Flyaway (14 page)

I called Paul Kupchok, the naturalist, educator, and rehabilitator who, back before his semi-retirement, ran the wildlife program at Green Chimneys School. One of the tenets of this widely heralded nonprofit organization in Brewster, New York, is that children with emotional, behavioral, or learning difficulties can benefit from animal-assisted therapy. The school has farm animals from all over the world and a renowned raptor program. They also have large raptor enclosures—which I don't have.

“He's fine for now,” I said to Paul, “but pretty soon he's going to be bouncing off the walls. Would you be able to take him then?”

“Sure,” said Paul. “I love peregrines. You called Albany?”

When a New York State rehabilitator receives a member of a state-listed Endangered Species, the rehabber must contact the Endangered Species Unit of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) and let them know. If the bird is listed as Federally Endangered, the rehabber must also contact the U.S. Fish & Wildlife (USF&W) Service. The NYSDEC issues state licenses and USF&W issues federal permits; ignoring either of these agencies, or even worse, making them mad, can result in dire consequences for the rehabber.

“Ahhhhhh, jeeeeeez,” I croaked. “I forgot. I have a week, don't I?”

“You're in trouble!” said Paul in a cheerful voice.

Peregrines had been taken off the Federal Endangered Species List, but were still listed as endangered in New York, so in short order I was on the phone with Barbara Loucks of the NYSDEC Endangered Species Unit.

“I thought I had a week to call,” I finished lamely.

“A week!” she said. “Try forty-eight hours!”

I stopped: the red flag was waving in front of the bull. I was being dissed by an Authority Figure, my nemesis since childhood. Should I have spent the past week reading the fine print on my #@*!%* license, I wanted to shout, or making sure the damned bird didn't die?

I took a deep breath. “I'm sorry,” I said. And oddly enough, I actually meant it. The peregrine currently residing in my bathroom was a genie from a bottle, a phoenix who had crashed to earth and risen again, a wild creature of such spellbinding beauty and ability that merely being in his presence took my breath away. I knew he couldn't stay here for long, but I suddenly realized that I would say or do anything to guarantee those few extra days in his company.

“Suck-up!” screamed the little voice in my head.

I had to have better facilities. What if another peregrine was injured, and there was no one to take it but me, and the bathroom was already occupied?

“John,” I said. “I need to buy one of those garden sheds so I can turn it into a clinic and get the birds out of the house.”

“Really,” he said, looking pained.

“I need to pay for it up front, then I'm setting up a nonprofit and asking for donations.”

“But what happened to the ‘no injured birds' rule?”

“I don't know,” I said. “It came crashing down, like the Berlin Wall. But, really, it will be fine—it will be a small clinic, and I'm only one person so I can do only so much. I can't take in that many birds. Think about it—isn't that peregrine the most amazing creature you've ever seen? And what would have happened to him if I hadn't been here?”

We tramped around outside, trying to figure out where the best spot for the shed would be, settling on the area between John's office and the flight cage. If the shed were placed back-to-back with the office, we could run a thick extension cord from the office's outside outlet and up into the shed. The shed would be in a quiet area away from the house and only a few steps from the flight cage. There was only one problem. “How are we going to get it back here?” asked John.

“I'll figure it all out,” I said brightly. I returned to the house, picked up the phone, and started dialing.

First, I called Lew Kingsley, arborist, naturalist, veteran birder, and local curmudgeon, who always knows where the birds are and had located the waxwing flock into which we released Yin and Yang.

“What do you want now?” he said. “More cedar waxwings?”

I described the situation. “Oh, fine,” he said, “but how do you think you're going to get it back there?”

“Lew!” I exclaimed. “That's what I'm calling you for!”

“Oh! Right. Well, you get some big rollers and a bunch of pulleys. You put the rollers under the shed, and you run a rope around it and then around that hemlock by the parrot cage, and you just pull it forward. Then you run the rope around that big oak by John's office, and you pull
that
forward. Just keep inching it forward. It'll work.”

“Can you help me, if I get the shed here in a few days?”

“Sure. No problem.”

Next, I called John Cronin, once the Hudson Riverkeeper, a long-time environmental crusader wise to the ways of nonprofits. “It's such a tiny operation,” I told him. “It's just me. I don't want to expand. Is it worth it to try to set up a 501c3?”

“Yes,” said John, who neither minces words nor sits on the fence. “Absolutely. It's not as hard as you think, but you need a lawyer to help you set it up. Do you know Bob Bickford?”

