Flyaway (27 page)

“Jayne,” I said. “I'm drowning. I can't keep this up.”

“You have to start specializing,” said Jayne. “Just don't specialize in those damned Cooper's hawks.”

But those damned Cooper's hawks were exactly the ones I was contemplating, as well as their redtailed and sharp-shinned cousins, and their owl and vulture compatriots. I needed to draw a clear line: taking adult songbirds but not young ones was a line too easily crossed. Although I didn't have the enormous flight cages necessary to condition large raptors, I could get them back on their feet and then transfer them to Paul or to the Raptor Trust. I didn't receive nearly as many raptors as I did other kinds of birds. Young and injured raptors didn't need to be fed as often as songbirds. Maybe, at this point, it all came down to numbers and metabolism.

In September the kids went back to school and I searched for a permanent home for the summer's unreleasable songbirds. I had a wood thrush, a great-crested flycatcher, a chimney swift, and a diamond dove, a domestic species that had been found wandering along the sidewalk of a nearby town. I spent a few days calling around and finally reached the curator of the National Aviary in Pittsburgh.

“Sure, we'll take them all,” he said. “Can you ship them to me by air?”

“I can't,” I replied. “They're so little and delicate—I'd be a nervous wreck. Let me see what I can figure out.”

The next morning I received a call about a red-tailed hawk trapped in a
warehouse. “Lew!” I said into the phone. “Can you come with me? A redtail should be easy—we'll just chase him back and forth a couple of times and when he gets tired and lands, I'll grab him. They said he's been in there since yesterday.”

The redtail turned out to be a Cooper's hawk, the bane of Jayne's existence, which made things many times more difficult. Smaller, quicker and more agile than a redtail, a Cooper's is difficult to catch under the best of circumstances, and the way the warehouse was built made it nearly impossible. Rows of shelves
and a large loft provided hiding places. Normally birds will remain immobile if the lights are suddenly turned off, but windows ran along one whole side of the building just under the ceiling, providing permanent light and convincing the hawk that they were her only means of escape. Refusing to go near the open doors or the truck entrance, she flew back and forth along the windows, hitting against them when we tried to drive her away.

Cooper's Hawk

I watched her fly swiftly the length of the warehouse, frightened but so far uninjured. If we can catch her, I thought, we might be able to release her right away—a bad situation with a feel-good ending. Maybe this is what I'm looking for. A sign.

The employees were helpful and concerned, watching as Lew and I failed to corner her with our long-handled fishing nets. When we tried to herd her toward the exits, she disappeared into the loft. I climbed the stairs and waited outside the closed door; when Lew shouted I inched through, spotted her on the floor, and threw a blanket over her. As I gathered up the blanket she somehow lunged out from under it, launched herself into the air and flew back toward the windows.

“She's got to be getting tired,” said Lew. “Let's try one more time.”

I stood beneath the bank of windows, hoping that when Lew shooed her I could lift my net up into the air and catch her. She flew toward me, but without warning she veered off and slammed into the glass. She grasped the window frame briefly, her neck at an odd angle. I dropped my net, rushed forward and caught her as she fell, sank to my knees so I could cradle her, watching as her breathing grew shallow and the light faded from her eyes.

“Please don't die,” I whispered to her. “Please don't die.”

On the trip home we were silent. Lew pulled into his driveway and turned the truck off, then turned and looked at me steadily. “That was a damned shame,” he said. “Now, listen. We're going to get one of those mist nets, the kind they use to catch birds when they're banding them. We're going to stretch it between two poles so we can raise it up and the bird will fly right into it. And then this will never happen again. Okay? You all right?”

That night I dreamed it snowed in the warehouse, covering the desks and gathering in gentle drifts by the shelves. I followed the sound of wingbeats and found the Cooper's hawk crouching in the loft, her orange eyes burning into mine. I picked her up and she lunged slowly out of my hands, as if her escape had been captured on film and was being replayed inch by inch, frame by frame. “
Please don't die
,” I whispered to her, and as she veered away from the sound of my voice she slammed into the window and shattered like glass, each jagged piece of her falling, one by one, into the snow.

“I have an idea,” I said to the kids. “Let's take a road trip to Pittsburgh! If we drive all those unreleasable birdies to the National Aviary, the director said he'd give us a private tour—at feeding time! Wouldn't that be cool?”

“Pittsburgh!” said Mac. “How far away is Pittsburgh?”

“Well, it's a haul,” I admitted. “But if you come with me, I'll replace your broken CD players and buy you some new CDs.”

“Deal!” cried Skye.

