Two Years After Cormac McCarthy's Death, Rare Access to His Personal Library Reveals the Man Behind the Myth<br /> by [[Richard Grant]]<br /> accessed on 2026-10-25T14:02:31

"Fast Food". Female house sparrow (Passer domesticus) on a city street prepares to feast on a discarded french fry. (Credit: hedera.baltica / CC BY-SA 2.0) HEDERA.BALTICA VIA A CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE

What I like about this photo is that when I was a kid, I was amazed when I saw a sparrow doing this very thing, scavenging french fries. I was around 7–8 years old. My mom had taken me on a shopping trip in her 1968 Buick Skylark, green with black roof. We stopped at McDonald's for a snack. She went in to get food and left me sitting in the car. She had parked in front of the shop, facing the hedge-bordered outdoor eating area. I saw sparrows hopping through those hedges and on the ground around them. A lucky few of them found several french fries and were either eating them or carrying them away in their beaks. As a little kid growing up in a rural area, I expected birds to eat only seeds or bugs, so this sparrow french fry feast was surprising and hilarious to me.>