He was not interested in flying himself. He could fly, of course. That was not the issue. He could just spread the wings and go. Anywhere. No big deal. Most birds know how to do that.
He also heard of a colleague who knew how to fly without any wing movement. This was all pretty cute and all, but he was thinking beyond that. He was thinking bigger. (Much bigger.)
He noticed his gift one day when jumping from stick to stick inside of his golden cage. There were some sparrows down on 5th avenue and they were just too dumb to see a perfectly fine cookie not very far from them around the corner.
He tried shouting to them, letting them know in his quite sophisticated language what kind of delicious meal they were missing, but the heavy glass, the traffic, the Metropolitan Museum visitors... it was all too much, even for his quite well trained voice.
It was then that he got a little angry and noticed that when he only focused hard enough, and focused in the right way, he could make the sparrows take off, fly around the corner and find their stupid cookie. Just like that. Pure mental power.... Brilliant.
He did not want to believe his own abilities at first. It could have been a coincidence, maybe his ability was more something like foreseeing the future? Did he just know exactly when the other birds would decide to fly and happened to imagine that he wanted them to fly at exactly the same time?...
He needed to find out...
In his spare time he developed a series of rather simple experiments. All of them returned successful results:
He controlled the flight pattern of sparrows. Then pigeons. Then owls. Then Hawks. Even squirrels jumped from branch to branch guided by his mental commands.
He became obsessed with his new found ability. He would let birds fly in formation of 3, 7, 21. In the evenings he would pack the trees outside of his condo with as many birds as structurally possible. He would then let them fly off with the drop of just a single pin-pointed thought.
He would race pigeons around central park. He would reenact scenes from the swan sea (when the record happened to be on) on the reservoir... Nils Holgerson... hmm...
It was an incredible fun, to say the least.
Such amazing power.
After a few years of daily practice and a constant inclusion of more and more exciting species. (Racoons, horses, a coyote...)
He decided to try the ultimate challenge.
It was a very risky plan, as it involved beings from which he was not protected by several inches of glass and golden wires of his cage...
He waited for just the right moment, on a sunday. The feeder came over to talk and sing and change the sand...
He focused on the wingless creature... looked her deep into her beakless face... and...
Without a word... without even looking at him... the cage door was opened, a hand was extended towards him... he hopped on it gracefully... the hand carried him out of the cage, out of the room, out of the apartment, to the elevator, past the concierge (hello), past the doorman (good morning), out of the building, onto the street, across fifth avenue, past the obviously very interested crowds of tourists, south of the Museum, past the bronze bears (no wonder they never reacted) past the large tree, onto the hills he loved to look at so much since his childhood...
Here he made his feeder stop.
He looked at the unobstructed sky...
A color matching formation of 137 wild birds flew over them, just as he had planned...
He knew that this was truly just the beginning of things to come...
The gentle sunrise on the first day of his personal creation.