Flyaway (12 page)

“The hawk might catch one of them,” I said. “It's a danger all wild birds have to face. But the hawk has to eat.”

From then on the jays would appear one or two at a time, eat a few bites from the plate, and take off again, but they no longer responded to our loud announcements of fresh food. The grackles and the robins were more confident, but as the summer wound down they too spent more and more time away from the yard. One day three wild adult blue jays came to the feeder, and then days went by without any sightings at all. “Maybe Harry and the gang went off with the grown-ups,” I said, not very convincingly.

I released the others, each time torn between the conflicting desires of protecting the fragile creatures I had come to love and experiencing the secondhand exhilaration of a just-released wild bird. As long as they were capable of living in the wild, there was no decision to be made; I could no more sentence a releasable bird to life in a cage than I could choose to dwell there myself. Yet that didn't stop me from agonizing over their potential encounters with predators, windows, cars, airplanes, pesticides, and plastic fencing, as well as excess heat, cold, rain, snow, fog, and wind. Not to mention possible bouts of loneliness. Or angst.

Romeo's tattered feathers molted and were replaced by beautiful new ones. The little catbird was fast and agile and could easily catch the live moths I trapped each night and released in the flight cage the next morning. I drove him to a perfect spot, a marsh by the Hudson River filled with pokeberries and other catbirds, and opened the carrier. Romeo bolted out and I felt a rush of air, the upward sweep of a long-ago rope swing, and just for a moment I thought I could follow him into the towering oak tree. Then the leaves closed around him and he was gone.

I released Orangina, the finches, and the wrens in the backyard, hoping that the single cardinal would join the resident pair who appeared at the feeder several times a day. Before the week was out I saw Orangina land on a branch right next to the wild male—her beak open, wings vibrating so violently I thought she'd fall from the tree. For the rest of the day I'd see the pair of wild cardinals racing around the house, frantically pursued by the furiously begging Orangina. By the following day they had bowed to the stronger will and were taking turns feeding her, and the faithful pair became a trio.

The waxwings had worked it out. Yin had pursued Yang with a determination so dogged that within a few days Yang was not only allowing her to perch next to him, but on occasion would also ceremoniously feed her a mealworm or
a blueberry. Waxwings live in large flocks, and in order to give a captive-raised waxwing a halfway decent chance of survival you must release it directly into a flock of wild ones. Thanks to my friend Lew Kingsley, who always knows where the birds are, we accomplished this needle-in-a-haystack feat, and Ying and Yang were absorbed into a welcoming flock.

Cedar Waxwings

I found out where the shy, secretive wood thrush had come from, drove him to a forested area two towns away, and let him go. I released the downy woodpecker in the yard, as I kept two suet feeders full, the woods were filled with dead hemlocks, and there were other downies in the area. Last to go was the herring gull.

“I have this vision of releasing the gull on a beach in Nantucket,” I wrote to Ed, “not in a parking lot next to some disgusting burger joint.”

“If you released him on a beach in Nantucket,” Ed replied, “odds are he would immediately start looking for a parking lot next to some disgusting burger joint.”

The kids and I drove the gull back to Burger King on a warm, overcast Saturday morning. When I tossed him into the air he flew strongly upward, made two large circles, and coasted down, landing easily next to the small group of standing gulls. They all gazed at each other and rustled their wings; our gull approached another and gave him a sharp poke with his beak.

“See?” said Mac. “It wasn't just you.”

A car approached, and the group took off into the air. I still wanted them to be skimming over the sea, turning their backs to a gathering nor'easter, and searching the beach for crabs and dead fish. But these aren't the ones I should be worrying about, I thought. The aggressive opportunists are doing just fine. The ones in trouble are the ones no one will ever see in a Burger King parking lot: the black-capped vireo, the piping plover, the golden-cheeked warbler, the spectacled eider, the whooping crane, the California condor, the bobolink, the meadowlark.

There were so few of them left, and I had just saved a common herring gull. I looked up at the circling gulls, who flew just as gracefully over a parking lot
as a condor over a valley, a warbler through a forest, or an eider above a lake. Common or not, I could never begrudge a bird its wings. Should someone bring me an injured black-capped vireo, I decided, I would do my best to save her, too.

