Flyaway (5 page)

I needed to take a run.

I'm not a particularly fast runner, nor do I cover dozens of miles at a stretch. I run because I need to get out into the woods, to be alone on a rocky trail, to hear the sounds of the forest without the ubiquitous background hum of traffic and human voices. I also run because if I am stressed out and don't run, I'm afraid my head will explode.

When we first moved into our house we heard stories about a pair of reclusive but ferocious hawks who nested near one of the trails. They were seen only during the late spring and early summer, but woe betide the unwary hiker or runner who finds him or herself on the wrong trail at the wrong time. A neighbor who lived a quarter mile or so down the road from us had achieved local celebrity status by having his head bloodied several times, events he would recount with a grin and a good-natured shrug.

As it turned out, the birds were northern goshawks.

Goshawks, along with Cooper's and sharp-shinned hawks, are members of the accipiter family, a group of long-tailed, short-winged forest dwellers who prey mostly on other birds. Coops and sharpies can be the bane of a songbird lover's existence; no dopes, they will occasionally set up shop around a busy bird feeder and simply pick off the songbirds when they appear. Goshawks, on
the other hand, avoid developed areas, preferring uninhabited dense woods. Evidently the goshawks figure they'll stay away from people's houses as long as people stay away from their woods. But people inevitably fail to live up to this bargain, and the trouble begins.

I knew approximately where their nest was located, so when I went for my run that morning I decided to try to find it. I spotted the large nest, the product of years of additions and renovations, wedged in firmly near the top of a dying hemlock tree forty yards or so from the trail. Woolly adelgids, aphid-like insects unwittingly imported from Japan and first discovered in the United States in 1985, have all but destroyed the hemlocks in much of the East, turning dense green forests into areas so blighted they look like the scene of a forest fire. The goshawks' territory was still filled with healthy oak, maple, walnut, and birch, but the area surrounding their nest was mostly dead and dying hemlock. Although the trees that once gave them a thick curtain of privacy were now crumbling around them, the goshawks were unwilling to abandon the nest they had used for so many years.

The nest was there, but its occupants were not. I scanned the trees, found nothing, and started to resume my run. I had taken only a few steps when I heard a ringing cry, ascending in pitch and momentum, that silenced the other sounds of the forest:
kek-kek-kek-kek-kek-kek!

It was a sound so wild, so stirring, yet so viscerally fear-inspiring that I stopped in my tracks. Those who believe that humans have no trace of wilderness left in their veins should listen to the cry of an angry goshawk, which can instantly reduce the smug descendants of thousands of years of civilization to small, trembling prey. I searched but could not find the source, and I didn't hear the cry again. Finally, knowing I was being watched, I headed for home.

While most people's protective instincts are aroused by cuddly creatures such as puppies and ducklings, mine are also triggered by homicidal raptors with records of assault. Although I wanted to go back to the nesting area the next day, I knew that the female would be sitting on eggs and shouldn't be disturbed. I marked out a month on my calendar; I would return when the eggs had hatched.

In the extra bathroom, the house finch's wound was healing, and the robin who had lost the bird fight was eating like a prize hog and biting me whenever he had the opportunity. The young redtail had gone off to the Long Island sanctuary, and my first worm delivery had finally arrived.

Most birds eat bugs, so bird rehabilitators must always have bugs on hand. Mealworms come in small, medium, large, and super, the latter being so big that they can actually bite you through your pant leg. Some birds prefer waxworms, which are small, white, soft-bodied grubs that resemble maggots. You can buy a small plastic container of worms at the local pet supermarket for an astronomical amount of money, or you can order them by the thousands from companies such as Grubco or Nature's Bounty, which charge reasonable rates and will ship them to your door.

I couldn't resist a company with a name like Grubco, so I ordered 1,000 medium mealworms and 500 waxworms, which arrived in two cardboard boxes riddled with dime-size airholes. Inside the first box was a muslin bag tied shut with a wire twist-tie. Inside the bag were five or six sheets of crumpled newspaper, and within the newspaper were the mealworms. When I held up the bag I heard the sound of soft rustling, like gentle rain.

In the second box were four light blue plastic containers, each poked with airholes and filled with soft wood shavings, and each containing 125 waxworms.

“Kids!” I called. “Come on! The worms are here!”