I called Bob Bickford, a retired lawyer known for his generosity and community-minded spirit. “That sounds like a wonderful idea,” said Bob. “Sure, I'll help you. I'll e-mail you some material. You need to pick a board of directors, usually five to seven people.”

“Would you be on my board of directors?” I asked.

“I could do that,” he said agreeably.

I called Randi Schlesinger, a graphic designer who lives at the horse farm down the road. Randi not only has a gift for finding the most arresting image-
typeface combinations, but she is a dedicated greenie and animal lover and has the heart of a philanthropist.

“Randi!” I said. “Can I hire you? I'm setting up a nonprofit for my bird rehab operation and I need to create a newsletter. Something simple. I can supply the copy, but computers scare the life out of me.”

“Wow!” said Randi. “That is so cool! I'll bet we can come up with something really eye-catching. I'll tell you what—you just pay for the printing and the rest I'll donate. Because it's a
really
good cause.”

I called Mark Kristiansen, who can build or fix anything. “Sure, I could drywall a shed,” he said. “Let's see. I could start a week from Wednesday. Good for you?”

I called the garden supply company and arranged to have the shed I wanted delivered. I checked off the list I'd made, started another, then served Pancho a quail (a peregrine delicacy), a frozen box of which I had ordered through the Internet.

After my conversation with the Endangered Species Unit I became a model rehabber, faithfully calling Barbara Loucks with weekly progress reports, feeling less like a suck-up after being roundly chewed out by a fellow rehabber.

“You didn't call DEC for a week?” she exclaimed. “What's the matter with you? It's an Endangered Species! They want the best possible care for the bird—if they don't know you, how can they be sure you're not going to put a feeding tube down his windpipe?”

When the epoxy on Pancho's beak flaked off and it split once again, I took digital photos of his operation and sent them to Barbara via e-mail. Along with colleague Dr. Mary Wallace and veterinary technician Shirley Fogelquist, Wendy put the peregrine under anesthesia and then put a hole through the top of the beak, where the tissue was dead, and inserted a wire. She twisted the wire enough to draw the two sides of the beak together, snipped off the ends of the wire, and covered the whole thing with epoxy. This time it held, and a week later Wendy added a bit more epoxy and filed it into a point, allowing Pancho to have a temporarily functional beak.

Peregrine Falcon

Meanwhile the patient continued to improve. No longer content to hop from log to log on the bathroom floor, he'd jump up onto the towel-covered toilet and eye the window ledge with more than casual interest. Convinced that he was destined to slip off the ledge, fall behind the toilet, and break his neck, I banished him from the bathroom floor and instead put him in an extra-large dog crate with several perches. This seemed to ratchet his energy level up several notches. Normally when I picked him up and placed him on the scale for his daily weight check he stood casually, wearing a slightly bemused expression. Now, as soon as I lifted him out of the crate he screamed at me in his goshawk-crossed-with-seagull voice and bicycled his legs so frantically I had to put him down on the floor. He'd glare at me, rattle his feathers defiantly, then trot over to the scale and hop up by himself.

The day he started eating from a dish instead of my tweezers I committed an
act of hubris that even now makes me shudder. As I ambled through the house I actually thought to myself:
you're a pretty decent rehabber
. This is akin to spitting in the face of the rehabber gods, and it didn't take long for them to retaliate.

I had put the crate on my bed so that Pancho could get some afternoon sun. I walked into the bedroom and the crate door was ajar. I must not have locked the gate securely. Pancho was gone.

I turned cold. I imagined the peregrine knifing through the house, grabbing a parrot in each foot; I envisioned Mario begging for his life by singing “Rainy Night in Georgia” with extra pathos. I shot into the living room, completely distraught, and shouted to the kids.

“Oh, my God, Mac and Skye! Pancho's gone!”

“No, he's not,” said Skye, without even looking up from her drawing. “He's sitting up on the bedroom door. I thought you were letting him have some exercise.”

As I raced from the room it occurred to me that my seven-year-old daughter hadn't thought twice about finding a fairly large carnivorous bird loose in the house. My Parent-o-Meter took another nosedive.

I found Pancho perched contentedly on the top of the door.
“¿Cómo está mi pájaro guapo?”
I asked. He looked down at me and cocked his head: anything good on the menu?

