Flyaway, page 24
I released the crows when the kids were at day camp and John was working, as Lo and Behold were skittish around other people and I didn’t want them flying away in a panic. When I opened the door, the three of them flew into the trees and perched, heads swiveling, while I watched, willing myself to a state of calm. I thought of Lo jumping into the water dish, of Behold hopping up and down in place, of Nacho tracing my face with his beak. Something could happen and I would never see them again. Nacho coasted to the ground next to me, fluffed out all his feathers, and soaked up the sun, beak open, eyes half closed. Eventually he had enough, slapped his feathers down, and took off into the trees.
I lay back against the hill, cushioning my head with my arm. I should get up and make sure they’re all right, I thought, just before I fell asleep.
“Mom,” said Mac. “I need a guitar.”
“You need a guitar?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I really do. I can’t stop thinking about when I was playing Jack’s guitar. I just…I just need to play a guitar.”
Mac’s cousin Jack had appeared at a family gathering with an acoustic guitar, playing several classical pieces and finishing up with “Stairway to Heaven.” Mac had watched, mesmerized. Jack handed him the guitar and taught him some chords, and this was the result.
“Guitars are expensive,” I said. “Let me talk to Dad about it.”
“A guitar!” said John. “School is about to start, and he’s going to be busy. He can wait for Christmas. It’s nice that he wants a guitar, but there’s a good chance that he’s going to play it for a month and decide he’s sick of it.”
“He won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he doesn’t just want it, he needs it,” I said.
A week later Mac and I were on our way to the music store, after I had placated Skye with a bag of new clothes. “I’ve gone out on a limb for you,” I told him. “If you play this thing for a month and then quit, my credibility’s out the window.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to quit.”
It was an electric Fender, a good starter guitar that came packaged with its own amplifier. Mac quickly discovered how to use the Internet to learn songs, and for hours at a time I would hear notes and chords floating down from behind his closed door. “Come on!” I called. “The fledglings are all gone—I’m free! Let’s get Daddy out of his office and go to Sunny Pond!”
“Let’s go!” cried Skye, rushing down in her bathing suit.
“But I’m just in the middle of figuring out this chord,” called Mac.
Sunny Pond was at the end of a long, hidden dirt road. It was filled with water weeds, and one had to keep swimming; if you paused for long enough near the edges, the odds were good you would emerge sporting several small leeches. But the leeches were easy to pull off and the pond was an oasis, surrounded by thick forest, tranquil and beautiful. Diving into the water, we all swam toward a jutting rock just large enough to accommodate us. I eased through the water using a slow breaststroke, watching the water striders fan out in front of me like a tiny herd of wildebeest on a liquid Serengeti.
“Wait!” cried Skye. “You want to play Not It?”
That night I called my aunt Sue Tyrie, who runs her own preschool, gives seminars on dealing with children of all ages, and has always been my childcare advice lifeline. She listened silently while I gave a garbled account of my last two summers, most of which was familiar territory to her.
“…and then we went to Sunny Pond and it was so nice and we haven’t been there all summer, and I’m afraid I’m depriving the kids of all this stuff because I’m always busy and feeding babies or picking mealworms out of tanks or taking care of some horribly wounded bird. Do you think I’m a bad mom?” I finished, with a heavy sigh.
“How bad can you be if you’re asking the question?” she replied.
“Pretty bad?” I asked.
“If this is what you love to do, I would not give it up,” she said. “But I would find a way to cut down the number of birds you take in. The babies are the hardest, right? Can you give them up for a couple of years, until the kids are older?”
“Well, I could…but where would they go?”
“They managed before you started, I guess they’ll manage if you stop.”
I filed this idea away, as I would not have to address it directly until the following spring.