Mac hurried down the stairs. As he looked at me expectantly, the large lump beneath his shirt started moving slowly across his chest.

“Ouch!” he said. “Get out of there, Zack!”

He pulled the collar away from his neck and a small head appeared, beady eyes flashing. The yellow-collared macaw climbed out of Mac's shirt and onto his shoulder, eyeing me and laughing giddily, as if he wanted nothing more than to have me join in the fun. I was wise to this little strategy, however; it meant that if I put my hands anywhere near Mac, Zack would rush down like a velociraptor and try to bite my fingers off.

When the kids were toddlers Zack had been relentless, chasing them from room to room and biting them whenever he caught them. “Get rid of that bird!” John said finally, exasperated.

“No way!” I shouted furiously. “Zack was here first!” I ran interference between the kids and the outraged macaw until Mac turned five, when for no apparent reason Zack's world started to revolve around one of the children he had previously wished only to maim. He treated Mac like a human perch, climbing up his leg, clinging to his belt, and riding on his shoulder; when Mac sat down Zack snuggled under his chin, fluffing out his feathers and grinding his beak in contentment. In the space of a day I went from Zack's favorite person to his mortal enemy, from the loyal owner of a strong-willed but loving bird to the despised jailer of a homicidal mental patient.

“This is why parrots shouldn't be pets,” I'd say, removing the hysterically protesting macaw from Mac's shoulder by sandwiching him between two thick oven mitts. “Only one person in a million can put up with them.”

“Don't remind me,” said John.

Zack had softened over the last few years and would cozy up to me as long as Mac was not around. Taking him away from Mac with bare hands, however, was still out of the question.

Skye appeared, covered with dirt, at the sliding glass door. “I just built another room onto the kelpie house,” she announced.

Skye's world was filled with fairies. Her own personal fairy was Marigoldy, who, on certain magical nights, would write tiny notes in tiny handwriting and leave them, colorfully illustrated and accompanied by a real marigold, under Skye's pillow as she slept. Marigoldy's friends were the fairies of the clouds, the sun, the rain, the hemlock trees, and every natural wonder, and each one would eventually leave a tiny letter containing a self-portrait, news from the fairy world, and helpful hints on how to deal with the trials and tribulations of first grade. Sometimes the fairy idea well would run dry and suddenly all the fairies would decamp to the moon or the bottom of the ocean, leaving a farewell note saying “Back in a month” and “Bye! We'll miss you!” Skye would
retreat mournfully to the backyard and lavish her energy on the kelpie house, which she was carefully constructing from flat rocks and various pieces of forest flotsam.

Telling the kids about kelpies seemed to me to be a fun way to pass the time and to pay homage to my Scottish ancestors; it was only later, when I watched Skye describe them to a group of friends and their mothers, that I realized why the Brothers Grimm had lost their popularity.

“Kelpies are little men,” she said to her wide-eyed audience. “They're thousands of years old. Usually they live in lochs in Scotland, but we have one in our pond and his name is Donal MacLeod. If you make friends with him, he'll tell you all the secrets of the universe. But he keeps his pearls at the bottom of the pond, and if you try to steal them he'll appear as a giant black horse who is so beautiful you have to climb onto his back, and the second you do, WHAM! He'll rear up into the air, screaming his rage, and then he'll drag you down deeper and deeper into the pond until your lungs fill up with water and you drown! And then your hair will turn to seaweed and the crabs will eat out your eyes!”

Skye was delighted, the kids were awestruck, but the mothers' frozen smiles indicated that my Parent-o-Meter had once again fallen to zero.

“Are you ready for the worms?” I said to the kids. “Mac, you get the fish tank and Skye, you get the food.”

Mealworms need a healthy diet or they won't do the birds any good, so they are fed a basic mixture of puppy chow, avian vitamins, and several other ingredients that vary according to each rehabilitator. Waxworms are kept refrigerated in the containers in which they arrive; they can go for so long without food that by the time they require it, they have normally already become a food source themselves. We set everything up on the table on the deck, then went to work.

After the fish tank received two inches of mixed worm food, I opened a mealworm bag and slid the crumpled newspapers into the tank. Each time I unfolded a section hundreds of mealworms slid downward, coming to rest in a wiggling, squirming heap.

