Flyaway (23 page)

“I'm calling you from my office,” said the woman's voice. “We have a deck here, and there's a bird on it and he won't move.”

“What kind of bird is it?” I asked.

“I don't know,” she said. “It's brown. Maybe a pigeon or a wren or something.”

Hmm, I thought grouchily. Maybe a kiwi or an ostrich or something. It's either a pelican or a spotted owl—hard to tell from this angle.

“Can somebody bring him to me?” I asked.

“Sorry,” she said. “We're all working, and we can't leave.”

“All right, I'll come over and get him. Can you put him in a box?”

“I'm certainly not going to touch it!”

“Is there anyone there who can put him in a box?”

“Nobody here will touch it.”

“Oh, come on,” I said, hoping to shame her into it. “Is there
a man
around there who can do it?”

“There's a man standing right here next to me,” she replied, “and he won't touch it, either.”

By the time I arrived someone had managed to get the bird into a box. Expecting a pigeon, I peeked in. It was a yellow-billed cuckoo, the first one I had seen up close. It was a beautiful bird, tall and graceful looking, with a white
chest, brown back, boldly striped tail, and a slightly curved beak. Unless she had simply dropped from the sky onto the deck, it seemed logical to conclude that she had flown into the large sliding glass door.

I set her up in a reptarium in the shed, then readied a carrier for Danielle. It had taken some doing to find a home for the friendly mallard. I wanted her to have the company of both ducks and humans, but humans only up to a point: petting zoos were out. My meandering phone-call trail took more than the few days I had promised John, but it finally produced results. Sean Castellano, a rehabber an hour north of me who took in deer, raptors, assorted waterbirds, and miscellaneous stragglers, agreed to take Danielle.

“We have lots of ducks, quite a few mallards,” he said. “There's always people around, so she can have company if she wants it. Otherwise she can hang out with the ducks.”

The kids and I drove to Sean's. “I don't want her to go,” said Mac, stroking Danielle's beak through the bars of her carrier. “I'm going to miss her.”

“I know you will,” I said sympathetically. “But living her whole life in our house is no life for a duck. She needs a big pond. She needs duck buddies.”

“Look!” cried Skye. “Look at all the ducks!”

There were mallards, a pintail, and two mergansers; several large domestic ducks, a few Canada geese, a couple of greylags, and a swan. “There's a wood duck!” said Skye. “Just like Daisy but all grown up!” Some of them floated on the pond, some picked through the area near the barn, some drowsed in the sun. All looked quite content.

Sean came out of the barn and greeted us. “We'll keep an eye on her,” he said to the kids. “Don't worry—she'll have a good home.”

We walked down to the edge, Skye opened the carrier, and Mac lifted Danielle out and put her on the grass. She dabbled at their legs, then caught sight of the pond. Soon she was doing barrel rolls in the water, luxuriating in what she made clear was far superior to a bathtub or a plastic pool. She was chased briefly by one of the mallards, then one of the domestic ducks; she swam
quickly away from each of them, and peace resumed. When Sean returned to the barn we gathered up the carrier and walked slowly toward the car, wondering if Danielle would follow us. Danielle, however, had no intention of leaving the water. When we finally reached the car she was floating tranquilly, not far from the wood duck.

“I hope you guys aren't too sad,” I said on the way home.

“Some ice cream would help,” said Skye.

The summer wound down. Had I been hired to create the sound track for a wildlife rehabilitator documentary, I would have recorded the wails and groans of exhausted rehabbers falling apart. “Aggghhhh,” croaked Jayne when I called her to tell her I was sending someone with an injured woodpecker to her. “I swear to you, I'm not going to make it to the end of the summer. I had two volunteers scheduled for Saturday and neither one of them showed up and I had forty-nine fledglings to feed. Halfway through the day I sat down and started crying. I swore I was going to quit, that this would be my last summer. But guess what? My chimney swifts are all flying! I throw them mealworms and they catch them in the air and then they just keep swooping around! You would die if you saw them—they are the most beautiful things in the entire world.”

