Flyaway (3 page)

After four days in the flight cage, the house finch was eating well and seemed comfortable, but had made no attempt to fly. I was wary of chasing him, envisioning my very first songbird launching himself off the branch, crashing to the ground, and breaking his formerly dislocated wing. With this in mind I called and made an appointment with Dr. Alan Peterson, a good friend who had promised to donate his veterinary services should I ever need his help.

“A house finch?” asked the receptionist. “You mean a wild bird? I don't think Dr. Peterson sees wild birds. Hold on, let me check.”

After a minute she returned. “When would you like to come in?” she asked.

There is no one more important to a rehabilitator's professional life than a skilled veterinarian, and those willing to help injured wildlife are few and far between. Treating wildlife requires an added layer of knowledge, as treatments that may work for domestic animals don't necessarily work for wild ones. Veterinary medicine, often cited as being far more difficult than human medicine because the patient can't say where it hurts, becomes even harder when the patient has no owner to report its recent behavior. And, of course, no owner to pay the bills.

I once heard a story about a young veterinarian, enthusiastic and altruistic but inexperienced with wildlife, who had agreed to treat an injured screech owl
that a Good Samaritan had dropped off at his office. The vet carried the cardboard box into one of his exam rooms, peered inside, and was dismayed to find that the owl had died. He picked up the owl, a tiny creature about five inches tall, and laid it gently on his table. Unaware that screech owls play dead when stressed, he leaned over to give it a closer look, whereupon the owl sprang to life, launched itself off the table, and sank its talons into the vet's nose. Unable to remove the owl himself he bellowed for his technicians, but they were at the other end of the hospital and couldn't hear him. He ended up having to walk through the crowded waiting room with a small owl hanging from his nose, which reportedly he did with surprising aplomb. I don't know the eventual outcome of the story; I would hope that this experience cemented his relationship with wildlife, although it could very well have had the opposite effect.

Later that day I stood in one of Alan's exam rooms, watching as he opened the cardboard carrier a half inch, peered downward, and slowly reached inside. When he removed his hand he was expertly cradling the finch. Alan gazed blandly at the bird, then at me.

“Kernels of corn,” he said. “You're rehabbing kernels of corn.”

“Really!” I said, returning his look. “So are you.”

Alan can't help himself. It's his nature to look for the absurdity in every situation, and as soon as he finds it, he feels compelled to point it out. Unfortunately, as soon as he points it out I feel compelled to start arguing with him, even if I secretly believe that his view may be valid. Such was the case here.

The person who had found the finch had gone out of his way to make sure the little bird arrived safely at a veterinarian's office. The veterinarian had donated his expensive time to examine and treat the bird, then had called Maggie. Maggie had driven to the office, picked up the bird, then spent three and a half weeks feeding and caring for him. She had delivered him to me and now here I was, consulting a second normally well-paid veterinarian, whose advice would certainly include an indeterminate number of weeks of additional food and care. Should everything go well, I would eventually drive the bird back to his original location for his release.

And it was all for a house finch, a common, 23-gram species of songbird. In terms of time, money, and effort—not to mention gasoline—it might have seemed a bit absurd.

Except that it wasn't.

Heaving a weary sigh, Alan went to work. He gently felt along the finch's wing, almost imperceptibly moving each joint. “Stiff,” he said. “He needs a little physical therapy. Move it like this—back and forth—very slowly. When you feel any resistance, stop. Twice a day for a few days. Then try tossing him into the air. Gently. Just make sure he has something to land on besides the ground.”

“Great!” I said. “Thanks, Alan!”

“No problem,” said Alan. “That'll be eight hundred dollars.”

The following day I caught the little finch and slowly manipulated his wing, struck anew by the fragility of songbirds and their ability to survive despite the obstacles that humans so carelessly throw into their paths. He was a trouper, wearing a resigned expression as I slowly moved his wing back and forth. And he did look resigned, despite the fact that birds' faces are fixed and supposedly cannot show expression. The problem is not with the average bird's inability to show expression; the problem is with the average human's inability to perceive subtlety. Perhaps if birds had giant eyebrows to waggle and fleshy lips to distort, they'd be easier to figure out.

After a few days I gathered armloads of brush from a nearby field, piled it under one of the hanging branches, and then tossed the finch into the air, hoping that he wouldn't need to use his makeshift landing pad. He flew halfway across the flight and landed gracefully on the branch, sending me into paroxysms of glee. A few days later he wasn't flying as well, sending me into the depths of gloom. I can't keep this up, I thought, suddenly appreciating another advantage to working at a wildlife center: instant emotional support. If a grounded bird starts flying, you celebrate with your compatriots; if he takes a turn for the worse, you share the pain. In my case John was gone for the day, so I had to wait for my support team to return home from elementary school.