“Aaaaaggghhhhh!” shrieked the kids, shuddering gleefully and taking turns holding overflowing handfuls of worms.

We opened a container of waxworms so we could scrutinize them, then picked up a few individuals and held them in our hands. Softer and more delicate than mealworms, the waxworms elicited a more restrained response: gentle pokes, followed by long, drawn-out hisses and violently contorted expressions.

“What if Daddy eats them by mistake?” asked Skye, watching as I tucked the four light blue containers into the back of the refrigerator.

“We'll have to warn him when he gets home,” I replied, chopping up a carrot and an apple and tossing the pieces into the fish tank. “Meanwhile, where should we put the mealworms?”

“They can stay in my room,” offered Mac.

The doorbell rang. “That's a friend of Maggie's named Jen,” I said. “She's bringing us two common grackles. Come on, we'll just stick the tank in the dining room for the time being, and deal with it later.”

Soon the three of us were walking out to the flight cage with our newest arrivals. I carried two cardboard boxes, while Mac and Skye toted food and water.

“Now remember what we talked about,” I said when we were all inside. “Even though these guys are imprinted, they're still wild birds.”

“Wild birds think of us as huge predators,” said Mac.

“We have to move very slowly and not stare at them,” said Skye.

“They'll probably be awfully scared,” said Mac.

“Exactly,” I said, and opened the boxes. Two dark birds hopped out, surveyed the situation with startling yellow eyes, then one flew onto my arm and the other onto my head. I looked up to see the kids staring at me reproachfully.

“They don't look very scared to me,” said Skye.

The grackles were about two weeks apart in age, still dressed in the brownish black plumage of juveniles. They were clearly surprised to see each other,
and equally surprised to find themselves in a 200-square-foot enclosure filled with trees and leafy branches. Within a few moments they were exploring their new surrounding, all the while keeping a close eye on each other. We filled a large shallow dish with water, arranged an appetizing plate of moistened puppy chow, grapes, hardboiled egg yolk, pasta, and live mealworms, then left them alone in the flight cage.

Common Grackles

On the way back to the house we stopped and piled onto the hammock, swinging gently back and forth and enjoying what was left of the sunny and peaceful spring day.

“Oh, my God!” came a bellow from the house. “There are maggots in the refrigerator!”

“You're in trouble again,” said Skye.

“Wait till he gets to the dining room,” said Mac.

I had sworn not to take baby songbirds.

The general public tend to be impressed by those who care for big, aggressive birds: swans, who can break your arm with one wing, or herons, who will occasionally try to stab their beak through your eye, or great horned owls, famous for the fly-by scalping, which is the avian version of the drive-by shooting.

Those birds are a piece of cake compared to baby songbirds.

Tiny, delicate, and insatiably hungry, baby songbirds are food-processing machines. When they're hatchlings (just born) and young nestlings (older but still unfeathered), they need to be fed every fifteen to twenty minutes from sunup to sundown. Then they knock off for the night, giving whatever exhausted creature is caring for them—be it avian or human—a little time to collapse before work resumes at daybreak.

When the babies' pinfeathers start coming in the feedings can be moved up to every half hour, then the time between feedings can be slowly increased in increments of five minutes. When they're around 21/2 weeks old, their feathers have opened and they're out of the nest and perching, and you're practically on vacation—feeding them only once an hour.

Since I had two kids and a limited amount of time, raising baby songbirds was simply out of the question. But then the phone rang.

“Suzie,” said the woman on the phone, her voice shaking. “This is Liz—do
you remember me? Dana's friend? I have a nestful of baby blue jays. I've called everywhere and I can't get anyone to take them and they're hungry and I'm afraid they're all going to die.”

“Are you sure the parents aren't around?” I asked. “How long has it been since you've seen them?”

“The mother was hit by a car,” she said. “I saw it happen. They've been alone for two hours and I haven't seen any other blue jay go near them.”

“I'm not set up for babies,” I said. “Let me make some calls.”

“Can I bring them to you while you're calling?” she said. “They're all falling over and I don't think they have much time left.”

I hung up and immediately dialed Maggie's work number. “Maggie!” I said. “I have a nestful of blue jays coming in. What do I do, besides get this woman to drive them down to you?”

“I can't take them!” whispered Maggie. “We're getting reviewed this week and there are people all over the place. I have nine babies in three nests, and they're all hidden in my desk drawers and if anybody finds them I'm going to get fired!”