We chatted about our bird triumphs, our bird disasters, and our mental health. “Compared to you, I'm perfectly sane,” said Jayne. “You're doing this with kids.”

“I'm releasing all these birds,” I said. “Sometimes I wonder if I should release myself.”

“Forget it!” said Jayne. “You'll be out there having a great time and you'll hit a window or get attacked by a damned Cooper's hawk, and somebody will pick you up and put you in a box and bring you to me. And I'm too friggin' tired to take care of you.”

I released the crows when the kids were at day camp and John was working, as Lo and Behold were skittish around other people and I didn't want them flying away in a panic. When I opened the door, the three of them flew into the
trees and perched, heads swiveling, while I watched, willing myself to a state of calm. I thought of Lo jumping into the water dish, of Behold hopping up and down in place, of Nacho tracing my face with his beak. Something could happen and I would never see them again. Nacho coasted to the ground next to me, fluffed out all his feathers, and soaked up the sun, beak open, eyes half closed. Eventually he had enough, slapped his feathers down, and took off into the trees.

I lay back against the hill, cushioning my head with my arm. I should get up and make sure they're all right, I thought, just before I fell asleep.

 

“Mom,” said Mac. “I need a guitar.”

“You
need
a guitar?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I really do. I can't stop thinking about when I was playing Jack's guitar. I just…I just need to play a guitar.”

Mac's cousin Jack had appeared at a family gathering with an acoustic guitar, playing several classical pieces and finishing up with “Stairway to Heaven.” Mac had watched, mesmerized. Jack handed him the guitar and taught him some chords, and this was the result.

“Guitars are expensive,” I said. “Let me talk to Dad about it.”

“A guitar!” said John. “School is about to start, and he's going to be busy. He can wait for Christmas. It's nice that he wants a guitar, but there's a good chance that he's going to play it for a month and decide he's sick of it.”

“He won't.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he doesn't just want it, he
needs
it,” I said.

A week later Mac and I were on our way to the music store, after I had placated Skye with a bag of new clothes. “I've gone out on a limb for you,” I told him. “If you play this thing for a month and then quit, my credibility's out the window.”

“Don't worry,” he said. “I'm not going to quit.”

It was an electric Fender, a good starter guitar that came packaged with its own amplifier. Mac quickly discovered how to use the Internet to learn songs, and for hours at a time I would hear notes and chords floating down from behind his closed door. “Come on!” I called. “The fledglings are all gone—I'm free! Let's get Daddy out of his office and go to Sunny Pond!”

“Let's go!” cried Skye, rushing down in her bathing suit.

“But I'm just in the middle of figuring out this chord,” called Mac.

Sunny Pond was at the end of a long, hidden dirt road. It was filled with water weeds, and one had to keep swimming; if you paused for long enough near the edges, the odds were good you would emerge sporting several small leeches. But the leeches were easy to pull off and the pond was an oasis, surrounded by thick forest, tranquil and beautiful. Diving into the water, we all swam toward a jutting rock just large enough to accommodate us. I eased through the water using a slow breaststroke, watching the water striders fan out in front of me like a tiny herd of wildebeest on a liquid Serengeti.

“Wait!” cried Skye. “You want to play Not It?”

That night I called my aunt Sue Tyrie, who runs her own preschool, gives seminars on dealing with children of all ages, and has always been my childcare advice lifeline. She listened silently while I gave a garbled account of my last two summers, most of which was familiar territory to her.

“…and then we went to Sunny Pond and it was so nice and we haven't been there all summer, and I'm afraid I'm depriving the kids of all this stuff because I'm always busy and feeding babies or picking mealworms out of tanks or taking care of some horribly wounded bird. Do you think I'm a bad mom?” I finished, with a heavy sigh.

“How bad can you be if you're asking the question?” she replied.

“Pretty bad?” I asked.

