Flyaway (8 page)

Breathe in. Feed the nestlings.

Breathe out. Feed the nestlings.

Breathe in. Feed the nestlings.

Breathe out. Feed the nestlings.

Oh, is there more to life?

It was pouring rain, the kids were in day camp, and I was leaving to see Dr. Wendy. Strapped to the backseat was the closeable wicker picnic basket; inside, tucked into various nests, were the current nestlings—two house wrens, a tufted titmouse, and a chipping sparrow. Riding in carriers in the back of the Jeep were a herring gull and a Canada goose.

“A goose!” I'd said to the man who called. “Can't you find any injured flamingos? I only take healthy adult songbirds, but I'd make an exception for a flamingo.”

“What?” he said.

John had not been as easily sidetracked. Appearing just as I was about to back out of the garage, he cast a suspicious look into the car.

“What have you got in there?” he asked.

“Just the nestlings!” I said.

“I don't mean in the basket—I mean in those carriers. Those carriers that seem to be too large for nestlings, unless they're nestling pterodactyls.”

“I promise you,” I said solemnly. “I will never accept a pterodactyl from a member of the public.”

John opened the back door and peered behind the towels covering the carriers. “You're on a slippery slope, aren't you?” he said.

“I'm not keeping the goose,” I explained. “I'm taking them both down to Wendy, and she's going to give the goose to another rehabber. But I have to go, because she's waiting for me. Bye!”

I drove slowly, peering through the rain and following a line of traffic. When I was halfway there, the driver two cars ahead of me hit a large woodchuck. He tapped his brakes briefly, then kept going. The driver directly ahead of me made a wide circle around the woodchuck, who stood, fell over, rose drunkenly, and fell again. I yanked the steering wheel to the right and pulled off the road, watching incredulously as car after car avoided the staggering creature and continued on its way, barely slowing down.

Half of my brain ordered me to pull back onto the road and follow their example. The other half shouted, “Fer Chrissakes,
hurry up before some idiot kills him!”

Cursing, I jumped out of the car, opened the back, and grabbed the blanket covering the gull's crate, also snatching two small cardboard trays that happened to be propped up between the crates. I marched into the middle of the road and threw the blanket over the woodchuck, suddenly realizing that I knew very little about them. I thought furiously, trying to remember the woodchuck questions from my New York State Wildlife Rehabilitation Exam.

• a) opossum
  
• b) red squirrel
  
• c) woodchuck
  
• d) raccoon
  

My grandfather once told me that all knowledge has value, although knowing that woodchucks hibernate in the winter did not seem especially valuable to me as I was standing in the middle of the road. Assuming that if I suddenly grabbed a wild woodchuck he would bite me whether or not he had recently been clobbered by a large car, I swaddled him in the blanket, put one cardboard tray under him and one over him, picked him up like an overstuffed sandwich, and carried him back to the Jeep. Cramming the whole package between the two crates, I slammed the back door shut, going on faith that during the next five minutes the woodchuck wouldn't somehow wiggle out of the blanket and start running laps around the car.

During the short drive to the veterinarian's office I considered my situation. As John had noticed, I wasn't doing a very good job at drawing the line. But there was a terrible shortage of bird rehabbers in my area, and I had never been good at saying no to an animal in distress. It's just a facet of my personality, I decided. Some people are unable to pass a chocolate truffle lying on a table without grabbing it and stuffing it into their mouth, and I am unable to pass a woodchuck convulsing on the road without grabbing it and stuffing it into the back of my car. At that particular moment I reached the office, thus concluding my haphazard psychological self-assessment.

I parked the car, unstrapped the basket, and sprinted across the parking lot, trying to avoid jostling the baby birds as I ran. Reaching the door, I flung myself inside, breathless, disheveled, and dripping wet. Janet looked up from her desk, pursing her lips in a desperate attempt not to laugh.

“Lovely day for a picnic,” she said.

Wendy, ever positive, walked into the waiting room and regarded me with a look of pleasant surprise, as if I had just strolled in wearing tennis whites and holding a mint julep.

“It's not enough that I have a goose and a gull and all these babies,” I told her. “Now I have a
woodchuck
.”

“Room number one,” said Wendy, without missing a beat. “Need help bringing him in?”

A minute later I hurried back in through the front door, balancing the woodchuck sandwich between two soggy cardboard trays.

“Hey!” caroled Janet as I disappeared into the examination room. “You want some mayo on that groundhog?”

Wendy closed the door and pulled at the blanket, searching for the beast within. An opening appeared and the woodchuck burst into view, blood dripping from his nose, chattering in what I would term an aggressive way even though at the time I had no basis for comparison. Wendy calmly grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, felt around for broken bones, shone a penlight into his eyes, and finally announced that he looked fine but could probably use a shot of cortisone. Depositing the woodchuck gently on the floor in the corner, she tossed the blanket back over him and left the room.

I opened the picnic basket and fed the nestlings, keeping a wary eye on the blanket in the corner of the room. I'd fed the last one and was closing the lid when the blanket started moving ominously. Should I act casual, I wondered, or run back into the waiting room and hide behind Janet? Get ahold of yourself, I told myself sternly. Wildlife is wildlife; it's just this one is huge, hairy, and has giant rodent fangs instead of a beak.

