Flyaway, page 7
“Sorry, Mac,” I said. “I’m afraid whoever hit her is long gone.”
The kids had just watched their new Harry Potter video several hundred times, so they christened the orphans Harry, Ron, Hagrid, Norbert, Professor McGonagall, and Albus Dumbledore. (Skye had decided, inexplicably, that she was saving the name Hermione for a woodpecker.) After several sessions of watching me feed them, the kids took supervised turns. We gave extra care and extra feedings to Albus Dumbledore, the smallest, while I tried to prepare them for one possible outcome.
“He’s so little,” I said. “It’s like being the runt of the litter. He’s just not as healthy as the others. Sometimes not all of them make it.”
“He’ll make it,” said Skye.
The odds are that not all of them would have survived in the wild. The largest and most aggressive siblings usually get most of the food, while the smallest become progressively weaker and sometimes die. Occasionally the parents will push a sickly baby from the nest, an act that may seem brutal to those who don’t understand the Herculean task the parent birds face. Once you stop to consider the dawn-to-dusk feeding schedule and combine it with the dangers facing most songbirds—both natural (natural predators, bad weather) and man-made (suburban development, outdoor cats, windows, cars, pesticides, etc., etc., etc.)—it’s easier to comprehend a parent bird’s cutting its losses early and devoting its limited resources to the nestlings more likely to grow to adulthood.
Our extra labor didn’t do any good. Despite our best efforts, Albus remained small and sickly and died two days later. I carried his tiny body into the woods, once again trying to figure out what I would tell the kids when they returned from school. Unlike with the house sparrow, they had invested time, effort, and emotion in the nestling jay, even if it was only two days’ worth.
Wildlife rehabilitators see more death in a busy month than most people do in a lifetime, and must come up with their own coping mechanisms. In my previous eleven years I had handled the deaths of many wild creatures with the emotions rehabbers strive for: a mixture of regret and resignation and a resolve to use any knowledge gained for the next one. But I had one spectacular crash. She was one of a pair of orphaned crows I had raised during my years at the raptor center. I released them both and she stayed around the house, only to die in a freak accident one late summer morning. She was half wild, still friendly to our family, but along with her shyer nestmate, she was in the process of forging a bond with the local crow flock. She soared between our world and theirs, bursting with life and joy, and when she flew beside me as I ran through the woods I felt as if I, too, were flying.
I knew I could lose her at any moment. Like the chickadees of my childhood she was free to leave, free to cast off the chains of my increasingly desperate love for her. Though captive-raised, she was my tangible link with the wild world, the feathered embodiment of everything I had always found wondrous but unattainable. I rejoiced when she appeared and feared for her safety when she left. I worried about a hawk attack, however, not some random, unpreventable accident: a collision with a swing that broke her neck.
After she died I swore to myself that I could still see her flying beside me as I ran through the woods, and grieved for her for months with an intensity that frightened everyone but my children. Wearing an unconvincing smile, my eyes bruised and swollen, I would start them on a project; as soon as they were engrossed I would slip out the door, hurry down the hill, and sit beside the stone-circled grave blanketed with flowers, my face buried in my arms. Soon they would both appear behind me, at ages four and five the small guardians of their devastated mother. “Time to come home now,” they would say, and carefully lead me back up the hill to the house.
Remembering this I realized that they were more resilient than I gave them credit for, and probably far better equipped than I was to handle the highs and lows of bird rehabilitation. The kids came home from school, peered into the box, and looked up in dismay.
“Where…” Skye began.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “He didn’t make it.”
“Oh, no,” sighed Mac.
For a long moment Skye stared into my eyes, precariously balanced between grief and resignation.
“Could you feed the others?” I asked her.
Her gaze dropped to the remaining five nestlings. Roused by our voices, they had lifted their heads and were opening their beaks.
“Okay,” she said finally, and picked up the tweezers.
Chapter 11
BACKING TOWARD THE CLIFF
From what I could see, our grackles were having a fine time in their flight cage. The younger one was somewhat tentative, the older already swaggering. Gender was anyone’s guess, so I declared the younger one female and the older, male. Both had a repertoire of chirps, clicks, and that endearing grackle sound of heavy metal being dragged across concrete. Although they were still young, you could already catch glimpses of the fearless, aggressive personality of the adult grackle. We christened them—in order of ascending age—Null and Void.
During their first two weeks I visited them twice a day, keeping our interactions to a minimum, hoping they would come to view me as a relatively boring food source rather than a parental figure or a fun pal. I combed through my ever-expanding bookshelves for specific information on readying captive-raised grackles for release, surfed the Net, and peppered my wildlife rehab electronic mailing list with questions.