“If this is what you love to do, I would not give it up,” she said. “But I would find a way to cut down the number of birds you take in. The babies are the hardest, right? Can you give them up for a couple of years, until the kids are older?”

“Well, I could…but where would they go?”

“They managed before you started, I guess they'll manage if you stop.”

I filed this idea away, as I would not have to address it directly until the following spring.

 

The kids started school. Each morning after they left I walked outside and greeted Nacho, who waited for his breakfast in one of the hemlocks near the parrot's outdoor flight. He would land near my feet, ready for a bite to eat, a game, and a head scratch; close by were Lo and Behold, always watching from above but with no intention of coming down until I had left the vicinity. None of the disasters I was sure awaited them had come to pass—at least not yet. With the summer over my bird population went down and I could spend time sitting alone on the rocky outcropping above the flight cage, notebook and binoculars in hand, watching as the crows explored, interacted with one another, and formed tentative connections with passing wild crows. It was blissful.

I cared for the other birds, greeted the kids when they came home from school, helped with homework, and wondered if any studies had been done on the stress level of wildlife rehabilitators. Late one afternoon I was sitting on the deck, staring at the sky and thinking about preparing dinner, when Tanya arrived with a skeletal great blue heron.

I could see no underlying cause for his emaciation, no broken bones, no open wounds. His rescuer had found him at the edge of a pond in a public park, barely able to stand. He could have been poisoned by lead or mercury, or had a heavy parasite load; but in the end it wouldn't matter unless I could bring him back from the brink of starvation.

In a perfect world I would have put him in the shed, filled up a rubber tub with live fish, and left him alone. But when I put him down he collapsed, too weak to raise his head.

Tri-State Bird Rescue in Delaware has developed an effective emaciation mix for waterbirds that can be pureed in a blender, then frozen. I pulled out a plastic container of the mix from the freezer, defrosted it, and calculated how much the heron could take, measuring out a little less just to be safe. Drawing it up into a large syringe, I attached a very long tube, then realized that John wouldn't be home for an hour.

“Mac!” I called. “Can you help me?”

You need four hands to tube a heron: one to hold the bird's neck straight, one to keep his beak open, one to thread the tube down his throat, one to push the plunger on the syringe, and one to make sure the tube doesn't come flying off the syringe when the liquid is ejected. Well, maybe five hands. Six, if you count the occasional straightening of the blindfold I always place around a heron's eyes so he can't see the monsters who are manhandling him.

Mac was unfazed. Wearing a large pair of ski goggles he calmly and quietly followed my whispered directions, reacting only with the occasional widening of his eyes. We finished and quickly left the darkened shed.

“Wow,” said Mac. “What an amazing bird.”

“We make a good team,” I replied. “Can you help me again in a little while?”

John arrived home and reminded me that a babysitter was actually coming to our house after dinner, allowing us to join Alan and his wife Jan for a drink in a nearby town. “You know how hard it's been to schedule something with them,” said John, when I protested that I couldn't leave the heron. “We're not even going for dinner! The heron should be settled by then, shouldn't he?”

As I readied another round of tubing mixture I drew up the full amount. Mac and I repeated our procedure, but before it had all been administered, a stream of the mixture ran from the side of the heron's beak. I gasped and pulled the tube out. I must have miscalculated the amount of liquid the heron could take, and it had backed up. Odds are he had aspirated some of it into his lungs, and would eventually develop pneumonia.

“What's the matter?” whispered Mac.

I used a small towel to soak up the remaining liquid, then we left the shed. “I made a pretty serious mistake,” I said to Mac as we walked back to the house. “I tried to give him too much. I hope he'll be all right.”

“He'll be okay,” said Mac.

I said nothing further about it until John and I were en route to the restaurant. “It's my fault,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “He'll probably get pneumonia and die, and it's all my fault. I'm so stupid!”

“It was a mistake,” said John. “Everyone makes mistakes.”

“Not as many as me. I've been making mistakes for two years.”

“Of course, you have! The number of birds you've taken care of? If you hadn't made any mistakes you wouldn't be human!”