I wanted to settle the birds and get away from my dreams. I dreamed of shredded wings, of bloody bandages, of airplanes trailing clouds of broken songbirds. In the mornings I ran through the woods, trying to shake off the lingering images. I watched for wild birds, but sometimes when I saw one fly by I couldn't tell if it was real or if it was one I had lost.

John agreed to take care of Merlin, the parrots, and the two mourning doves, screech owl, and hairy woodpecker still in the shed. We headed out early in the morning, the kids in the backseat with stacks of books and their music, the birds in comfortable carriers behind them, our overnight bags stacked in the passenger seat beside me. I drove for eight hours, chatting with the kids when they took off their headphones, making a couple of pit stops along the way, trying to think of nothing but the songs on the radio.

The National Aviary is a beautiful and impressive place, with huge open aviaries filled with flowering trees and ponds, and a grand assortment of dazzling birds who willingly approached us when they saw we had seeds or mealworms. On the way out of Pittsburgh we passed several scary-looking motels, settling
on a Days Inn on a busy strip that boasted of free cable TV. Driving through the Pennsylvania countryside the following day we saw a sign for ReptileLand and immediately turned off the highway.

“Wow,” said Skye. “Maybe we should start rehabbing Galápagos tortoises!”

“They're awesome,” I agreed.

“I like those vipers,” said Mac. “Would it be a problem to rehab birds and snakes?”

On the way home I thought of all the rehabbers I had met at conferences and on the Internet, many of whom had worked with wildlife for twenty or thirty years.

I had been a home-based wildlife rehabilitator for five years.

The house rang with Jimi Hendrix solos and Eric Clapton riffs, with peals of laughter at midnight from girls' sleepovers. For two weeks the bird calls stopped and John and I hired someone to stay with the kids, went into New York City, had dinner, saw a play, and spent the night, reveling in the strange feeling of twenty-four hours with no responsibilities. Mac found a singer for his band and geared up for another school talent show, dropping a casual announcement the week before.

“I want to get a haircut,” he said, causing our jaws to drop.

“No!” cried Skye. “You won't be Mac without your hair!”

“Seriously?” I asked. “You mean now that other kids in school are growing theirs, you're going to get yours cut?”

“Yup.” He grinned.

“Cool, dude,” said John.

The band played Ozzy Osbourne's “Crazy Train” and just before Mac's solo, his strap slipped off its knob. He reached down and reattached it, beginning his solo late but coming in on the right note and performing the remainder flawlessly. Once again, the ovation fell on deaf ears.

“Mac,” I said later that night. “You heard what Ruth said! She was a bona fide rock star, and she said she has never seen a kid so young act so professionally. That strap coming off was not your fault. You fixed the strap and kept
going! You were awesome and the audience loved you! Listen to them and don't do this to yourself!”

Occasionally I had short conversations with Maggie and Joanne, or we swapped birds, or, way too rarely, had lunch together. I saw Tanya more than anyone else. We tried to make it a working relationship, and she never failed to bring food or supplies when she brought me a bird; but finally our philosophical differences reached the boiling point.

“I have a wild turkey here from Tanya,” said Beth, calling from a small sanctuary two hours north. “She has a badly healed fracture and can't fly. We were willing to keep her, but she's miserable. She's in a big flight cage with other turkeys but she just keeps bashing herself against it, trying to get out. I thought if I gave her a little time she'd settle down, but it's not happening. She's cut herself on the head, she won't eat. I called Tanya, but she said if we won't keep her she'll pick her up and find someone who will.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

“Our vet will euthanize her,” said Beth, “but can you deal with Tanya?”

“Yes,” I said.

Steeling myself, I called her. “What?” she cried. “How dare you! What gives you the right to play God?”

“The fact that you're doing a lousy job of it!” I shouted. “She's lost her family and she can't stand being in a cage! Can't you see what she's going through?”

“At least she's alive!” snapped Tanya, and hung up.

I looked out into the woods, my refuge sown with bones. This will be my legacy, I thought. Two hundred years from now anthropologists will dig up my land and think some kind of avian serial killer lived here.

 

The flight was tarped, the shed prepared for winter. On a chilly mid-November morning I had just taken off my coat when the phone rang. It was Teresa Pep
pard, who lives in my town and has the uncanny ability to spot an animal in distress, no matter where it might be.

“Hi, Suzie,” she said. “Listen, I'm standing here looking at a red-tailed hawk hanging from a tree; I think her leg is stuck in a crack. There's no way I can get to her, she has to be twenty-five feet up. You'd need a really long ladder. I have to get to work, but I can give you directions?”