According to the veterans who had released captive-raised songbirds, the two most important release criteria were the bird’s ability to relate to its own species and its ability to forage for its natural food. Slowly but surely the grackles were beginning to interact more with each other, although Void occasionally acted irritated with Null, like a cool kid with a bothersome younger sister. The “natural food” part took a bit more doing. I looked up “Grackle, Common” in Marcy Rule’s Songbird Diet Index, one of the songbird rehabilitator’s bibles, which contains both the natural and captive diets of well over 100 species of songbirds. Armed with clippers and gloves I scoured the countryside for various berries, weeds, and grasses gone to seed; brought them home; and arranged them artfully around the flight to encourage the grackles to forage. Meanwhile, the kids and their friends took to the fields with buckets and bug boxes and returned with beetles, grubs, caterpillars, crickets, and centipedes. The first time they dumped a bucket of bugs onto the flight floor the grackles danced backward, their yellow eyes bright with alarm, as they were used to their relatively slow-moving mealworms and not things that hopped and raced across the ground. Soon, however, they were outmaneuvering the crickets and expertly turning over leaves and wood chips to find the centipedes hidden underneath.
The wound under the house finch’s eye had healed and he was back in the second flight cage, keeping company with a song sparrow recovering from a broken wing. The robin who had lost the bird fight was still healing, his prodigious appetite no doubt fueled by dreams of revenge. My plan to give the blue jays to Joanne was loudly vetoed by the kids, who had decided that raising baby birds was a grand and worthwhile project, and seconded by Joanne, who was swamped with a dozen or so nestlings of her own.
Blue Jays
The five remaining nestlings had rallied and were eating like champs, although Norbert, the second smallest, developed foot problems and needed snowshoes. A “snowshoe”—used to straighten out a bird’s foot when it is curled and clenched—is made by affixing a piece of lightweight padded plastic, made to order for each bird, onto the bird’s open foot using special tape. Three days was sufficient to straighten out Norbert’s toes, but meanwhile one of the others had developed bloody diarrhea. A fecal test revealed protozoa, so the whole crew had to be wormed.
And then Jill called.
Jill Doornick is the founder of both Animal Nation, an animal rights and rescue operation, and Westchester’s Wildlife Line (WWL), a group of rehabbers based in the county south of me. When people call the WWL, they choose from a menu of wildlife forms (“For small mammals, press 1. For reptiles and amphibians, press 2…”). They then hear a recorded message telling them what to do and whom to call.
“There are no secrets around here,” said Jill. “I’ve heard all about you and I know you have two beautiful flight cages. What I’m hoping is that you’ll let me list you on the hotline. We don’t have enough bird rehabbers and everyone is always swamped, and it would be such an incredible help to all of us.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I have the two flight cages, and I’m happy to take any birds who need them. But I can’t take injured birds. I don’t have the space and I have two kids in elementary school.”
“That’s okay!” said Jill enthusiastically. “My kids used to help me rehab! Can you do babies? They don’t take up much space. A lot of rehabbers work during the day and can’t take nestlings to work. Are you home during the day?”
“Yes,” I said, “but the kids get home at three.”
“Do they like birds? Can they help you feed babies?”
“Well, as a matter of fact we have five blue jays, but that was just an accident and there’s no way…”
“There! See? You can’t imagine what having you on board would do. We get so many calls for these poor birds, and we just don’t have enough people to take them, especially in your area. It’s awful.”
“I understand that,” I said. “But…”
“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “Could you just provide information? Tell people if they’ve found a baby bird to put it back in the nest, tell them to leave the fledglings alone—you know, that kind of thing. That way the other rehabbers won’t have so many messages backed up. And if it’s really a rescue situation and you can’t do it, you just tell them to call someone else.”
I considered it. How could I say no to just giving out information?
“Please help us,” she said. “We really, really need help.”
“All right,” I said.
I hung up the phone, wondering what sort of pact with the devil I had just made. I needed to take a run and think things through. I glanced down at my weekly calendar and saw, to my delight, the word goshawks scribbled in purple magic marker.
By now the goshawks’ eggs would have hatched and the nest would be filled with nestlings. Since our audio encounter her voice had haunted me, echoing through my dreams, winding through my head like an old song I couldn’t dislodge. I fed the blue jays, then donned my running clothes—shorts and an old tee-shirt riddled with parrot beak holes—and added a pair of ski goggles, just in case I met up with one of the parents and they were not happy to see me. I pulled the goggles over my head and around my neck, grabbed a small pair of binoculars, and took off into the woods.
The June woods were welcoming, filled with dappled sunlight and the sounds of summer, and the farther I ran the better I felt about agreeing to list my number on Jill’s phone bank. I still had control over the situation; I could provide information to the public, which I was more than willing to do, and say no to anything that would upset the household equilibrium. Feeling confident and decisive, I slowed down as I neared the nest area.
Slightly smaller than the more familiar red-tailed hawk, the adult northern goshawk has a slate gray back and wings, a pale gray chest, and a dark band of war paint across its eyes. Like many other raptors, the female is noticeably larger and heavier than her more agile mate, which allows them to hunt prey of different sizes—an advantage when there are hungry nestlings to feed. The female is also louder and, around her nest, more aggressive.
