Flyaway (20 page)

I received an e-mail from Ed. “I was reading
The Merchant of Venice
again,” he wrote, “and I came across this quote, spoken by Portia to Nerissa:

“This morning I was birding on Plum Island,” he continued, referring to a wildlife sanctuary off the Massachusetts coast, “and with every bird I saw I thought: ‘by season seasoned are / To their right praise and true perfection.' I expect that phrase will soon be lodged in your head, too, if it isn't already. By the way, have you any of the above?”

“Thank you for the poem,” I wrote back. “And yes, as a matter of fact, I have a goose, although she doesn't do much cackling. But none of the others.”

By one of those small but strange coincidences, less than twenty-four hours
later my statement was no longer true. Tipped off by Tanya, a rehabber named Kelly called and asked if I could take two nestling crows.

Everyone wants a pet crow, but luckily for the crows, it is illegal to keep one without a special license. Crows, like parrots, are very intelligent, intensely focused flock birds who hate to be alone. A single crow (or parrot) raised from a nestling will want to be with its foster human constantly and will suffer greatly if ignored. A crow cannot be raised by people and then, when it gets to be too messy and time-consuming, suddenly set free; it will have no idea how to relate to other crows, find food, or recognize predators, especially the human ones. Young crows have to be raised with other crows. Luckily for me, these two came as a pair.

“Sure, I can take them,” I said, after she told me there was no way to get them back to their parents. “Can you bring them over here?”

I didn't add, “within the next five minutes?” although I wanted to. It had been years since I raised my pair of crows, and the one who survived had long since joined the wild crow flock and disappeared. The one who died remained, buried on a grassy slope behind our house, never having relinquished her fierce hold on my heart. Because of her I watch wild crows, follow them through the fields when I go running, and gravitate to the unreleasable ones at nature centers, always marveling at their intelligence and their complicated personalities. Crows are too smart for their own good and have no sense of law and order, traits that make them annoying to many people but irresistible to me. They're bullies and opportunists, travel in gangs, and harass better behaved birds, but they're also loyal and affectionate and like to slide down snowbanks on their backs. When the two nestlings arrived, they gazed up at me through wondrous blue eyes, and I felt a small poignant stab of remembrance.

They were thin and their feathers a bit ratty, but otherwise they were healthy young crows. They were pre-fledglings, covered with fuzzy dark feathers and not quite ready to leave their nest. While much of crow behavior is instinctual, even more is learned from parents and extended family. Nestling crows are trusting, as their family has not yet clued them in on the human penchant for
assault, murder, and mayhem. But adolescent and adult crows are well aware of it and can be difficult birds to rehab, simply because they are so terrified of their captors.

Since their hourly feeding schedule precluded them from going into the shed, I brought a medium-size carrier into the spare bathroom, lined it with newspaper, and outfitted it with a cozy nest. I added a small log, just in case they felt inclined to hop out and move around. Soon after they arrived I approached them holding an appetizing bowl of crow food—soaked puppy chow, hard-boiled egg, raisins, peanuts, vegetables, fruit bits, mealworms, chopped mouse, and vitamins. Seeing my extra-large pair of tweezers they stood up, opened their beaks, and emitted a series of loud begging cries, eagerly gobbling down each offered bite.

I felt a surge of emotion. Stop it, I told myself sternly. You are a professional. There will be no more falling for any crows around here.

The number of bird-related phone calls increased, and people called from farther away. Occasionally I would open my door to find a stranger holding a wounded fawn, or receive a telephone plea to help an injured coyote. The shed slowly filled with injured birds, the bathroom with nestlings. If I had managed to juggle four balls the previous summer, this summer I was juggling eight balls, three torches, and a rake.

“Dear Marigoldy,” wrote Skye. “What will you be doing for Summer Solstice? Will you and your fairy friends have a party? Can you tell me who will be there, and what kind of food you will eat?”

Skye's fairy notes were always on my daily To Do list, although they were always the last to actually be accomplished. Rising at 6
A.M
., I would head for the kitchen, make myself a cup of tea, then head off to the spare bathroom for the first nestling feeding of the day. I would check the critical-care birds, if I had any, steeling myself in case they hadn't made it through the night. Returning to the kitchen, I would soak puppy and kitten chow and chop fruits and vegetables for the birds in the shed and the flight cage, finishing up with an array of dishes filled with various enticing food combinations. I'd get the kids
up, feed them breakfast, and get them dressed and ready in time for John to come in from his writing cabin and take them down to the school bus. I would spend the day feeding and caring for birds, fielding phone calls, giving people directions to my house, and accepting the wounded and orphaned, somehow sandwiching house and family chores and errands in between.

