches so she can lean her body on them when she’s tired. From there she snoozes lazily and plays with food, throwing spinach and mixed green leaves all over. I make her playlists and watch as she brightens and grows tall when songs she likes are playing. She bobs her head and chirps loudly, and soon everyone’s singing. 

Eventually, she becomes strong enough to move into the aviary with everyone else and I adopt another budgie for her. Now that she has a new bestie, I fade into the background except as feeder, toy provider, aviary cleaner and part-time bird. One of the pack, where I belong.

When Hope molts, there are bloodstained white budgie feathers everywhere. We find them all over the house. Many are spiny and worn. I find a clipped wing feather on the floor of my car. It must have made its way there in my bag or on my shoe. I hold it, fragile and precious, between two fingers, and tears come to my eyes. The cruelty of a trimmed wing feather. People clip wings to tame a bird. To keep her close. But that’s not what a bird is meant to be or to do. Healthy, full-grown wing feathers mean flight. They mean freedom. 

Hope’s chest muscles are now strong, and she can fly. 

I weep holding that feather. As a human I feel so much pent-up resentment and rage at other humans. I know exactly what it is like when someone else decides I cannot be the person I was born to be and decides I must be someone else. Adoption does that to a human. Yet, all my birds are adopted too. In a way, one could say I have done to them what was done to me. Saved, and given a better life, some say. They’re so lucky to have you, others say. I’ve heard it all. I know they’re tropes because people have said them about my adoption too, and I never felt lucky. This is why I let my birds be birds without too much intervention. Most of them keep their distance from me unless I have treats. I am happy just watching them. They bathe, play with toys, ruin furniture. Preen and dunk in water. Argue busily over who gets the first bite of today’s salad or strawberries, the better perch. Nap lazily lined up in their fuzzy huts. Best of all: live their bird lives, doing bird things. They have found community with each other. I don’t need them to feel grateful to have me. I am the grateful one, the lucky one. I just want them to be themselves. Wild. Untamed. Avian. They do not have to be my pets, too. I can give to them what was never given to me: I can let them be themselves. 

Feeling my sleepy sparrow girl’s heart thrum when she lies in my hand like she did this morning is transformative. When she decides I am her mother bird. Feathers to skin. I stroke her beak, her wing pits, her cheeks, her head. I love her so much I want to preserve this feeling inside of me, in my heart, forever. I love that they let me pick them up when they are tired. I love that they let me pet them, snuggle them, breathe them in. These birds smell like home, being themselves in their neediest forms, allowing me to need them too. They whimper for more in their sleepiness, their dinosaur brains allowing them to relax under the protective wing of their mama. I run one finger from top of beak to end of tail until they shudder and lie still, slumbering so deeply I worry they might be dead. 

Until I peer closer, tighten my grip, or shift just a little too suddenly. The fear of captivity kicks in before I can blink and the bird in my hand takes flight. This instinct I understand well.

It’s smart they don’t trust me fully. Birds are right to be wary of people. We use them, abuse them, yell at them, kill them and eat them. We forget they are sentient and sensitive and so very intelligent. But I won’t ever hurt them. I, too, have been left behind by the ones who were supposed to love me. 

With my birds, I am part of the flock. 

With them, I get to be a bird too.

Aimee Seiff Christian writes memoir and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Hippocampus, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She teaches writing and offers developmental editing. She is querying her memoir, Nobody’s Daughter, about adoption and identity. Website: aimeechristian.net

19 March 2026