Flyaway, page 18
Three days after the medicines arrived the turkey’s loud wheezing and coughing were gone, and from then on it was just a question of keeping her somewhat calm until her lungs healed. When I put her in the flight cage she paced endlessly back and forth, wearing a trench in the dirt, instead of lounging around gaining weight as I’d requested. Most days I let her loose in the shed. If she felt like it, she could move around on the floor, where she had no view of the woods. If she wanted a view, she could hop up on the table, but she had to stand still in order to look out the window. This worked relatively well, until the turkey vulture arrived.
As always, it began with a phone call. “It’s a great big vulture,” a man’s voice said indignantly, “and somebody shot him.”
Rehabilitators dread the start of hunting season. On the one hand, you have the conscientious hunters who know the woods, eat what they hunt, and wouldn’t dream of shooting a protected species. On the other, you have the drunken idiots who are just out there to blast whatever has the misfortune to cross their path. The turkey vulture I eventually found huddled next to an old house in Westchester had obviously met up with one of the latter.
Turkey vultures, along with their smaller cousins, the black vultures, are smart, funny, and sociable creatures. As they soar through the air they rock gently back and forth, like huge black butterflies, and they greet a bright morning by perching together and spreading their wings like an ancient clan of sun worshipers. I find large groups of circling vultures so exhilarating that I become a dangerous driver; when my kids are in the car with me, they respond to the sight of vultures with howls of “Watch the road!”
Turkey Vulture and Wild Turkey
“The jury’s out on this one,” said Wendy, after X-raying the Westchester vulture, removing several shotgun pellets, and thoroughly cleaning and setting his wing. “The bone is splintered, so we’ll have to see how it heals. There might be nerve or tendon damage. But it’s worth a try.”
Turkey vultures look like wild turkeys designed by Tim Burton. Both are large birds with unfeathered, wrinkled heads. But turkey vultures, so named because of their resemblance to wild turkeys, strike the average person as more sinister because of their black plumage, smaller eyes, ivory-colored hook on their beaks, and the superstitious nonsense that has dogged them ever since humans started making it up. Sure, vultures eat dead things; the last time I looked, so did Homo sapiens.
I put the turkey in her large crate on one side of the shed and the vulture in another large crate on the other, so each had a window. The settling-in period for vultures can be difficult. Some are immediately matter-of-fact about dealing with humans; others are horrified by the very idea. This particular vulture fell into the latter category. For the first two days he would greet me like a drunken frat boy caught by the college dean: he’d eye me with alarm, empty the contents of his stomach, then regard me reproachfully, as if the whole sad state of affairs was beyond his control and entirely my fault. Except for my twice-daily hospital rounds, I stayed away from the shed. Yet in spite of my lurid descriptions, the new patient had two determined visitors.
“Awww, come on, please let us see him,” begged Skye. “Pleeeeeeeeeze!”
“We’ll be so calm and quiet and we won’t upset him at all, we promise!” said Mac.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” I said, leading them into the shed, where the vulture took one look at us and heaved up a good-sized pile of partly digested venison. We all turned, closed the door, and trudged silently back to the house. “Can you drive me to Cindy’s house?” asked Skye. “Her mom is a hairdresser.”
By the third day the vulture had decided that I was a relatively benign figure who brought food and didn’t hurt him, and from then on he would vomit only when he was forced to undergo something he considered truly ghastly, like a bandage change. For the daily cleanup I would open the crate door, step to the side, and poke a thin stick through the back panel; the vulture would step away from the stick, out of the crate, and into a small pen. We’d studiously ignore each other while I shuffled bowls and newspaper, and during those few occasions that I caught his eye I’d immediately drop my gaze, thus proving that I was far more scared of him than he was of me. Since a large percentage of injured wild birds eventually die from the stress of being in captivity, the vulture’s growing comfort level was a milestone in his recovery.