When the kids jumped off the bus at 3:20, I'd take them to the pool or to the store, usually lugging the nestlings along with me. Then there was homework or, during the last few weeks of school, an unending series of activities. Odds are Tanya would have called sometime during the day, and would arrive with a wounded bird who needed immediate attention right around 6:00. This was the time she finished work and was driving past my house, but it also happened to be when the family dynamic had reached its crescendo: the kids were hungry, the parrots were screaming, and John was walking in from his cabin with the pipe dream of enjoying a leisurely beer on the deck.

“I'm sorry,” I'd say to him. “I'll be as quick as I can.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he'd sigh, and start to prepare dinner.

Occasionally we all went outside after we'd eaten, or watched a movie, but inevitably I would be called away by a phone call or the arrival of an injured bird. When I put the kids to bed, John and I could finally spend some time together, then about 11:00 or so I'd suddenly remember the Marigoldy notes and have to race off to find paper and colored markers. I'd slip the finished note under Skye's pillow, yawning and wondering how long this phase would last; but when she read the note the next morning, giddy with delight and awed by the magic in the world, I hoped it would last forever.

I had never worked so hard in my life, and the weekends were worse than the weekdays. But like Skye, I too was awed by the magic in the world, the kind that allowed me to watch a bird grow from a tiny naked nestling to a healthy fledgling, or to see an adult bird recover from an injury that would otherwise have doomed her. At times my learning curve was so steep it felt almost vertical, and I often despaired over my own ignorance. Once I posted
yet another question on one of my electronic mailing lists and followed it with an emotional declaration of incompetence, triggering a flood of e-mails filled with support, generosity, and kindness.

“Don't start getting crazy on us,” wrote one veteran rehabber. “I've been doing this for thirty years and I still don't know what the heck I'm doing.”

“You're doing a great job,” wrote another. “Hang in there and try not to stress out too much.”

“I don't know what I'd do without all of you,” I wrote back.

“Don't tell us you love us,” cracked another. “Just send money.”

There were complications with many of the summer's nestlings. There were some whose parents, knowing they had such serious defects that they could never make it on their own, probably pushed them from the nest. There was one small nestling whose head was twisted to the side; when it gaped for food, its head turned upside down. Another's back was hunched, its legs crossed and feet curled. There was one with missing toes and half a wing, another whose head moved slowly back and forth, like a metronome. Had I received two from the same nest, or even the same town, with similar problems I would have reported it to the Department of Environmental Conservation, as perhaps there might have been a provable connection to heavy pesticide use in that area. But they came in one by one, over a period of two years, and all from different directions.

There were the otherwise healthy ones who were victims of human interference. A sparrow whose leg, tightly encircled by a piece of string the parent had used in making the nest, came off when I tried to free it; the fuzzy little almost-fledgling whose wing had been ripped off by a cat.

It fell to me to let them go. When the healthy young nestlings were released, they would live out their lives as wild birds. If any of the others survived, they would spend their crippled lives in a cage. There was not a ghost of a chance that they could someday live the way they were meant to live.

I couldn't let a suffering bird languish in a box until he died, as it could take
hours, even days. The first time I dug a small hole in the woods and gently laid a mortally wounded nestling down, his obvious pain sent my adrenaline surging and allowed me to do what I would never have thought I could. Placing the heavy shovel above his neck I whispered, “I'm so sorry” and brought it down, stepping on the edge to make sure it was over. I filled in the hole and then sat beside it, trembling, my face in my hands.

It never became any easier.

My father arrived on the 5:34 train from New York. After leaving his home in Colorado, where he had moved after my mother died, he spent a few days in the city with old friends and would be going on to visit my brother after three days at our house. When Mac and Skye were toddlers they had somehow transformed “Grandpa” to “Grumpy”; this inspired us to dub Missy, the tall, sardonic blonde with whom he had lived for ten years, “G.G.,” or Grumpy's Girlfriend. Dad would entertain the kids with arcane scientific facts and math puzzles, G.G. would read them children's books in French, and we'd all go for a hike in the woods. But G.G. was traveling elsewhere this time, so Dad arrived on his own.

He greeted us heartily, disappeared upstairs with the kids for half an hour, then wandered through the living room. “Everything looks very nice,” he murmured appreciatively, even though nothing had changed since his last visit; actually, not much had changed since we moved in ten years before. “And look!” he continued, as if he were admiring a particularly intricate new piece of stereo equipment. “You even have maggots in your dining room!”

I grew up in a world with a calm and gracious exterior. Everyone my parents knew had a sense of decorum; at least, they did until the early 1970s, when social mores started to unravel and things got slightly out of hand. But even then, kids went to dancing school, women wore evening dresses to each other's
parties, and if a man talked openly about the cost of his possessions he immediately became a social pariah. Conversation was an art, and overreacting—to
anything
—was a hanging offense. Had my mother walked into the dining room and found a pair of vultures standing on the table, she would have smiled and said, “It's a good thing your grandmother isn't here—you know she wasn't all that fond of birds.”