The kids started school. Each morning after they left I walked outside and greeted Nacho, who waited for his breakfast in one of the hemlocks near the parrot’s outdoor flight. He would land near my feet, ready for a bite to eat, a game, and a head scratch; close by were Lo and Behold, always watching from above but with no intention of coming down until I had left the vicinity. None of the disasters I was sure awaited them had come to pass—at least not yet. With the summer over my bird population went down and I could spend time sitting alone on the rocky outcropping above the flight cage, notebook and binoculars in hand, watching as the crows explored, interacted with one another, and formed tentative connections with passing wild crows. It was blissful.
I cared for the other birds, greeted the kids when they came home from school, helped with homework, and wondered if any studies had been done on the stress level of wildlife rehabilitators. Late one afternoon I was sitting on the deck, staring at the sky and thinking about preparing dinner, when Tanya arrived with a skeletal great blue heron.
I could see no underlying cause for his emaciation, no broken bones, no open wounds. His rescuer had found him at the edge of a pond in a public park, barely able to stand. He could have been poisoned by lead or mercury, or had a heavy parasite load; but in the end it wouldn’t matter unless I could bring him back from the brink of starvation.
In a perfect world I would have put him in the shed, filled up a rubber tub with live fish, and left him alone. But when I put him down he collapsed, too weak to raise his head.
Tri-State Bird Rescue in Delaware has developed an effective emaciation mix for waterbirds that can be pureed in a blender, then frozen. I pulled out a plastic container of the mix from the freezer, defrosted it, and calculated how much the heron could take, measuring out a little less just to be safe. Drawing it up into a large syringe, I attached a very long tube, then realized that John wouldn’t be home for an hour.
“Mac!” I called. “Can you help me?”
You need four hands to tube a heron: one to hold the bird’s neck straight, one to keep his beak open, one to thread the tube down his throat, one to push the plunger on the syringe, and one to make sure the tube doesn’t come flying off the syringe when the liquid is ejected. Well, maybe five hands. Six, if you count the occasional straightening of the blindfold I always place around a heron’s eyes so he can’t see the monsters who are manhandling him.
Mac was unfazed. Wearing a large pair of ski goggles he calmly and quietly followed my whispered directions, reacting only with the occasional widening of his eyes. We finished and quickly left the darkened shed.
“Wow,” said Mac. “What an amazing bird.”
“We make a good team,” I replied. “Can you help me again in a little while?”
John arrived home and reminded me that a babysitter was actually coming to our house after dinner, allowing us to join Alan and his wife Jan for a drink in a nearby town. “You know how hard it’s been to schedule something with them,” said John, when I protested that I couldn’t leave the heron. “We’re not even going for dinner! The heron should be settled by then, shouldn’t he?”
As I readied another round of tubing mixture I drew up the full amount. Mac and I repeated our procedure, but before it had all been administered, a stream of the mixture ran from the side of the heron’s beak. I gasped and pulled the tube out. I must have miscalculated the amount of liquid the heron could take, and it had backed up. Odds are he had aspirated some of it into his lungs, and would eventually develop pneumonia.
“What’s the matter?” whispered Mac.
I used a small towel to soak up the remaining liquid, then we left the shed. “I made a pretty serious mistake,” I said to Mac as we walked back to the house. “I tried to give him too much. I hope he’ll be all right.”
“He’ll be okay,” said Mac.
I said nothing further about it until John and I were en route to the restaurant. “It’s my fault,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “He’ll probably get pneumonia and die, and it’s all my fault. I’m so stupid!”
“It was a mistake,” said John. “Everyone makes mistakes.”
“Not as many as me. I’ve been making mistakes for two years.”
“Of course, you have! The number of birds you’ve taken care of? If you hadn’t made any mistakes you wouldn’t be human!”
“But if I make a mistake, the bird can die!”
“If you did nothing, the bird would die anyway!”
We arrived at the restaurant and greeted Alan and Jan. “We’ve had a rough night,” said John, and explained the preceding events.
“It happens,” said Alan, as Jan nodded sympathetically. “Don’t beat yourself up. If he comes down with pneumonia, you get him on antibiotics. Meanwhile, you did what you could.”