I roped off a third of the shed and hung a large sheet as a privacy curtain, so the turkey could come out of her crate and have some space to move around. Eventually she finished her medication and I began putting her in the flight cage during the day, when it was warmer, and bringing her in at night so she could continue to gain weight.
After two weeks Wendy took another X-ray of the vulture’s wing. The X-ray showed calcium forming around the shards of his splintered bone but not enough to leave the wing without support, so she wrapped it for another week. He was doing well, though, and needed space, so I put him in the left side of the flight cage and set up a heat lamp in a corner where he could go to warm up. He was obviously happy to be out of the crate. He walked around, tested out the low perches and logs, stretched his good wing, and continued to eat heartily.
But the status quo never stays so for long. “Hey, Suzie?” said Joanne through the phone. “Can you overwinter a couple of pigeons in your flight?”
If a bird is injured in the autumn and recovers, it often means the rehabber will still have to “overwinter” him, or keep him until spring. A migratory bird normally in Costa Rica for Christmas can’t be booted out into the snow and be expected to survive. Even birds who spend the winter in harsh climates are sometimes kept through the winter, as letting them go in the spring will give them a better chance. This means that there are many healthy birds biding their time until spring, and many rehabbers wishing they didn’t have to spend the winter cleaning up after them.
“I guess,” I said. “Who do you think they’d rather have as a roommate—a wild turkey or a turkey vulture?”
“They don’t care,” said Joanne. “They’re pigeons.”
I posed the question to the family. “Put them in with Wavy Gravy,” said Skye. “Because the vulture might get nervous and throw up on them.”
“But the turkey is leaving soon,” said Mac. “Put them in with the vulture—he needs some company.”
“Put one in with the turkey and one with the vulture,” said John.
“How about if I put them both in the bathroom?” I said.
“Don’t even joke about that,” said John.
Mac had a point: the turkey would be leaving soon. The vulture was well-fed, had plenty of space, and vultures are not an aggressive species. The pigeons could fly while the vulture couldn’t. And, as any soldier will confirm, odd alliances can be formed when you’re in a captive situation. Why not give them a chance? I propped their crate door open, and the pigeons walked busily into the flight cage.
Pigeons look surprised even if there’s nothing going on, so it was a little hard to tell just how undone they were by the sight of a large turkey vulture in close proximity. After a single frozen moment they flew up onto a high perch, where they sat staring at the strange creature below them. The vulture stared back with his usual look of wary interest, but didn’t seem particularly impressed.
As the days went by, the pigeons became more intrigued by their flightmate. Despite their bad publicity, pigeons are curious and intelligent birds. They are successful and adaptable without being aggressive toward other species; they have complicated and interesting relationships; and they simply love to fly, as anyone who has ever seen a flock wheeling through the sky can attest. The two in the flight cage seemed irresistibly drawn to the mysterious vulture: the first day they stayed high above his head; the next day they perched just slightly above him; and by the third day all three were sitting on their own tree stumps, each no more than a few feet apart. I’d peer into the flight cage and see the vulture walk regally past me, followed by the pigeons, like a rock star trailed by his fans; unable to stop ourselves, we dubbed them Jerry Garcia and the Deadheads.
Jerry’s shattered bone healed slowly, and there was permanent soft tissue damage. While the wing was immobilized, the injured muscles and tendons contracted further, eventually preventing him from extending it more than halfway. I’d appear each morning (when his stomach was relatively empty), toss a small towel over his head to calm him down, then sit on a log and slowly and carefully extend and retract the wing, hoping the tendons would stretch and regain some of their elasticity. No one appreciated my efforts, of course; the Deadheads would fly to a high perch and watch me with suspicion, and every once in a while Jerry would snake his beak out from under the towel and bite my hand. Although vulture bites can be quite painful, they are not in the same league as, say, pet parrots, who can practically sever your finger when they’re in a bad mood.