Even though I wasn't taking any injured birds.

 

The house finch had been my first songbird, and it was he who was left behind at the summer's end. Although there was no infection, his eye had begun to atrophy; his wing had healed, but not well enough for life in the wild. He had a firm place in my heart. In his own energetic, matter-of-fact way he had dealt with injury and captivity, and had been the supervising adult for more than a dozen fledglings. His close companion was a young female orchard oriole, a lovely bird whose broken wing had not healed well enough for her to ever fly again. Her right wing drooped noticeably, but she was alert and active, and she hopped around the entire flight cage. Unfortunately, I did not have the permits or the facilities to keep unreleasable birds; my rehabilitator's license stated that if I couldn't find a good sanctuary with proper permits willing to accept them, I would have to have them euthanized.

“I'll find them a good home,” I said to John, adding silently, even if I have to drive them to California to do it.

I was the den mother whose den had emptied but who still could not relinquish her hold on her scouts. I thought about the released birds constantly. I worried about them. I was able to keep tabs on some of them, for the birds in our yard were no longer anonymous. When we looked out the kitchen window, it was like looking onto the main street of a small town. Sometimes we'd see a familiar little group of finches, sometimes a robin poking through the bug pit. A trio of cardinals. Grackles perched in the black oak. A downy woodpecker swinging from a suet holder.

I took stock. Despite the work, the stress, and the constant juggling, I felt
as if I was where I was meant to be. After my first summer of home rehab, I couldn't imagine a life outside the bird carousel.

We continued to look for Harry Potter and his siblings, but caught only glimpses of them from time to time. Then one morning John went running and took the trail through a wooded area by a nearby pond, christened “Blue Jay Town” by the kids for its large and noisy population. Hearing a familiar sound he stopped, then looked up to see a small group peering down at him from the top of a tree. He shouted his usual “Hey, you blue jays!” and two of them hopped down for a closer look—something a born-wild jay would rarely do—then they all flew off together. The next day he returned and saw a young one settled firmly on a branch, being fed by another.

“It was Norbert!” said Skye delightedly. “I knew it! They've all moved up to Blue Jay Town, and they're going to live happily ever after.”

In a world filled with all kinds of possibilities, I had no reason to doubt her.

“The femur is fractured,” said Denise. “I had him X-rayed, and it needs to be pinned. But the only vet who can do the surgery is on vacation, and I've called everyone else I know. Do you have a vet who could do it? One of my volunteers could drive the bird right down to you.”

“But Denise!” I said. “I've never taken care of a heron!”

“Quiet, no stress, feed him live fish,” said Denise. “Wear goggles so he can't poke your eyes out.”

The kids had gone back to school. Free all summer, they were now enclosed; with no more baby birds to feed, I had been set free.

But not for long.

Denise Edelson is a long-time rehabilitator in Woodstock, New York. She accepts all kinds of injured wildlife, from opossums to birds to turtles. Whenever she can find a weekend babysitter for her animals she and her husband take off into the Adirondacks to study loons. She has a softly memorable voice and nothing fazes her.

“Let me see what I can do.” I sighed.

Alan was on vacation. Wendy was not due to work at the hospital for three days. A reknowned orthopedist an hour away was booked solid for surgery. I called Maggie.

“Can you rehab a heron?” I asked her.

Maggie burst out laughing. “A heron! Right! Good luck finding someone to take a heron!” she said. “But as far as vets go, try Croton Animal Hospital. Dr. Hoskins and Dr. Popolow are wonderful, and they've always helped me out.”

Dr. Popolow agreed to do the surgery, but the hospital's surgery day was not until Thursday—two days away. I called Denise back, opened my purple three-ring binder, and looked up “Great Blue Herons.”

I had no business taking this bird, as I didn't have the experience or the right facilities. I could drive him to a rehab center several hours south, but I had to be here when the school bus arrived. It seemed as if I were the heron's only chance. I read through the heron information twice, made a checklist, and went to work.