The day the shed was delivered John and I watched as a large flatbed truck rumbled slowly up our driveway, did a three-point turn, and backed up toward the house. Two men eased the shed off the truck and onto the top of a small embankment, the very beginning of our lawn. Still to go was fifty feet across the lawn, over a small retaining wall onto a lower level, then 120 feet along a long, sloping, rocky path to the back of John's office.

I ran into the house to call Lew. “You're not going to believe this,” he said, “but a big job I've been waiting two months for just came through. If you can wait about five days from now, I'll be there to help you.”

I relayed the information to John. “I guess we can just leave it here until then,” I said.

“It's supposed to start raining on Sunday,” he said. “For a couple of days. It'll be a mudhole. We can't wait.” He paused. “I'll do it.”

The shed was eight feet wide by twelve feet long and nine feet high.

“What do you mean, you'll do it?” I demanded. “
It weighs two thousand pounds.”

It took him almost three days. John bought six round plastic pipes eight feet long to serve as rollers and a long, heavy pole to act as a lever. Our friend Robert helped him to get the shed over the retaining wall, but aside from that, John worked alone from 7 in the morning until 6 at night, sliding the shed forward inch by inch, refusing all offers of help. Occasionally he would appear in the doorway, covered with sweat and dirt, and ask me to lean on the shed while he slid another roller beneath it. I would finish my small task, then insist that he let me provide him with further assistance.

“Nope,” he'd say. “Go away.”

Halfway into the third day I followed him down the rocky path and there was the shed, nestled perfectly against the back of the office.

“There you go,” he said.

As much as I wanted Pancho to be the shed's first guest, it was not to be. He had grown even stronger and more energetic, and the turning point came later that afternoon when I opened the crate door and he hopped out onto my arm. He looked me in the eye, then hopped up onto my head. “Hey, get off me!” I ordered, grabbing him and putting him back in the crate. “No bird hats.”

He was ready for an outdoor flight, and he had become too attached to me. I called Paul. “It's time for him to go,” I said, fighting the quaver in my voice. He had been with us for three weeks.

The next morning I told the kids I was taking him to Green Chimneys. “You mean no more mouse guts?” said Mac.

Paul had a small enclosure ready, built next to the side of a building and protected from the wind. It was beautifully constructed, with evenly spaced
wooden slats and perches of varying height and dimension. When I took Pancho out of his carrier he surveyed his new surroundings, then stared intently into my face.

“Look at the way he looks at you,” said Paul.

Paul kept me informed. He taught Pancho to wear jesses, the soft leather leg straps worn by falconry birds, and to perch quietly on his glove. He taught him to chase a lure swung on a long line, hoping that these falconry techniques would ready the bird for his eventual release by increasing his speed and agility. But although Pancho could swoop through the air in pursuit of the lure, he couldn't catch it; each time he would overshoot it, landing a foot or so beyond his target. Paul began to suspect that the blow that had split his beak had also damaged his eyesight.

Paul took him to an avian eye specialist. The exams proved inconclusive. After several months there was no sign of beak regrowth, so Paul called two of the country's top raptor veterinarians. They consulted with a friend of Paul's, a surgeon who worked at a local hospital, who then invited a dental surgeon to brainstorm whether it would be possible to create a prosthetic beak. The verdict was that no artificial substance could withstand the constant wear and tear normally endured by a raptor's beak.

I called Barbara with the news. Paul agreed to provide him with a permanent home.

 

A little over a year later I would return to Green Chimneys with a recovering redtail who needed some time in a large flight cage before release. “How's the peregrine?” I asked.

“He's fine,” said Paul. “Stop by and say hello to him before you go.”

After the redtail had been released into the big flight cage I wandered down the bamboo-edged path to a cluster of roomy raptor enclosures. There was
Pancho, settled comfortably on a high perch. His coloring was a bit lighter, as he was heading into his adult plumage. His beak, still split, was serviceable but far from perfect.

I felt my throat tighten. It wasn't what I had wanted for him. I thought of all the people who had worked so hard to rescue and restore him to health; it wasn't what any of us had wanted for him. Perhaps one day he would be part of a captive breeding program, and his descendants would fly freely over the Hudson River. Pancho himself would have a comfortable life. He would never again know hunger, never again lie injured and alone. But he would never live the way he was born to live, with nothing but the sky before him.

I looked in. He glanced at me impassively, then looked away. It won't matter if he doesn't remember me, I told myself. It all happened a long time ago.

“¡Hola, Panchito!
” I said softly. “
¿Cómo está mi pájaro guapo? ¿Te sientes mejor?”