Eventually it became clear that Jerry’s soaring days were over, and I found him a home at a sanctuary that was looking for a companion for their single vulture. I tried to include the Deadheads in the deal, but they turned me down. The flight cage seemed empty without Jerry, who would eventually forge a companionable bond with the sanctuary’s vulture. For days the pigeons wandered forlornly around the flight, two little groupies deprived of their rock star. All they really needed was the company of their own kind, and before long their own kind began to arrive. In spades.
But meanwhile, Wavy Gravy had became more and more rambunctious, making it clear that she considered it time to go. When her release date finally arrived, I called Bonnie.
“Your turkey’s all set,” I said. “I didn’t think this day would ever come. I want to release her back into her flock—what time do they show up?”
“They don’t,” said Bonnie. “They’ve moved on. I haven’t seen them for weeks.”
I called everyone I knew in Bonnie’s area; no one had seen the turkeys. I called my other birding friends, thinking a strange flock would be better than no flock at all, and fared no better.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do with her,” I said to my friend Diana Swinburne. “I can’t find her a flock, and I don’t want to release her completely alone.”
“Why don’t you take her to Anna’s?” said Diana. “She could join the turkey parade.”
Anna Schindler lives in a house overlooking the Hudson River and has a soft spot for wild turkeys. They disappear during the spring and summer, then appear faithfully at her door throughout the fall and winter. Anna feeds them generous helpings of corn, and in return they accompany her on her daily trek to the mailbox. She walks down her dirt driveway, followed by fifteen to twenty turkeys; when she reaches her mailbox, she turns and orders them to stay away from the road. They stop where they are and mill about while Anna looks over her mail, then they step aside for her and follow her back to the house. I called Anna and introduced myself. Would it be all right if I released a wild turkey at your place? I asked her.
“Oh, sure,” she said in her broad German accent. “What’s one more turkey?”
Anna called me the next morning at 8:00. “They’re here,” she said.
There were fifteen wild turkeys on Anna’s front lawn when I arrived. Our turkey hopped out of her crate sporting one bright orange leg, colored that morning with livestock crayon for temporary identification. Just as she was getting her bearings, another female barreled out of the group and launched herself at the intruder. It was here that Wavy Gravy the turkey parted philosophical company with her namesake; this turkey was no pacifist. She lit into her attacker, furiously pecking her, biting the back of her neck and whacking her with her wings; when a big male strode over to join the fight, she clobbered him, too. Finally she chased them both away, left the group, and walked around in large exploratory circles. Anna called me that afternoon to report that the turkey with the bright orange leg was peacefully scratching at the ground with the flock. By the second day there was barely a trace of orange left, and by the third it had disappeared all together, along with my only way of staying in contact with her. For the next few weeks I felt a stab of fear each time I heard the echo of a shotgun. I’ll never know if she stayed with her new flock or eventually left in search of her family, but at least I know she did it with a clean pair of lungs.
Chapter 27
PEYTON (PIGEON) PLACE
The snow arrived in time for Winter Solstice. It was a classic New England snowfall, too peaceful to be called a storm, falling in big, heavy flakes and blanketing the woods with six inches of powder. The kids raced outside, pelting each other with snowballs and rolling down the hills. A few days before I had tarped the roof of the flight cage, balancing precariously on the narrow beams as I unfolded the heavy blue plastic and used short nails to secure it. I covered the loft under the roof of the second flight with hay, giving the two pigeons a snug spot in which to ride out the winter.
I had no other wild birds and was grateful for the break. During Christmas vacation we went sledding and skating, took moonwalks, and played Monopoly in front of the fireplace. We spent hours working on old Springbok circular puzzles, unable to pull away until the final butterfly or garden flower was complete. John and I caught up with friends, few of whom I’d seen over the summer.
“Alan thinks you’re ignoring him,” said Jan, Alan’s veterinarian wife, when they were over for dinner one night.