Wendy returned with a hypodermic and a large cardboard box. As soon as she bent down and gave the injection, the woodchuck shot out from under the blanket and ran straight toward me. Leaping into the air, I did a lively Mexican hat dance, silently vowing that someday I would rewrite the New York State Wildlife Rehabilitation Exam with more pertinent questions:

• a) yes
  
• b) no
  
• c) not if the rescuer has explained to the woodchuck that
  she is a bird rehabilitator and doesn't do mammals.
  

Wendy intercepted the woodchuck, deposited him into the large cardboard box, and covered the box with my blanket. “There we go!” she said cheerfully. “Now—who's next?”

The goose and the gull both had broken wings. The rehabber Wendy had contacted was a kind woman named Marylyn Eichenholtz, a mammal rehabber who had agreed to provide temporary care for the goose until she could pass her along to a waterbird rehabber up north. That left me with the herring gull, normally a big strapping creature with wide yellow eyes and a bad attitude. This one was thin and weak, having been grounded in a parking lot for two days before someone rescued him. This did not prevent him from methodically biting my hand at every opportunity; it just meant that, at this point, his bite didn't hurt.

“That'll change,” promised Wendy. “Believe me, you'll know when he's starting to feel better.”

After both birds had been treated and their wings wrapped, Wendy lifted the blanket and regarded the woodchuck.

“I would bring him back where you found him and let him go,” she said. “Unless you're really dying to take him home.”

“No,” I said. “Believe it or not, I'm drawing the line.”

I made my way through the waiting room, carrying the gull's crate and the basket of nestlings, while Wendy followed behind me with the woodchuck. “Suzie!” cried Robin Sista, the other receptionist. “Janet tells me you're doing mammals! Can you take a coyote?”

I drove back to where I had found the woodchuck, pulled off the road, and squinted through the downpour at a heavily wooded steep slope. This couldn't have happened next to a nice level field on a sunny day, I thought grumpily. I opened the back of the Jeep, picked up the woodchuck's box, trotted across the road, and began staggering up the slope, trying to maintain enough momentum to keep me moving upward but not so much that I would lose my balance and somersault, box and all, down onto the road—where, no doubt, cars would make a wide circle around me and continue on their way. I finally slowed
to a stop and, gasping, set the box down in the mud. Through the drone of the rain I could hear the sound of angry chattering.

I pointed the box uphill, tipped it over, and pulled the blanket away. The woodchuck bolted out, took a few strides, then made a U-turn and started galloping back down toward the road.

“%$@$&*!” I shouted. “You %@$#(# &%*#% &%*$#@!”

I raced after him until the ground gave way and I found myself sliding. The woodchuck looked to the side and found that the human he had spent most of the afternoon trying to get away from was mudsurfing beside him, wobbling dangerously and howling like a beagle. He slammed on the brakes just as I hit an exposed root; eventually I rolled to a stop just short of the road. I looked up groggily and watched as the woodchuck loped up the hill, paused for a brief moment, and disappeared into the woods.

I looked into the cardboard box, where a beautiful young black-billed cuckoo lay bloodied and gasping for breath.

Once again the bird had ended up with me by default. The finder lived less than ten minutes away and had been given my number by the local Audubon sanctuary.

“Wait a minute,” I had interrupted. “How did they know I was doing this? I didn't tell them.”

“Got me,” the man replied. “Somebody told them.”

I gave him three other numbers, but it was a Sunday afternoon and he had been unable to reach anyone.

“Look,” I said when he called me back. “The bird needs a certain kind of antibiotic, and I don't have it.”

“Can you get it?” he asked. “If I can bring the bird to you, I'll drive to wherever you want and pick up the medicine.”

It wasn't that easy. The bird needed a wide-spectrum antibiotic sold through veterinary supply companies, not through regular drugstores. No local veterinary offices were open on Sunday. The closest twenty-four-hour animal emergency groups were at least an hour away, and they weren't going to hand out drugs to a total stranger without a call from a licensed veterinarian. I called the four numbers I had given the finder, leaving the same
desperate plea on each machine: “Please call me the second you get this message!”

The doorbell rang, and I opened it to find a middle-aged man and his teenaged son. I invited them in, told them to wait, carried the box into the bathroom, and shut the door; that way if the bird suddenly flew out when I opened the box, he couldn't go far. I pulled back the lid and winced, then felt a hot surge of anger. Although I was relatively new to songbird rehabilitation, I was no stranger to the one-sided war between birds and outdoor cats.

Of all the ways human beings casually slaughter “protected” wildlife, letting domesticated cats outside is by far the most egregious. And the most easily shrugged off. People who wouldn't dream of taking a shotgun and blasting a bird out of a tree let their cats outside, which accomplishes the exact same thing but in a slower and more horrifying way. “Don't scream at these people and call them names,” I remembered a rehabber friend telling me. “There's a chance for education here.”

I walked deliberately back into the living room. “Why do you let your cat go outside?” I asked.

“Cats,” he said. “We have six.”

