Sparrows

Sparrows register the disaster not through a dramatic encounter but through a disappearance noticed across ordinary streets and yards. Their bodies are raked up with leaves and buried; two years later, their return becomes news residents eagerly share with one another. In that brief arc, the birds make ecological loss visible while exposing the limits of human plans for protecting other forms of life.

Disappearance and Return

In the first year after the accident, sparrows vanished from the town. The account recalls them lying in yards and on asphalt, then being raked up and removed in containers with fallen leaves. The leaves could not be burned because they were radioactive, so they were buried. The passage gives no separate explanation for why the birds disappeared, but places their bodies, the contaminated leaves, and the act of burial within the same damaged landscape.

Two years later, the sparrows came back. Residents called to one another with the simple excitement of shared news: “I saw a sparrow yesterday! They’re back.” The return did not erase the earlier absence; it made that absence newly legible. The birds’ presence had been easy to overlook until there were no sparrows in the streets, and their reappearance became a small, collective relief. The same passage contrasts their return with the May bugs, which had not come back, making clear that recovery was uneven rather than complete.

Birds and the Limits of Evacuation

The sparrow also appears in a wider question about whom evacuation could include. After searching and asking around, Sergei Gurin was told that, in the first months after the accident, someone had proposed evacuating animals along with people. He tests the idea against the practical impossibility of moving every form of life: animals on the ground might perhaps be relocated, but what of creatures in the earth, or birds in the sky? A pigeon or sparrow could not be given the information people received, nor could it be enlisted in a human plan for its own safety.

The sparrow’s place in that dilemma is specific. It is a familiar bird, but its ordinary mobility makes it difficult to shelter or direct. The question is not simply whether people cared about animals; it is whether their systems of rescue could even reach lives that could not be gathered, informed, or transported as human evacuees were. The proposed evacuation thus reveals the boundary of a response organized around human needs and human communication.

A Measure of Attention

Gurin’s account connects this practical failure to a broader change in how he sees animals. After showing his films about Chernobyl to children, he remembers one boy asking, “Why couldn’t anyone help the animals?” The question stayed with him because he saw human art and attention as overwhelmingly centered on people, while animals and plants remained outside the frame. His proposed film about animals would try to see the world from an animal’s perspective rather than treat nonhuman life only as background to human suffering.

Within that reflection, the sparrow carries both a concrete history and a larger narrative weight. It is a creature whose bodies were collected from public ground, whose possible evacuation was contemplated but not made practicable, and whose return was noticed and celebrated. The book does not present the bird as a symbol detached from that history: its disappearance and reappearance are material events in the town’s altered everyday life. The sparrow’s brief return, alongside the continued absence of the May bugs, leaves the recovery of the living world partial and uncertain.