“Alan,” I said. “You have to do me a favor—move your office down here. It’s a ninety-minute round trip to see you, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day.”
“No problem,” said Alan. “I’ll get right on it.”
When the kids went back to school I filled out my nonprofit application, e-mailing the saintly Bob Bickford with so many questions that I was sure he had to regret his offer to help me. But he never failed to provide quick and sure answers, and the recurring spasms of terror I felt about inadvertently crossing the Internal Revenue Service were always allayed by his knowledge and confidence. Finally all my paperwork was finished, mailed, and on file. Flyaway, Inc. would receive its nonprofit status by fall, and I could start soliciting donations.
Randi Schlesinger took the text of my newsletter and, through her graphic designer wizardry, created a work of art. She trudged through the snow into the woods, pointed her digital camera straight up, and took a photograph of the latticework of winter branches silhouetted against the sky. Manipulating it until it was faded and dreamlike, she extended the image into an elongated rectangle, then, using an airy, graceful font, dropped flyaway on top of it. The result was an eye-catching, memorable masthead, and an image—of branches just waiting for a bird to land on them—that could be used as the background for headlines throughout the publication.
The four-page foldable newsletter had a section for basic information, one for thank-yous, a panel for donations, and a large middle area for bird stories. By the end of the year I had taken in eighty-two injured or orphaned birds, so I had quite a few from which to choose. I selected four feel-good stories and wrote them up. “I love these stories!” said Randi, her infectious enthusiasm making me giddy with anticipation. “Do you have pictures? I’ll put a photo of the bird by each story, and then two or three more right next to the donation panel. This is great! I know people will send you money!”
And she was right. I sent out about fifty newsletters and friends, relatives, and members of our tight-knit little community responded quickly and with generosity. Touched and gratified, I wrote thank-you notes and deposited the checks into my official Flyaway bank account. I felt dangerously on top of things. Eighty-two birds between May and December made for a hectic summer, but it was certainly doable and didn’t seem to be causing my family any distress, apart from the occasional disgruntlement of a missed movie. I had a nice break during the winter, when I could relax with my family, write my newsletter, and coordinate the growing treasure trove of avian information stored in my rainbow-colored library of three-ring binders.
I had no idea what was to come.
By mid-March there was a flurry of pigeon activity. “It’s Joanne again,” she said. “Say, can I unload two more pigeons on you?”
“I don’t mind,” I replied. “I’ll put them in with the Deadheads.”
“The dead what?” said Joanne, with alarm.
There is something inherently comical about pigeons. Maybe it’s the way they bob their necks back and forth as they walk briskly about, as if they’re on a very tight schedule and should really be somewhere else. Maybe it’s that Three Stooges whoo-whoo-whoo sound they make when they take off. Maybe it’s the fact that once they’re comfortable around you, they don’t seem to care what you see them doing. On a few occasions I’ve even suspected them of overacting for their audience, like reality show contestants, although this is not something I could convince any self-respecting biologist to believe.
Joanne arrived with the pigeons: Sly (charcoal gray, broken wing healed but slightly stiff) and Sasha (light gray, hit a window but recovered). I don’t name all the birds who end up here. Some don’t stay long enough, and for some no name seems appropriate. Some are so wild and resentful of their confinement that to name them would feel like harnessing them with another symbol of captivity. But this eventual gang of pigeons were ripe for naming, especially when the group dynamic emerged. Sly was named for action hero Sylvester Stallone, and Sasha for his first wife. The reason will become clear in a minute.
Sly and Sasha, a comfortably bonded pair, spent a few days settling into the flight cage. Initially the Deadheads watched them from a high perch, as they had done with Jerry Garcia. Within a few days all was amicable, although the Deadheads seemed to prefer to observe the newcomers rather than to interact with them. Then came the phone call.
“Aha!” caroled another rehabber friend in an I’ve-got-you-where-I-want-you tone. “I hear you have pigeons in your flight cage!”
