The Bird That Wasn’t

All summer long we puzzled over the strange bird-call coming from somewhere around our back deck, or possibly the adjoining garden or shrubs. Kind of a raspy note, much like the sound of a rusty door hinge. Just couldn’t put a finger on it, and even Merlin the magic bird-song-identifier app couldn’t tell us what our mystery visitor was. Or exactly where it was.

A nest in the rain gutter, perhaps? A careful inspection ruled that out. No flights into or out of the French lilac tree, nor the nearby poplars. A ground dweller, maybe? No, the dogs ruled that out, showing no interest whatsoever.

Yet all summer the odd raspy call continued, mostly on clear days and evenings. Visitors couldn’t shed any light on the topic, either. We invented silly names for the bird, as humans are wont to do with the unexplained.

But finally, one late afternoon as I was out on the deck writing, the strange bird revealed itself. The noise was emanating from the wall clock, set slightly back in the shadows. There, sitting just above eleven o’clock, was a tiny tree toad, croaking out its love-lorn appeal to whichever passing toad of its gender choice happened to be nearby. Some bird!

Which got me thinking about life and prejudices. “Prejudice”, after all, simply means a pre-judgment. I know you don’t, of course, but all too often I have my mind made up long before I have all the relevant information, sometimes even when I have just a few shreds of it.

And just as Karen and I, and all of our visitors, assumed it was a bird, “just because”, we were all off-base. Just because the crowd agrees with your prejudgment doesn’t mean you’re correct.

A toad simply didn’t fit into our view of the world. Toads shouldn’t live behind clocks on the back wall, nor should they impersonate birds. But apparently they do, once again as evidence of my tendency to rush to judgment.

Yet prejudice, per se, is not in itself a bad or a dangerous thing. It’s how you deal with it, and it’s how you deal with discovering the truth. Pre-judgment is hard wired into our beings, because it kept our gene-contributing ancestors alive, rather than their idiot brethren who ignored hunches of danger. Upon hearing shrieks and howls outside the cave, you can imagine it to be an evil spirit or a werewolf, and hide under your furry blanket, or you can blithely go to investigate, never to be seen again. Your choice, but one of you gets to stay alive and have offspring, the other doesn’t.

Again, encountering a band of pale-skinned, blue-eyed individuals carrying spears and clubs, your pre-judgment is that they’re not there to invite you to a birthday party. You’d do well to slink behind a tree until you find out more about them. Your prejudice probably saved your skin.

But when facts and reality begin to call your pre-judgment into question, you have a choice. You can cling to your prejudice, because, after all, you’re never wrong. Or you can adjust to the emerging reality.

As you can see from the picture below, the toad seems to be puckering for a kiss, but he/she/they/it is just going to have to wait a bit longer– I’m not quite ready to see whether or not it really is a prince/princess/former-president, or whatever. That part of the pre-judgment still stands.