“That little finch wasn't flying so well today,” I said, after they'd jumped off the school bus and were accompanying me up our long dirt driveway.

“What?” Skye gasped, looking stricken. “Is he going to die?”

“No!” I said quickly. “He's only….”

“How do you know?” she demanded. “How do you know he's not lying dead on the ground right this minute?”

“He's not dead,” said Mac. “And he's not going to die, either. He's probably just tired from all that flying.”

“There you go,” I said, adding the final link to our emotional daisy chain. “He's going to be fine.”

Soon all I needed to do was to walk toward the finch and raise my hand, and he'd launch himself from his branch and fly to another. I kept wishing for another finch to keep him company—not that I wanted another bird to be injured, but if one
were
to be injured I wished that he would find his way here. This was where I made a serious “wish error.” As anyone who has ever heard a fairy tale can attest, all wish genies get a big kick out of messing with wishers who are not specific. I wished for another finch, and suddenly one appeared. But it was not a house finch.

It was an American goldfinch.

What the heck! one might reason. Goldfinches are in the same family as house finches. At least it's a finch. That was my reaction.

At first.

I was unprepared for the phone call. A friend of a friend had found the goldfinch, dazed and motionless, outside one of her windows. She had placed it carefully into a cardboard box; when she opened the box a half hour later, it hadn't moved. Could you please take him? she asked. He's so beautiful and I don't know what to do for him. I can drive him right over.

I hesitated, and a war broke out inside my head. I had spent a year working out the master plan, each subplan, and every individual detail. I had set my rehabilitation rules in stone: no injured birds. No birds from anyone but other rehabbers. No birds that couldn't go right into the flight cage. I envisioned my
rules as bowling pins and the goldfinch as a speeding ball, heading down the center line. I can't crack this early in the game, I thought.

“Uhhhhh,” I said. “Actually, I'm not really set up for…I'm in a…kind of….”

It is almost impossible to predict how an impact injury, whether it be from a window or a car, will turn out. Minutes after the injury some birds are raring to go; others are dead. Some have broken bones or spinal injuries along with their head trauma, others appear to have no ill effects. Some will be bruised and in pain but appear to be improving, then three days later they'll die when the blood clot you can't see reaches a certain part of their brain. Many rehabbers keep birds who have suffered head trauma for a period of time after the injury even if they seem to be fine, just as an added safety measure.

I had no local number to give the woman with the goldfinch. Maggie and Joanne were the only bird rehabilitators within an hour of me, and both were at work. I did have a contingency plan for emergencies: I could keep one or two injured songbirds temporarily in pet carriers—which I had collected over the years and stored in a small stacked tower in the garage—in our extra bathroom. I could take the goldfinch, give him a small dose of the anti-inflammatory Maggie had given me, and if he wasn't better in a couple of hours I could take him to Maggie. If he recovered quickly, he could go into the flight cage with the house finch.

“Is driving the bird an hour and a half away an option?” I asked. “Because if not, maybe I could….”

I made a silent vow: it would be only this once.

“Never mind,” I said. “Just bring him over.”

The goldfinch looked like a bird of the tropics, a dazzling combination of deep black and brilliant yellow. I gave him his medicine, put him into a small pet carrier, and left him alone in the extra bathroom for an hour. When I returned he had hopped off the floor of the towel-covered carrier and was sitting up on a perch.

American Goldfinch

“Hey,” said John at dinner that night. “What's that bird doing in the bathroom?”

“There's a bird in the bathroom?” asked Skye. “Can I see him?”

“Is he hurt?” asked Mac. “What kind of a bird is it?”

“It's a goldfinch,” I said. “He hit a window, but he's better now. He has to rest right now, but you can see him tomorrow morning before you go to school.”

“I thought you weren't taking injured birds,” said John.

“I'm not,” I said firmly.

 

The following morning the goldfinch was active and alert, and had eaten all his niger seed and most of his mixed seed, so I released him into the flight cage. The house finch brightened visibly at the sight of another bird, rustling his
feathers and watching closely as the goldfinch surveyed his new surroundings. After ten minutes I left them alone and walked back to the house, just in time to see Maggie getting out of her Jeep.

“Did you get my message?” she asked, reaching into her car and pulling out a small cardboard carrier. “One more for your flight cage. I thought I could drop him off on my way to work—can you help me take off his bandage?”

“No problem,” I said. “Step into my office.”

We went into the extra bathroom, where it would be easy to retrieve the bird should he escape while being handled. As I closed the door Maggie pulled a leather glove out of her jacket pocket, put it on, then started to open the cardboard carrier.