“But it was so stupid,” I said miserably. “And I left him in the dark—do you think I should have put a night light in with him?”
Jan looked at me in amazement. “Shut up!” she cried, grinning incredulously. “You think he’s going to live or die depending on whether you used a night light? Oh, man—you’re a mess!”
I stared at her, shocked, then started to laugh.
“I have to agree,” said Alan, deadpan. “You are a mess.”
“I’ve been telling her that for months,” said John.
“You know what you need?” said Jan. “A lemon drop martini.”
“All around,” said Alan.
When we returned home I walked back to the shed, buoyed by my husband and good friends. I found the heron lying motionless, his head resting on the floor and his wings extended, as if in flight.
The night was warm and filled with stars. I vowed to myself that I would take no more herons, knowing if I kept my promise I would never find redemption for the one I had lost. I wondered if anyone in my fragmented life could have predicted the direction I would take, then I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in thirty years.
I was sixteen years old, in boarding school, and a battered horse van pulled up to the stable run by my friend Sam, the ex-jockey. The horses inside were cheap and anonymous, some broken down, some intractable, all offered for sale by a loud tough guy named Ray, a man who set my teeth on edge the moment he jumped down from the driver’s seat. Sam wanted to see the horses in action, so I climbed onto the first one, a thin black mare trembling with fear. Responding to my encouragement she trotted a few steps, then without warning crashed to the ground. I rolled away and climbed to my feet in time to see Ray run toward her, red with anger, and deliver a heavy kick to her side. I rushed to where Ray stood and he turned toward me, his watery blue eyes wide with surprise.
“Leave her alone!” I screamed, and hit him in the face.
Ray let out a string of obscenities and raised his fist, and Sam appeared out of nowhere, hobbling up between us like a human wedge. “I’ll buy her, I don’t care what it costs,” I shouted. “I’ll kill her before I sell her to you,” Ray shouted back, and Sam pushed me toward the barn. “I’ll take care of it,” he said. “Don’t make this harder for me than you already have.”
I waited outside my own horse’s stall, listening to the two angry voices as they rose and fell in the distance. I leaned my head against the door, thinking of how many men like Ray I’d met, how many more I’d heard about in the supposedly genteel world of East Coast barns and show stables. When I looked up, Sam was limping toward me, the black mare following behind him. He handed me her lead rope, his face impassive.
“You owe me a hundred bucks,” he said.
I tried to hold back my tears and failed, crying for the black mare, for the ones left waiting on the truck, for all the beaten and broken horses I couldn’t save. Sam stood unmoving, his hard eyes filled with sympathy.
“You’re never going to have an easy time of it,” he said quietly.
I gazed up at the moon. If I looked closely enough, I could see the heron’s silhouette.
Chapter 35
TURNING LEAVES
“I found him on the ground at the golf course,” said the male voice. “He couldn’t fly—he wasn’t even trying—and his head was going back and forth. Can I bring him to you?”
When I opened the cardboard box the red-tailed hawk seizured, staggering backward and thrashing for what seemed like an eternity. When he finally quieted, I transferred him to a padded carrier and draped a towel over it.
“It could be any number of things,” I said, handing the man a pen and paper. “I need your name, address, and phone number for my records, but I’d also like the name of the golf course. Some of them use a lot of poison, and that could be the problem.”
“Could you call me when you find out?” he asked. “He’s such a beautiful bird, and I’d just like to know.”
I couldn’t rule out that he had been hit by a car or suffered some other kind of trauma, but when I examined him a half hour later I could find no signs of it. He was alert and only slightly thin. I gave him fluids and was putting him back in the crate when he seizured again. In less than a minute he was dead.
I called the golf course and demanded to know what kinds of poison they used. I was transferred to the groundskeeper, who tried to be helpful.
“We’re very careful about poisons,” he said. “We don’t use many at all, compared to some of the courses around here. We use Merit, Sevin, Telstar, and a few different fungicides.”