I shifted into rehabber's autopilot, grabbing gloves, a carrier, a net, and ladder and hopping into my car without thinking of the possible implications. The tree was along a dirt road ten minutes from my house, in a heavily wooded area where houses are few and far between. “The road curves around, then it straightens, then you go down a hill,” Teresa had said, using what passes for directions around here. “The tree is on the left, next to an entrance to the Appalachian Trail. People have leaned some walking sticks against it. On the other side of the road are a bunch of dead hemlocks.”

When I finally spotted the big female redtail, I reacted with a word not found in family publications. She dangled from a split in the tree by one leg, wings hanging limply. In a futile effort to free her leg she beat her wings and pulled herself to an upright position, only to fall again when exhaustion overtook her. There was no way to tell how long she'd been there.

The ladder I'd brought was nowhere near long enough to reach her, and I didn't have a cell phone. It was a weekday morning, so most people were at work. Where could I get a very long ladder, fast? I had only one idea: the fire department.

On the way over I tried to practice sounding reasonable. “
Hello,”
I recited. “
I'm a wild bird rehabilitator, I live right down the road, I'm licensed by the state and the federal governments; there's a situation with a protected species and I really need your help
.” The problem was that I kept imagining the damage that every extra minute was inflicting on that leg, so I ended up screeching into the parking lot and bolting out of the car in no mood for niceties.

“Excuse me!” I called to the man working on one of the engines. “I have an emergency! Can I borrow your fire truck?”

“Sure!” said the man with a grin. “If it were mine I'd give it to you. But I'm just cleaning it.”

“Can I use your phone?” I asked.

I made three calls and reached no one, but meanwhile my new compatriot had used the radio and arranged for the fire chief to meet me at a nearby street corner. The chief would then follow me to the hawk's location, where he could determine what kind of equipment was needed to get the bird down. As the two of us approached the site, however, I could see a very long ladder leaning against the tree, steadied by one man as another climbed up carrying rope and a bag. It was Rich Anderson and Eric Lind, who hadn't answered their phone at the local Audubon center because they were en route to rescuing the hawk.

Rich climbed to the top of the ladder and roped himself to the tree. Balancing precariously, he somehow managed to reach up, extricate the hawk, and put her in the bag, all the while avoiding her thrashing talons. I opened the bag to transfer her to a carrier, and was amazed to see that her leg was bloody but not broken.

“There's a knothole with a crack at the bottom,” said Rich. “I'll bet she stuck her foot into the knothole after a squirrel and lost her balance.”

I put the carrier into my car and waved good-bye to the whole rescue squad—Rich, Eric, and the fire chief, Joseph Surace, who by this time had been joined by a passing member of the state police. I borrowed a cell phone and called Croton Animal Hospital.

“Dr. Popolow is here,” said Charlene, “and she says you can bring the hawk right in.”

Carol inspected the hawk's leg, sedated her, X-rayed her, and stitched her torn skin. When I returned several hours later, she pulled the towel curtain away from the front of my carrier, revealing a quietly perched redtail who sported a thick blue bandage on one leg. Carol snapped an X-ray into the viewer and turned off the overhead light.

“This wasn't the first time she's gotten into trouble,” she said, tapping the X-ray in three places. “Look—she was shot.”

The redtail's ghostly skeleton appeared dreamlike, her pale curved organs surrounded by graceful lines of bone, filmy contours of muscle, and cartilage intricate as lace. The leg that had held her captive was intact. But lodged in her thigh were two shotgun pellets, colorless and unyielding, the jarring evidence of another narrow escape. A third jagged piece of metal rested above her eyes.

“Right now the pellets don't seem to be doing her any harm,” said Carol. “I'm assuming they're not lead, since this is an old injury and she doesn't seem to be suffering any effects of lead poisoning. The usual protocol is to leave them where they are—especially when you're dealing with the head, you're apt to do more damage digging around to get them out than you would if you left them alone. Think of all the war veterans who walk around with shrapnel in their heads.

“The leg is another matter,” she continued. “There were no fractures, and she can stand up and seems to be able to perch. But at this point I can't tell if there was muscle or nerve damage, and I don't know if there was damage to her blood vessels, which would compromise her circulation. As long as she puts up with your handling her, we'll just have to wait and see.”

I put her in the large crate, newly cleaned and disinfected. Not surprisingly, she wouldn't eat the day of her ordeal or the day after; since she was otherwise healthy and in good weight I left her alone, except for the occasional quick check.

On the third morning I took a medium-size defrosted rat, held it in front of her, and shook it back and forth to simulate struggling. I put it on the floor of her crate, shut the door, and by the time I was halfway out the door of the shed she had hopped down from her perch and was holding it in her talons. She's a trouper, I thought. She's going to be just fine.