Dad had left much of his old life behind, but held on to certain inviolable traditions: cocktail hour, for one. Soon we were on the deck, Dad drinking vodka on the rocks while John and I, who had many times experienced the painful consequences of trying to keep up, consoled ourselves with glasses of wine. The kids busied themselves with cheese and crackers and pointed to various birds traversing the slope—three robins, several different types of sparrows, and a pair of jays—who might have been birds we released last summer. Dad expressed interest in all our updates, alarm at my nestling-feeding schedule, and after inquiring as to what sort of bird paraphernalia I was lacking, offered to build me an outdoor cage.

“No problem,” he said. “Just a nice big cube with a door. Something you can pick up and move around, but that will protect the birds inside. No bottom, right? Why clean it if you don't have to?”

The next morning, as my father sat drinking coffee and making what looked like a series of professional architectural drawings, I tried to figure out how I could possibly spend time with him as well as accomplish all I had to do. There were birds to care for and nestlings to feed; during one of my thirty-minute breaks I had to rush into town; buy a birthday present for one of Mac's friends; stop at the drugstore; pick up the live crickets, mealworms, and waxworms waiting at the post office; then race back in time to drive Mac to the party. When I returned, I decided, I could finally spend some time with my father, maybe even help him build the cage. I was negotiating with Mac to feed the nestlings if I was delayed when the phone rang.

“Suzie?” said the voice. “This is John Lucid down at the post office. I'm afraid we have a situation here.”

“A good situation?” I said idiotically.

“Not according to Karen,” said John. “Your box of crickets arrived damaged, and, uh, it seems a few of them got out. Karen's afraid of bugs, and they've got her cornered up against the wall.”

“No!” I said, my mind racing: how could I possibly fit a cricket roundup into my schedule? “I'll be right down,” I said, and hung up.

I hurried into the post office, wondering how many of the 1,000 crickets I'd ordered had escaped. Twenty? Thirty? Karen was standing behind the counter, wide-eyed; from the room behind her came a melodious chorus of chirps.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “They're everywhere! I told John I'm either staying up here in front or I'm going home. It's like a horror movie back there! I'm going to have nightmares for months!”

“I'm so sorry!” I told her. “I'll get them out of here as fast as I can!” I disappeared into the back, sure Karen was exaggerating.

She wasn't. The back of the post office was dark with crickets: strolling along the floor, hopping out from behind large packages, surveying the room from the tops of mailbags, all waving their little antennas in a friendly manner.

“Pretty funny!” said John, chuckling to himself. “Good luck catching 'em all!”

John had placed the damaged box containing the crickets that hadn't escaped into a large mailbag. I borrowed another one and started chasing the rest down, soon realizing that compared to a songbird—even a juvenile songbird—I was astoundingly clumsy. Could I return home, I wondered, gather up my birds, return, and let them catch all the crickets? My deliberations were interrupted by an anguished gasp from the counter in the front.

“She's catching them
with her hands?”
Karen hissed. “Oh, my God. The
nightmares
.”

En route to driving Mac to his birthday party, I explained why I had been delayed. “You got to catch all those crickets yourself?” he cried. “Why didn't you come home and get me? How come you get to have all the fun?”

When I returned Dad had taken his list and driven himself off to the hard
ware store in John's car, leaving me to feed the nestlings, run Skye to a friend's house, and do a few assorted chores. He returned with several bags of supplies, set himself up in the garage with a radio and a tall glass of iced tea, and created what we would eventually christen the Crow Mahal. Portable and made of a lightweight skeleton surrounded by hardware cloth, it would allow young crows to enjoy the grass and the sunshine in a secure and hawkproof environment. Whenever ducklings arrived, I could remove the perches and presto! The Duck Mahal. When Dad was nearly done I appeared, breathless, finally able to spend some time with him.

“This is quite an operation you're running,” he said. “Are you sure you're okay?”

“Oh, absolutely,” I said, as a yellow Toyota pulled up behind us. Tanya climbed out, and I introduced her to my father.

“Nice to meet you!” said Tanya. “I'm sorry—I tried to call you and there was no answer. I was passing right by and figured I'd just see if you were home. Would you be able to take an almost-fledgling starling and a sparrow who was caught in a glue trap?”

This isn't fair
, I thought with anger and frustration.
I see my father twice a year.
“The starling is no problem,” I said. “I have one about the same age and I'd be glad to put them together. But I'm kind of swamped—can anyone else take the sparrow?”

Tanya shrugged helplessly. “Go ahead,” said Dad. “I'll finish up here, and meet you inside.”

“All right,” I said. “Poor sparrow.”

