On her way to a hospital in Carmel, Indiana, Stefanie Bergunder spotted what looked like a man standing near the entrance, gently holding a bird while others perched around him.
Excited, she thought she was about to witness — or maybe even join in on — a touching moment.
“I wanted to check out the birds and feed them too,” Bergunder told The Dodo.
But as she got closer, something seemed strange. The “man” wasn’t moving, even though a bird was resting in his hand. And the other birds nearby weren’t flying away.
Then, a car passed by, and the illusion broke.
“I realized it was a statue,” Bergunder said. “He was standing in the snow in a tank top and shorts, and that’s when I saw that none of the birds were real either.”
Though slightly embarrassed, Bergunder couldn’t believe how lifelike the scene looked. She snapped a few photos and later shared them online — and plenty of others agreed they’d have been fooled, too.
Her curiosity led her to the artist: J. Seward Johnson, known for creating hyper-realistic sculptures around the country. The piece, titled Sharing Hope, honors Joe Schwarz, who passed away in 2018 from throat cancer. His wife, Shelly, donated the statue along with $10 million to support the hospital’s cancer center in his memory.
A quote from Johnson resonated deeply with Bergunder: “It’s easy sometimes to forget the simple things that give us pleasure. If we open our eyes, life is marvelous.”
What seemed at first like a fleeting, everyday moment — a man feeding birds — turned out to be something different but equally beautiful: a reminder, captured forever, of hope, love, and the joy found in life’s simplest acts.