By the time the heron arrived I had dropped his X-ray off at Dr. Popolow's hospital, bought a few dozen live fish, and outfitted the shower in my own bathroom with five-foot phragmites freshly cut from a marsh near my house. My bathroom was quieter and more isolated from the rest of the house than the bathroom in which I had put the gull and the nestlings, and I wanted the stress-prone heron to be as free from disturbance as possible. I fixed the tall reeds to the shower walls with clear packing tape, put rubber mats on the shower floor so he wouldn't slip, and placed a green rubber tub containing a dozen live fish on top of the mat. I plugged our sound machine into the wall and turned it to “Babbling Brook,” then went to dig my ski goggles out of the closet in the garage.

Soon after, I was walking through the house carrying a very large and aggravated heron. The adult great blue is four feet tall, has a six-to seven-foot wingspan, and sports a sharp and powerful beak. My heron information included a diagram showing how to hold the bird so as not to end up with this legendary weapon imbedded in one's eye: one arm encircling the body, the opposite hand firmly grasping the beak. Using this technique I gently put the heron into the shower, noting that he was strong and in good weight. I also noted that he was staggeringly beautiful; a Giacometti with a sword, hard-eyed
and elegantly plumed. Hoping the phragmites made the area look less frightening, I closed the shower door and hurried from the room.

One spring day when I lived in Maine I followed an abandoned logging trail deep into the woods. I heard a series of harsh, guttural croaks and, searching for the source, finally raised my eyes to the tops of the pine trees. Over a hundred feet in the air and silhouetted against the sky were dozens of great blue herons, all guarding huge nests filled with downy chicks, in a scene that struck me as strangely primordial even before I learned that herons (as well as egrets and bitterns, their fellow Ardeidae) have remained essentially unchanged for the last 1.8 million years. They were like a lost order of Druids, ancient and wise, an integral part of the earth and sky and far beyond the understanding of modern humans.

And now I had one in my bathroom.

A relative silence descended on the house. “No running through the living room. No yelling. No going into our bedroom. No loud TV,” I said during dinner.

“Can we breathe?” asked John.

“Only through your noses,” I said.

The following morning his fish were uneaten, a few still swimming under the water but most floating on the surface. Donning my goggles I held the heron, pried open his beak, and slipped several fish down his throat, making sure each one made its way down his long neck. I left quickly, giving him less of an excuse to immediately regurgitate them.

I went outside to feed the house finch and the orchard oriole. Soon the weather would start to turn cold, and I needed to find the two of them a good home. I put a message on the Wildlife Rehab electronic mailing list, and within a few hours had a reply from Leslie Hayhurst, a mailing-list regular and the founder of Genesis Wildlife Sanctuary.

“Sure, I'll take them,” she wrote. “We just built a beautiful new songbird aviary—it's climate-controlled and filled with live trees and has lots of ramps
for the ones who can't fly. They'll have a good life. All you have to do is get them here.”

“Here” was the mountains of North Carolina. Well, I thought, I had vowed to drive the house finch to California, so it could be worse. I put another message on the mailing list: anyone happen to be leaving New England and heading for North Carolina? No replies.

That night I was reading in bed when John came in. “Have you noticed…” he began, then stopped when I grimaced wildly and stabbed my finger toward the bathroom.

“Have you noticed,” he whispered, “that it smells like Sea World in here?”

“I know,” I whispered back. “But I don't have anywhere else to put him. He needs his own building.”

Great Blue Heron

“How long will it take him to recover after the surgery?”

“A few weeks.”

“Hmmm,” he said. “This could get interesting.”

“You're a good egg,” I said.

“I know I am,” he replied. “Just don't put that dinosaur in my office.”

The next morning John and the kids stood in the living room as I carried the heron past them and into the garage, where I would put him in a carrier and drive him to the animal hospital. It was their first sighting, as I had been too worried about his stress level to allow anyone else into the bathroom.

“Wow!” I heard softly. “Look how cool he is!”

At the hospital, Dr. Carol Popolow greeted me with a direct blue gaze and a wide smile, her obvious compassion and enthusiasm for her work instantly putting me at ease. As I would eventually learn, Dr. Popolow will efficiently assess a bird's injury and its chance of recovery, weigh the amount of stress involved in its treatment against the likelihood of its release, and lay it all out in a clear and understandable way. I left the hospital filled with happiness. I had survived my first summer of solo bird rehab, I had found another veterinarian willing to help me, and I was infatuated with great blue herons. On the way home I was thinking about what our bedroom would smell like after several weeks of heron rehab when I noticed a garden supply company, in front of which sat several barn-shaped garden sheds.

