Some say they have only heard them, others are not even aware of their existence, and few have been privileged with a glimpse of a fast blur. They are Baruch College Vertical Campus’s five-inch students.
“I hear them every morning. They live here,” said a maintenance worker who has worked at the college for 11 years. “I thought I was imagining things,” said Yvette Branson, VITAL program initiative coordinator, as she recounted her first sight of them.
These mysterious students are sparrows. Nobody seems to know exactly how long they have been in the building or how they got there, but their presence marks an unprecedented, peaceful coexistence of nature and college students amid a bustling urban scene like Lower Manhattan.
At college, students are responsible for some kind of financial contribution, and these birds are not an exception. They pay their own type of tuition. For one thing, they help with sanitation by eating any food left behind by the other students. There are no complaints of the sporadic feces flying down from above that their cousins, the pigeons, are notorious for. They also welcome guests into the building early in the morning with their loud, resonating chirps.
Like any college students, the sparrows have favorite “hangout” spots. According to Felix, a sophomore, they can often be sighted on the seventh and eighth floor near the lounge space facing the large glass window. This is especially true during lunch time when the birds seek out food. Otherwise, they can be spotted sitting on the ledges of the glass wall that face the Baruch Information and Technology Building.
Though they cannot be credited with impeccable attendance of classes, their fellow classmates have only good things to say. “Pretty cool” was Raymond, a freshman’s, description of his winged schoolmates. He added that he had fed different types of birds at Madison Square Park to reinforce his positive opinion of them.
A College Now student, Julian, who noticed the birds last year when he first came to Baruch, said that they showed him how open and natural the school space was.
According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, sparrows are known to nest in buildings and keep in close proximity to people. Two Baruch students confirmed that these birds do not seem afraid of humans at all and often come very close to the benches where other students are sitting.
After spending so many years in college, these sparrows should be extremely smart, but according to the maintenance worker, they “come to college, but are not smart enough to go out.” Do these birds long to return to their homes outside the glass wall or have they become so attached to college that they never want to graduate?