“What have you got in there?” I asked, puzzled.

“A house sparrow,” she replied.

“A
house sparrow
?” I said, grinning. “You want me to get you a whip and a chair?”

“Observe,” she said, holding her gloved hand up, index finger pointing toward the ceiling. Opening the carrier with her other hand, she ceremoniously dipped her index finger into its depths, then slowly removed it. Clamped onto the end was a small brown bird with a bandaged wing, its stout beak determinedly grinding away at the glove, its feet pedaling furiously through the air. Maggie reached into her pocket and pulled out a cotton washcloth, and in one smooth motion enveloped the sparrow in the washcloth and pulled it away from her glove.

“I'd watch this thing if I were you,” she said. “He'll bite your finger off.”

As Maggie cushioned the sparrow inside the washcloth I flipped up one corner and removed the bandage. “Uh-oh,” I said, grimacing at the slightly swollen and hardened wing. “It doesn't look too good.”

“Ouch!” said Maggie, who had just been pinched through the washcloth. “I can take him back to the vet who set it, but I can't get there until the weekend.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “Leave him here and I'll see if I can run him up to
Alan tomorrow. The only thing is…it's a house sparrow. Alan will kill me for bringing him a house sparrow.”

“Maybe we could get some magic markers and disguise it as a goldfinch,” said Maggie.

“Here's where things get tricky,” I said.

For thousands of years groups of humans have arrived in places they don't belong, muscled their way past the native population, taken over the territory, then flooded the area with their own hordes of descendants. Humans who do this are called “settlers.” Occasionally they bring along birds who don't belong, either. When the birds follow the lead of the humans, they are called “invasive species.”

The male house sparrow is a stocky, strikingly patterned bird with a black bib and a thick, formidable beak. His more somberly dressed mate is a member of the LBJs (little brown jobs), the large group of basic brown sparrows between which new birders despair of ever being able to differentiate. Brought over from England somewhere around 1850, house sparrows quickly spread across the United States, preferring areas of human habitation. Both male and female are surprisingly aggressive, especially when it comes to taking over other birds' nests; they will actually kill the nestlings of gentle native species such as bluebirds and swallows—and sometimes the parents as well—earning them the enmity of birders everywhere.

“My anglophilia probably does not include English sparrows,” e-mailed my friend Ed, “but they, too, must individually appreciate some TLC.”

For someone who is as electronically inept as I am I've done surprisingly well by the Internet, which has supplied me with libraries of information and
connected me with many wonderful and helpful people, including one who became a dear friend: Ed Stokes, a nature lover, birder, sailboat designer, and sled-dog enthusiast who, at one point, lived with eighteen Siberian huskies. Ed is also a writer and philosopher who can take any complicated situation and boil it down to one simple, elegant sentence, as he did with my house sparrow conundrum.

“Thanks, Ed,” I wrote back. “It's not that I want to encourage the rotten little bluebird killers, it's just that this one happens to be in my flight cage and has a bad wing.”

At that point it was easy for me to be cavalier. I had not had the experience of building, setting up, and monitoring a field of bluebird houses, hoping to help a species whose numbers are rapidly dwindling, only to check them one morning and find occupant after occupant slaughtered by house sparrows, whose numbers are rapidly increasing. At that point, however, I didn't see a moral quandary; I saw only a single bird in need of care.

The following afternoon I entered the flight cage with a small towel and a cardboard pet carrier. The house finch hopped across several branches and flew to a high limb, while the goldfinch motored back and forth with surprising speed. I turned away from both of them and set my sights on the flightless sparrow, who was on the ground pecking at seeds. Tossing a dark towel over a bird normally causes it to crouch down in the sudden darkness, giving you time to bend over and pick it up. I tossed the towel over the sparrow, and a nanosecond later he sped out from under it and shot over to the other side of the cage.

I left the flight cage and walked over to John's writing cabin, where he was working on his second book. Filled with file cabinets, bookshelves, old record albums, and various eclectic and eccentric memorabilia, the cabin looks like a miniature Adirondack house nestled between two hills of mountain laurel.

“I hate to disturb you,” I said, sticking my head in the door. “But could you help me for a minute? There is no way I can catch this bird by myself.”

Soon we were both in the flight cage, flinging towels and brandishing long-handled nets while the sparrow avoided us with the energy and velocity of a pinball. Finally we held the towels like matadors and, dragging them on the ground, herded him into a corner; faced with the inevitable he hurled himself into the air, came down headfirst in the dirt, and digging furiously, attempted to tunnel his way away from us.