“But you have to take them!” I said. “What am I supposed to do with baby blue jays?”

“Call Joanne,” whispered Maggie. “Meanwhile, get them hydrated with drops of Pedialyte and feed them mealworms and that dip I gave you. Somebody's coming—I gotta go!”

Cursing under my breath, I called Joanne. No answer. I had the numbers of a few other rehabbers, all a little over an hour away. Nothing. Finally I called Jayne Amico, the Connecticut songbird guru who, at any given spring or summer moment, can have forty to fifty nestling songbirds going at one time.

“Jayne!” I said into her phone machine. “Pick up the phone! You gotta help me!”

Jayne lifted the receiver. “Damn those raptors!” she exclaimed. “I hate those things! How can you rehab them? I've got a Cooper's hawk hanging around my backyard and I know he's going to get one of my little woodpeckers as soon as I let them go.”

“Forget the raptors,” I said. “Blue jays—I've got baby blue jays and I don't do babies.”

“Oh, yes you do!” she chortled. “You do now, honey!”

Technically, blue jays aren't even songbirds—they're Corvids, the group of birds that also includes magpies, crows, and ravens. As Jayne explained as she was giving me a crash course in housing and caring for orphaned songbirds, I was lucky that I was starting out with a nestful of relatively sturdy birds; they could have been impossibly minuscule creatures like wrens or chickadees.

They arrived in their own large and beautifully constructed nest, six awkward, naked hatchlings sprouting tufts of down. They had oversized square heads, bright red mouths, and yellow gape flanges—the outer lining of the mouth, which is one of the markers for identifying nestling birds. Their eyes were just beginning to open, which meant they were about three days old. By the time they arrived they had missed more than ten feedings and were lying limply, like small plants that had been deprived of water.

First they needed to be warmed up, which meant placing them on a heating pad covered by a thick cotton towel. Meanwhile I twisted a small cotton towel into a doughnut, draped another one over the top of it, covered it with a few Kleenexes, and placed the whole thing into a ceramic bowl, creating a clean—and easily cleanable—nest. When they were warm I transferred them to the new nest and rehydrated them by placing tiny drops of electrolyte solution along the sides of their closed beaks until they were alert. Then I began to feed them, something I would do about a gazillion times during the next month.

The best diet to feed orphaned passerines is another contentious issue among rehabbers, inspiring lively bouts of namecalling and slander. A rehabber's goal is to mimic as closely as possible what the parent birds offer their nestlings, and almost all passerines feed their babies bugs. However, the parents supplement with various other wild foods—plus the adults' saliva contains essential nutrients, all of which you must attempt to duplicate if you want the baby to grow up healthy. This means you must put together a complicated and carefully measured vitamin mixture—of which there are many recipes that
are constantly being perfected—and puree it into a hummus-like paste, into which you dip each bug and then serve it using tweezers or forceps. At least, that was the idea at that particular point in time. Jayne recently told me that she has jettisoned the dip idea in favor of a more complicated mealworm diet—something that might have saved me hours of work had I known about it back then.

I gratefully defrosted Maggie's container of dip, which she had insisted I take “just in case.” I took a portion of it and added a bit of water, cut a group of mealworms in half, and went to work. But as I discovered, nestling birds who have been yanked away from their parents and placed in a bizarre new environment don't automatically open their beaks at the sight of a pair of tweezers.

“Jayne!” I shouted through her phone machine. “What am I supposed to do now?”

The phone clicked on. “Who is this?” she demanded. “Could it be the former raptor rehabber who has finally started to see the light?”

Armed with Jayne's arsenal of tricks I gently tapped the sides of the orphans' beaks, stroked the sides of their faces, lightly jostled their nest, and approached them with tweezers five different ways; soon they were all gaping for food except the smallest one, who steadfastly refused to open his beak. Eventually I pried it open gently, using a tiny tool so as not to inflict any damage, and placed bits of food inside. Realizing that I would be doing this every twenty minutes, rain or shine, I suddenly understood why most rehabbers react badly when yet another mom telephones and announces that she's found a baby bird and wants to know if her five-year-old can raise it.

By the time the kids returned from school things were manageable, if not under control. I had put the nest bowl into a small lidless cardboard box, just to be safe; the kids peered over its edge and gasped.