There must be a special place in hell for the person who invented the glue trap—no doubt right next to those who invented poison, the harpoon gun, and the leghold trap. Glue traps don't deliver a quick death; they simply hold the animal fast until it starves to death or rips one of its own limbs off trying to escape. The glue is a particularly disgusting mixture; one must dissolve it with surgical tape remover, then bathe the bird in Dawn dishwashing liquid, the savior of oil-spill-contaminated wildlife. And although wild birds love to
bathe, they don't appreciate
being
bathed, so removing anything from a bird's feathers is a complicated process, terribly stressful for the bird, and usually must be done in a series of attempts.

The little female house sparrow had ripped out several feathers trying to escape from the trap. I removed the glue, bathed her, made sure she was warm and dry, and put her in a carrier in my bathroom. Before leaving I opened the door once more to check on her and she came barreling out, blew past me, and disappeared under the bed. Cursing myself for not closing the bathroom door before I opened the carrier, I felt around under the radiators, pulled everything out of my closet, and rechecked the bathroom. Nothing. I couldn't find her.

I tried to get ahold of myself. It was cocktail hour, for Pete's sake. I hadn't been able to take my dad for a drive, or out to lunch, or even accompany him to the hardware store because of all these birds, and he was leaving in the morning. I could hear him laughing with John in the kitchen, and the kids running around outside. With any luck the sparrow would return for food and water; I brought the carrier into the bedroom, propped its door open, and after carefully closing the bedroom door behind me, headed for the kitchen.

After dinner we were playing charades in the living room when Dad looked up. “Do you hear a cricket in here?” he asked.

“I swear they're all out in the garage!” I cried. “I put rocks on the aquarium tops so they couldn't escape!”

“Mac and Skye each have two of them in their rooms,” said John. “The last time we had a cricket delivery, they convinced
their mother
to let them have a pair as pets.”

We looked at the kids. Mac appeared studiously neutral, while Skye wore the exaggeratedly innocent look of a child actor from the silent film era.

“What did you do?” I asked her.

“It wasn't my fault,” she said. “I was teaching Cyrus how to balance on my hand and he jumped off. And then I tried to catch him and he ran away.”

“So he's loose in the house somewhere?”

“He's not the only one,” said Mac.

Skye glared at him. “I didn't want him to be lonely so I let Esmerelda go, too.”

“Yeah!” said Mac. “Then she came into my room and tried to let mine go!”

“What?” said John. “Why would you do that?”

“Because it wasn't fair that two of them got to go and two of them had to stay!” said Skye. “If one was already gone, what's the difference between one cricket and four crickets? That's what Mommy's always saying! ‘What's the difference between one bird and four birds?'”

“But Mom's birds aren't loose in the house!” retorted Mac. “Right, Mom?”

I looked from face to face, not about to confess solidarity with my slippery-fingered daughter.

“I wouldn't worry about it,” said Dad. “They won't eat much.”

After everyone had gone to bed I crept into the bedroom. The sparrow wasn't in the carrier, but she had been there earlier, judging from the seeds scattered around inside.

“I'm sure I'll find her tomorrow,” I said, after trying to explain the situation to John.

The following morning I lay curled on my side as the first rays of sunlight crept through the blinds. Drowsily, I opened my eyes. Perched comfortably on my leg was the sparrow, preening her beleaguered feathers. Gathering myself for the assault, I sat up suddenly and threw the lightweight blanket over the bird, who raced out from under it and sped off toward the bathroom. Throwing myself out of bed, I thundered after her, leaving John shouting, “What? What happened?” behind me. Eventually I cornered her and a moment later emerged triumphant, sparrow in hand.

“Got her!” I said, grinning.

“Great,” said John, covering his head with a pillow. “On to the crickets.”

After breakfast I carried a sheet-covered reptarium to the slope outside the kitchen window. A little chickadee was ready to go, there were a number of others in the vicinity, and I wanted to release a bird in my dad's honor. As
John and the kids watched from the deck, Dad unzipped the reptarium and the chickadee flew off to the safety of a juniper bush.

“We'll watch out for him,” called Mac. “And we'll name him Grumpy.”

As Dad went upstairs to pack his clothes, I cleaned the reptarium with a scrub brush, disinfectant, and the hose and left it to dry in the sun. I had just finished feeding the nestlings when I heard Skye's voice from the kitchen. “Hey!” she shouted. “Grumpy's in the reptarium!”

On my way to the kitchen I had several moments of unlikely visuals, all involving my father somehow folding himself into a small mesh cage. I joined Skye at the bay window, however, and found the little chickadee hopping jauntily about the scene of his former—I thought—involuntary confinement. My dad came in and looked over my shoulder.

“You run a nice hotel,” he said. “None of us want to leave.”