I dropped down to a walk, squinting through the slight camouflage provided by hemlocks almost stripped of their greenery, and found the nest filled with whipped cream. At least that’s what it looked like at first: a soft white froth atop a shadowy structure, lightly trembling and shifting until it suddenly revealed the dark eyes of a nestling goshawk. There was another beside the first, maybe even two, but I was too far away to see them clearly. I was so trans-fixed that several seconds must have passed before I realized that the male goshawk was standing on the edge of the nest, staring at me intently. I backed away slowly, hoping if I put some distance between us I could watch them for a minute or two, then leave them all in peace. I continued until I came to a fallen tree, then quietly sat down and raised my binoculars.
As soon as I started to focus on the nest I felt a strange sensation. It was a slight discomfort, a shiver, a feeling that made me think, “Uh-oh,” although at that moment I was too slow-witted to figure out why. I lowered my binoculars and there, at eye-level and not ten feet away, was the female goshawk.
When predators come for you, you know it. And they know you know it.
Like a snake before a snake charmer I sat dazzled, held captive by her unwavering red eyes. I have no idea how long we stared at each other. Finally I did something that was logical for a birder, but wildly illogical for a birder sitting a few feet away from a hormonal raptor: I raised my binoculars.
I suspect that from the goshawk’s point of view, raising the glasses to my eyes not only made me even uglier and more misshapen than I was before, but raised my threat status from code orange to code red. In any case, she launched herself forward off her branch just as I launched myself backward off my log.
She flew over my head and landed screaming on a high branch, her voice ringing through the woods: kek-kek-kek-kek-kek-kek-kek! I backed away, keeping in mind that while a great horned owl might be capable of doing more damage to its chosen target, a northern goshawk is willing to do more. Once again, she hurled herself straight for my head. When she was several feet away I dropped to the ground, and she banked, headed up, and landed on a tree limb. I had dodged her first bullets not because of any vast raptor experience but because of my hardwired instinct for self-preservation; had I any control over my actions I would probably have simply stood there gaping, then shouted, “Oh, wow! Do you have any idea how cool you are?”
I continued to back away, hoping against hope that her mate wouldn’t decide to join the assault, and I put a large, leafy maple between us. In response she leaped into the air, pumped her wings once, turned sideways, flattened her body, snaked around the tree trunk, and came sailing through the leaves at my face, knifing through the air like a shark through water, a sleek and vengeful Fury with a single goal. I ducked, she banked. We performed our duet twice more as I continued to retreat and she to chant her outrage, until she had driven me from her territory and banished me from her sight.
Safely out of range I did a victory dance of sheer exhilaration, suddenly understanding the psyche of the disciple who waits for hours in the rain for a quick glimpse of the spiritual master. Far from the world that humans have reduced to tree stumps and pavement, the goshawk showed me a kingdom where my species gave me no unfair advantage, where I could see a fearless wild creature in all its glory, where I could participate in an ancient ritual that ended in a fair and just way. I turned in a slow circle and saw a nuthatch work its way up an old oak tree, two titmice peer at me from a striped maple, and a thrush sail by and disappear into the deeper woods. From the distance came the ascending echo of a pileated woodpecker. Theirs was the world in which I longed to play a part, in which I could witness the transcendent and perhaps even begin to atone for the sins of my own kind.
I raced back home, the forgotten goggles clutched in my hand.
Chapter 12
DAYCARE
“Rrrrrrrrrrrrr,” growled Skye softly.
Holding the bug-filled tweezers above her head, she slowly serpentined them down to a tiny eastern towhee, a new arrival who had steadfastly refused to eat. “Rrrrrrrrrrrrrr,” she repeated, and to my amazement, the nestling promptly opened its beak.
“Airplane,” she explained. “Remember, you used to get me to eat by pretending the food was an airplane.”
The kids were out of school and day camp had yet to start, but those carefree summer days were now chopped into twenty-to thirty-minute segments. People would call to say they had found a nestling bird on the ground, and every once in a while I would succeed in getting them to climb into a tree or up the side of their house and put it back in its nest. More often than not there were complications: the nestling had an obvious fracture, the nest was forty feet up, or the bird had appeared out of thin air and there was no nest in the vicinity. If it was a weekend, I could occasionally get the finder to call Maggie or Joanne; more often than not, I would simply take it myself. The nestling would arrive, receive the standard-issue box and towel nest, and somehow join the schedule. I pressed the kids into service, and Skye became a master at getting reluctant babies to eat.
Nagged by guilt that I was neglecting my own children, I’d pack the nestlings into a big wicker picnic basket with a hinged (thus closeable) top, place their food and supplies into a carryall, put the kids’ stuff into a giant canvas bag, then drive to the pool or the lacrosse game. Mac and Skye would race ahead and I’d stagger after them, laden like a pack mule and muttering under my breath, then I’d set up shop under a tree while they expertly fielded questions from the circle of kids who would inevitably gather around us.
“They’re blue jays. Those are finches, and that one’s a cardinal. They eat bugs and dip. They eat all the time. No, you can’t raise one by yourself; you have to have a special license to raise a wild bird. You once gave a baby bird bread and milk? Birds aren’t mammals; they don’t drink milk! No, don’t ever give them water; if a baby bird opens his mouth and you squirt water in, you’ll drown him. If you find a baby bird who fell out of his nest, just put him back; the mother bird won’t care if you’ve touched him, she just wants her baby back.”