“Ohhhhh, look at them,” cooed Skye, who, from that moment on, would always turn maternal at the sight of a nestling. “Can I help you feed them?”

“Can you find out who hit the mother?” asked Mac, who had recently reacted to a schoolmate's tale of removing an egg-filled nest from a tree by loudly
announcing, “You've just violated the Migratory Bird Act—one phone call from me and you're headed for jail!”

“Sorry, Mac,” I said. “I'm afraid whoever hit her is long gone.”

The kids had just watched their new Harry Potter video several hundred times, so they christened the orphans Harry, Ron, Hagrid, Norbert, Professor McGonagall, and Albus Dumbledore. (Skye had decided, inexplicably, that she was saving the name Hermione for a woodpecker.) After several sessions of watching me feed them, the kids took supervised turns. We gave extra care and extra feedings to Albus Dumbledore, the smallest, while I tried to prepare them for one possible outcome.

“He's so little,” I said. “It's like being the runt of the litter. He's just not as healthy as the others. Sometimes not all of them make it.”

“He'll make it,” said Skye.

The odds are that not all of them would have survived in the wild. The largest and most aggressive siblings usually get most of the food, while the smallest become progressively weaker and sometimes die. Occasionally the parents will push a sickly baby from the nest, an act that may seem brutal to those who don't understand the Herculean task the parent birds face. Once you stop to consider the dawn-to-dusk feeding schedule and combine it with the dangers facing most songbirds—both natural (natural predators, bad weather) and man-made (suburban development, outdoor cats, windows, cars, pesticides, etc., etc., etc.)—it's easier to comprehend a parent bird's cutting its losses early and devoting its limited resources to the nestlings more likely to grow to adulthood.

Our extra labor didn't do any good. Despite our best efforts, Albus remained small and sickly and died two days later. I carried his tiny body into the woods, once again trying to figure out what I would tell the kids when they returned from school. Unlike with the house sparrow, they had invested time, effort, and emotion in the nestling jay, even if it was only two days' worth.

Wildlife rehabilitators see more death in a busy month than most people do in a lifetime, and must come up with their own coping mechanisms. In my
previous eleven years I had handled the deaths of many wild creatures with the emotions rehabbers strive for: a mixture of regret and resignation and a resolve to use any knowledge gained for the next one. But I had one spectacular crash. She was one of a pair of orphaned crows I had raised during my years at the raptor center. I released them both and she stayed around the house, only to die in a freak accident one late summer morning. She was half wild, still friendly to our family, but along with her shyer nestmate, she was in the process of forging a bond with the local crow flock. She soared between our world and theirs, bursting with life and joy, and when she flew beside me as I ran through the woods I felt as if I, too, were flying.

I knew I could lose her at any moment. Like the chickadees of my childhood she was free to leave, free to cast off the chains of my increasingly desperate love for her. Though captive-raised, she was my tangible link with the wild world, the feathered embodiment of everything I had always found wondrous but unattainable. I rejoiced when she appeared and feared for her safety when she left. I worried about a hawk attack, however, not some random, unpreventable accident: a collision with a swing that broke her neck.

After she died I swore to myself that I could still see her flying beside me as I ran through the woods, and grieved for her for months with an intensity that frightened everyone but my children. Wearing an unconvincing smile, my eyes bruised and swollen, I would start them on a project; as soon as they were engrossed I would slip out the door, hurry down the hill, and sit beside the stone-circled grave blanketed with flowers, my face buried in my arms. Soon they would both appear behind me, at ages four and five the small guardians of their devastated mother. “Time to come home now,” they would say, and carefully lead me back up the hill to the house.

Remembering this I realized that they were more resilient than I gave them credit for, and probably far better equipped than I was to handle the highs and lows of bird rehabilitation. The kids came home from school, peered into the box, and looked up in dismay.

“Where…” Skye began.

“I'm so sorry,” I said. “He didn't make it.”

“Oh, no,” sighed Mac.

For a long moment Skye stared into my eyes, precariously balanced between grief and resignation.

“Could you feed the others?” I asked her.

Her gaze dropped to the remaining five nestlings. Roused by our voices, they had lifted their heads and were opening their beaks.

“Okay,” she said finally, and picked up the tweezers.