“You have to hand it to them,” said John, shaking his head. “That's why they're taking over the world.”

 

Alan flashed me a grin, closed the door behind him, and looked down at his file.

“So!” he said. “You described our last patient as an ‘adult male house finch with a formerly dislocated left wing, still unable to fly.' Today's patient is…let's see…how did you put it? Here it is: ‘injured bird.' Hmm. A strangely vague description.”

“Vague but accurate,” I said helpfully.

“Care to elaborate?” he asked.

“Compound fracture,” I replied. “Originally brought to another rehabber. Wrapped for two weeks. I took the bandage off yesterday—wing is hard and swollen. Feels like a solid mass.”

“Okay,” he said, putting his hand inside the carrier. “And what sort of bird are we dealing with?”

It was the moment of truth. It was high-stakes poker. I looked him in the eye.

“A little one,” I said.

Alan withdrew his hand and regarded the bird.

“A house sparrow,” he declared. “And it just bit me.”

Alan and his wife, veterinarian Jan Robinson, are both avid birders. They win birdathons, during which teams of birders travel from site to site trying
to identify the most species within a twenty-four-hour period. They bird by ear, sometimes needing only two notes to identify a small warbler otherwise invisible to mere mortals. They are active in their local bird club, of which Alan is a former president. They work to preserve habitat for native species.

They put up bluebird houses.

“The bone is infected,” said Alan, after giving the sparrow a thorough exam. “The only chance he has is if I amputate the wing. I don't know how far it's spread, so even if I take the wing off he could still die of the infection.

“It's up to you,” he finished, giving me a level gaze. “I told you I'd help you and I will. Just tell me what you want me to do.”

Every rehabilitator has his or her own way of dealing with life-or-death decisions. There are hard-liners on both sides: those who feel that it is always kinder to euthanize a wild bird than to take away its freedom, and those who feel that they must try to save every bird no matter how terrible its injury or how miserable its life in captivity will be. The majority fall somewhere in the middle, always trying to assess the situation and the individual, always trying to keep the emotions at bay and do what is best for the bird.

Finding a home for an unreleasable bird is not easy. A captive bird needs space, light, companionship of its own kind, and freedom from pain and fear. Some birds never adjust to captivity and live out their lives as prisoners who have committed no crime. Some birds' injuries require constant attention, which can sometimes be in short supply at a busy wildlife center.

Removing the entire wing from a wild bird is now illegal, although it wasn't when I was trying to decide what to do with the house sparrow. The reasons it is now illegal were valid back then, though: an amputation that close to the body doesn't heal well, and the bird will always be off balance. The sparrow's surgery would be difficult, his recovery painful, and should he survive, his long-term chances were questionable. Recovery would mean isolation, a distressing state for a flocking bird. And if he did recover, he would need a good permanent home with other house sparrows.

On the other hand, he was a feisty little bird and I would be saddened by his loss.

In this case, I was lucky. I didn't have to spend hours agonizing over what to do, weighing alternatives, making a list of pros and cons only to discover that they came out even; it was obvious that putting a wild bird through such a grueling ordeal for a chancy outcome was unfair, that I would be doing it more for myself than for the bird.

I sighed. “Can you put him to sleep?” I asked.

“Sure,” said Alan, picking the sparrow up once again and cradling him gently. He paused. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said.

I drove home, my throat tight. Common, invasive, aggressive, he was still a miraculous creature once capable of flight, a tiny bird I knew only briefly but who left an impression so indelible that years later I can instantly call him to mind.

I remembered a long-ago county fair where I had listened to a wildlife rehabilitator talk about his work. “Wild birds hide their troubles,” the soft-spoken man had said. “By the time we get them, most of them are heading for the edge. What we do is simple: we bring them back, then we let them go.”

He had paused, waiting for the audience's smiling reaction. How easy! How satisfying! Then he delivered the punch line. “The only problems are the exceptions,” he said. “And the exceptions will occur in nearly every case you get.”

Bring them back, then let them go. But there are different ways of letting go.

When I reached my driveway I stopped and waited for the school bus, debating what to tell the kids. How rosy a picture should you paint for a seven-and an eight-year-old? What circumstances warrant a lie? Maybe, I decided, I will just avoid the subject.

“How's the sparrow?” they both asked as they piled into the car.

“I'm sorry,” I said, and told them the truth, carefully explaining the reasons
behind my difficult decision. Mac looked crestfallen; Skye looked at me uncomprehendingly, her eyes welling with tears.

“But Mommy,” she said. “You're supposed to help them, not kill them.”

It took me a moment to respond. “I know, honey,” I said finally. “But sometimes that's the only way I can help them.”

We drove home in silence.