Have you read Providence of a Sparrow: Lessons from a Life Gone to the Birds by Chris Chester? It’s a great book: beautifully written, moving, insightful, funny, and full of wonderful information about birds in general and house sparrows in particular. That’s because the book chronicles the author’s eight-year cohabitation with, at first, one house sparrow (which he rescued as a tiny hatchling) and, eventually, several additional house sparrows, along with a handful of zebra finches and a couple of parakeets. I should emphasize that none of these birds lived in a cage. Chris and his wife Rebecca never saw it coming, but the entire upstairs of their house evolved into an aviary.

So, anyway, I’m reading along, thoroughly enjoying myself, when I suddenly come upon this sentence about Chester’s purchase of his first zebra finches: “Many pet store finches are products of a level of inbreeding that makes our southern states look incest-free.”

Excuse me? Here’s a guy who grew up in Pennsylvania, spent his adult life in Oregon, and, I’m guessing, never set foot as far south as Virginia. But, OK, I read on and get over it. Then I get to this passage, again about sex & finches, and the commotion they make while mating: “If that popular metaphor for the interconnectedness of things known as ‘the butterfly effect’ is correct in pointing out that a butterfly flapping its wings in China affects weather distantly elsewhere, our finches are probably responsible for meteorological upheavals in any number of places. Monsoons in India, twisters in Arkansas wiping out trailer parks.”

Listen. I’m not sensitive. I just want to help. Chester clearly doesn’t realize he’s offending a sizable percentage of the U.S. population. He needs a gentle reprimand. So I Google the guy to see if I can come up with an e-mail address or website, some way to get in touch. Well, what I find out is that Chris Chester is dead. Died in 2007 of an undiagnosed cancer—a cancer that may have been undiagnosed because he was too depressed to seek medical treatment. (A fine account of Chester’s life and death can be found on-line; it appeared in the Oregonian, May 5, 2007, by Inara Verzemnieks and Douglas Perry.)

So let’s forget the reprimand. Instead, here’s another sentence from the book, about the ants that have infested the house: “Now and then I’d see a pair of them in the kitchen moving at a brisk pace as though late for a meeting where they were expected to speak.” Actually, that sentence, with its combination of close observation and great wit, is pretty darn typical of what—despite my own thin skin—I’m happy to admit is an utterly wonderful book.

Providence of a Sparrow. Spread the word.