“Sure, I guess,” said the owner. “You could drywall it and paint it, then all you'd have to do is run a line up through the floorboards for electricity. Install some lights, and get one of those heaters where you can set the temperature. Where do you live? Yeah, we could deliver it.”

The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. How could I keep the kids quiet for weeks at a time? What if another great blue heron was injured, and there was no one to take it but me? What if someone brought me a killdeer—didn't they also need a perfectly quiet environment away from humans? What did killdeer eat, anyway?

The summer had been expensive, and live fish were not cheap. An 8- by 12-foot garden shed cost a lot of money. I currently had no income and my husband was a freelance writer. How would I pay for everything? This one didn't take long to figure out. I had written successful fund-raising newsletters, I could write one for myself. I could set up a nonprofit corporation. I could write the newsletter during the winter, when things were slower.

I didn't feel myself falling.

It was hard enough for me to believe that great blue herons existed at all, let alone that I had actually kept one in my shower, carried him to the vet, and would be helping him to heal. I was baffled that it had taken me this long to come into physical contact with a creature so awe-inspiring. In a just world there would be a wildlife rehabilitator on every corner, but in this world I had been the heron's only chance. What about all the other birds, for whom I might be
their
only chance? The situation was so unfair. But it could be remedied: all I needed to do was break a few more of my own rules.

I sat down and made lists. (1) People to call for nonprofit advice. (2) People to call for newsletter-publishing advice. (3) People to call for drywalling advice. I returned to my computer and checked my e-mail, where I had no offers to drive a group of unreleasable songbirds to North Carolina. I opened my purple three-ring binder and reread my heron chapter, then opened my yellow three-ring binder and reread my chapter on “Post-Surgical Care.” Just before the kids were due home from school, the phone rang.

“Suzie?” said the voice. “It's Carol Popolow. Hi. Listen, I'm afraid I have some bad news.”

But that's impossible, I thought. How can you have bad news?

“Too much time had elapsed between the injury and surgery, and his ligaments had tightened,” she said. “They pulled the bone so far apart that I couldn't get the two pieces close enough to pin. I pulled with all my strength and I couldn't get them together. I'm sorry—he was such a beautiful bird. But they can't live on one leg. I euthanized him while he was still under anesthesia.”

I had been unprepared for anything but resounding success. “Thank you,” I stammered. “Thank you for everything you did for him. I…I'm really sorry.”

“Me, too,” she said. “I wish we could have gotten him into surgery faster. I'll try again, if the situation comes up.”

I hung up the telephone and the heron flew by the kitchen window, graceful and sinuous, the sound of his wings as strong and steady as the echo of a bass drum, so real that it was only after I watched him go that I realized he had never been there at all. The ring of the telephone made me jump.

“Suzie? It's Jen Bowman. Remember? I brought you the grackle and the waxwing. I heard you have birds who need a ride to North Carolina. My husband Wendell and I love road trips—we'll take them and make a long weekend out of it. I have three unreleasables here at the hospital, and I called Leslie and she said she'd take all five of them. We'll spend Saturday night at her house. She's such a nice woman—this is really going to be fun.”

When the kids hopped down from the school bus I smiled at them, but Mac wasn't buying it. “What's the matter?” he said. “What's wrong?”

“Is it the heron?” asked Skye, looking apprehensive. “Is he dead?”

“Yes,” I said. “He is. He didn't make it through surgery.”

“Ohhh,” said Mac, watching me closely. “I'm sorry.”

“Oh, no!” cried Skye, then saw me blinking rapidly and abruptly switched gears. Linking my arm in hers, she leaned her head against me. “It's going to be okay,” she said.

“Thanks. Thank you both,” I said. “You know, I found a ride for the finch and the oriole.”

“Who's taking them? When are they going?” they asked, peppering me with questions. We walked up the hill to the house, three watchful, careful guardians of one another, each taking a turn being the shoulder to lean on.