Merit contains imidacloprid, a chlorinated nicotinoid compound that affects the nervous system and, according to the label, is “particularly toxic” to earthworms and bees; Sevin contains carbaryl, a cholinesterase inhibitor, and is “extremely toxic” to bees and fish; Telstar contains bifenthrin, which is “moderately toxic to many species of birds, toxic to bees, and very highly toxic to fish, crustaceans, and aquatic animals.” This lethal cocktail was being poured all over an area frequented by wildlife—and this was the careful golf course. That was bad enough. But how did I know the golf course’s snack bar wasn’t using rodenticides, a far more likely cause of the redtail’s death? I was livid. Determined that someone would pay for this beautiful hawk’s terrible death, I called Shawn Rogan, who works for the Putnam County Health Department. Shawn responded with his usual swiftness.
“Are you going to be home this afternoon?” he asked. “I’ll stop by and pick the hawk up, then I’ll send him to Ward. Don’t worry, we’ll find out what happened.”
The New York State wildlife pathologist is Ward Stone, who has worked for thirty years diagnosing and tracking causes of wildlife mortality, including chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides (such as DDT) and organophosphate pesticides (such as diazinon, which was banned from use on golf courses and sod farms in 1987, after Ward testified as principal expert for the EPA). Although his budget is slashed with depressing regularity and he works with a skeleton crew, Ward and his staff have monitored outbreaks of botulism and the secondary poisoning of raptors by rodenticides, followed the deadly trail of PCBs through the Hudson Valley, and documented the initial outbreak of chronic wasting disease. Despite the obviously critical importance of this position, New York is one of the few states that have an official wildlife pathologist.
I had known Ward for years, and always marveled at the way he managed to combine his passion for his job with being a father to six kids—who, unsurprisingly, were always jumping out of windows and dragging things into the house from the woods. “How are your kids?” I asked, when I called him two weeks later.
“They’re so much fun,” said Ward. “They’re such great kids. I was just teaching Jeremiah to fly-fish the other day.”
“Where did you go?” I asked, envisioning one of the paradisiacal upstate trout streams.
“Well,” he said, “actually, we were in the living room. I didn’t mean to do it, it’s just that he asked the question and I wanted to answer him before we were distracted. Speaking of which, your redtail was positive for West Nile.”
I was shocked, even though I knew about the devastating effects the mosquito-borne West Nile virus (WNV) was having on bird populations across the country, especially on raptors and crows. My second trusty electronic mailing list was Raptorcare, a list devoted solely to raptors and moderated by Louise Shimmel, the director of the Cascades Raptor Center in Eugene, Oregon. All summer the list had buzzed with desperate rehabbers pooling information, trying to come up with a protocol for a disease that was not yet fully understood—in birds or in humans—and had no proven treatment. Doctors treating West Nile in humans were contacted; the information from those willing to discuss possible raptor treatments posted; contact numbers for drug representatives able to give discounts to rehabbers were exchanged. List members wrote painstakingly detailed summaries of treatments that seemed to be working, hoping their observations might help a rehabber in another part of the country save a stricken bird.
“It is like they are seeing demons,” wrote Marge Gibson, who founded and runs the Raptor Education Group in Antigo, Wisconsin, and who created a West Nile informational database when the virus first appeared. “Hallucinating. We need to think brain insult, with neuro pathways having to regrow and reconnect. All you can do is wait and see what happens next, then watch and adapt as you treat the symptoms. WNV birds are some of the most emotionally and physically draining patients you can have. Remember to take care of yourselves.”
During the summer I printed out all the West Nile information that had come in on the electronic mailing list, and I collected it into a separate gray three-ring binder, hoping I wouldn’t be called upon to use it. I read heart-wrenching e-mails from raptor people in the Midwest who had received dozens of wild hawks and owls with West Nile, who had spent days wrapping their flight cages in mosquito netting only to watch several of their beloved long-time education birds die in convulsions. Although I had read that several dead birds collected by the public from areas nearby tested positive for the disease, until now it had all been slightly unreal. Until now.