“And they all go outside?” I said, more loudly than I meant to.

“We can't keep them inside,” the man replied. “They'd tear up the screens.”

“So instead you let them go outside, where they tear up the birds.”

“Well,” he said philosophically. “It's all part of nature.”

“Really!” I said. “Do you feed your cats?”

“Of course.”

“Then how is that a part of nature? If a wild animal doesn't catch his own food, he starves to death. If a housecat doesn't catch anything, it goes home and eats Little Friskies. Most cats don't even eat what they kill.”

“True, but…”

“If a car hits your cat and it drags itself home, do you let nature take its course or do you take it to the vet?”

“She's got you there, Dad,” said the son.

“The cats don't always hurt the birds,” said the man. “Sometimes they just play with them and let them go.”

“Oh, my God,” I said, fighting the urge to lure the man into the driveway and run him over with my Jeep. “Cats' mouths and claws are crawling with bacteria. All a cat needs to do is put one tiny little nick into a bird and it's a dead bird, only it'll take her two days to die. If it's springtime, she'll die and all the babies who are waiting for her in their nest will starve to death.”

“That bird we just gave you?” said the son. “One of our cats caught it and brought it into the kitchen. One cat had it and the others were trying to grab it away from him.”

After giving his son a quick look of irritation, the man unwillingly looked back at me, like a child standing in front of a principal.

“Can you save the bird?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “I don't know how badly she's been hurt. I'm going to let her rest before I examine her, and meanwhile I'll try to find some antibiotics.”

While the man and his son waited in the kitchen, I tried my last resort.

“Wendy?” I said into the phone. “I'm so sorry to call you at home, but…”

“Don't be silly!” she said. “That's why I gave you my number! What's the trouble?”

A few minutes later I returned to the kitchen and handed the man an address.

“Do you know where that road is?” I asked. “About a mile from the turnoff you'll see a yellow mailbox on the right. The antibiotics will be in there.”

“Great,” said the man. “We'll be right back.”

At the door, the son hesitated. “Maybe I could talk to my mom,” he said. “But she doesn't care about birds.”

I smiled at him. “It's worth a try,” I said.

Songbird populations are plummeting. The hardy, opportunistic species that adapt well to human interference are holding their own, but the others are
not so lucky. The two greatest threats to songbirds are habitat destruction and outdoor cats. According to the American Bird Conservancy (www.abcbirds.org), there are 90 million pet cats in the United States, and according to one poll, only 35 percent of them are kept exclusively indoors, even though 65 percent of people polled believe that keeping cats indoors is safer and healthier for the cat. During an eighteen-month period, a single cat roaming a wildlife experiment station killed over 1,600 birds and small mammals. A study in England showed that cats wearing bells killed more birds than cats without them; during a study in Kansas, a free-roaming declawed cat killed more birds than the cats with claws. And in addition to all the pet cats out there killing wildlife, there are between 60 and 100 million feral cats, which can have up to three litters of kittens per year. A study in a newsletter published by the California Academy of Sciences concluded that the combined population of outdoor cats kills more than
3 billion birds per year
, and the study was conducted
over ten years ago
.

Those who profess to love the cats they let outside ignore the fact that the average life span of an indoor cat is fifteen to nineteen years, while the life span of cats allowed outside is two to three years. Outdoor cats fall prey to cars, animal attacks (including dogs, wildlife, and other cats), human abuse, poisoning, traps, and a host of diseases, including rabies. Those who “love” their cats might want to show it by keeping them inside, where they are safe and secure. And perhaps those who profess to “love” nature shouldn't advertise their hypocrisy by allowing their pets to slaughter the dwindling wildlife populations around them.

I returned to the cardboard box and quietly opened the lid. The young cuckoo lay on her side, still and lifeless.

When the doorbell rang I took a deep breath, trying to control my rage and frustration. I opened the door, where the man and his son waited once again. “Here are the antibiotics,” said the man, handing me the box.

“Come in,” I said. “Can you wait a minute?”

I left them for a moment and returned holding the cuckoo. Cradling her
gently, I lifted one wing to reveal a deep bloody gash in the delicate pearl gray of her side; following the line of her wing, I showed them where the bones were broken. I parted the soft brown feathers on her back, exposing two deep punctures, and on her leg, where skin and tendons were torn and mangled. I looked up; father and son were staring fixedly at the bird.

“Imagine if you were holding one of your cats the way I'm holding this bird,” I said, “and it was your neighbor's dog who did it. What would you do?”

“I'd sue them,” blurted the man.

The boy pulled his eyes away from the cuckoo and looked at his father.

“Getting those antibiotics was a nice gesture,” I said. “But if you're going to keep letting your cats out, it was meaningless and this bird died for nothing. If you're trying to teach your son responsibility, then keep your cats inside. It will be difficult at first, but they'll learn to deal with it.”

“Thank you,” the man mumbled, and turned to leave. I stood on the front steps as they got into their car. The boy closed his door and slumped against it, his face turned away. I watched as they drove slowly down the driveway, my heavy hopes for the future of a small group of songbirds all resting on the slender shoulders of a teenaged boy.