Flyaway (11 page)

“When are you going to get that gull out of the bathroom?” said John. “The whole house is starting to smell like fish.”

“I don't have anywhere else to put him,” I replied. “His bandage is off and his wing looks good, but both flights are full.”

“I thought you were going to release the blue jays and the grackles.”

“I am. I will. I am. I'll do it. Really.”

“Tomorrow,” said John firmly. “They're all ready, it's going to be a beautiful day, and it's not going to rain until the middle of next week. It's a perfect time.”

“And then let's go to the movies,” said Mac. “We never go to the movies anymore.”

“I'm sorry!” I said. “We haven't gone to the movies much this summer. But the last batch of babies is almost eating on their own, and in four or five days I'll be free. Free as a bird!”

“A bird who's not in rehab,” said Skye.

Late the following morning I caught all eight birds, put them in three different carriers, and brought them to the slope outside the kitchen window. I tried to remember when I had been as determined to hide my complete, almost paralyzing apprehension; the moment before I had proved my female superiority to my male college friends by jumping off a forty-foot bridge into the local
river couldn't even come close. The slope area was busy; two of the released robins were poking through the bug pit. Wearing what I hoped was not an insane grin, I nodded to the kids and together we opened the carriers.

The six jays flew upward, each one a crazy quilt of brilliant blues against the dark green of the spruce trees. The grackles followed, their solemn coloring offset by their bright yellow eyes. For long moments they regarded the sky with what must have been awe, having suddenly and mysteriously become part of a world without boundaries. As they began to explore their new territory we all marveled at their swiftness and celebrated their newfound freedom. My moment was bittersweet, however; all these young birds had been raised in captivity, and by releasing them I could no longer protect them. At least the robins had spent time with an adult, even if the adult had stuck around only for twenty-four hours after I released him. My concern mushroomed; I envisioned all the fledglings sitting at tiny desks, watching me with alarm as I pointed to the drawings on a blackboard. “This one right here is a hawk—watch out! This is an owl—bad news! And this is a raccoon—major problems!”

There were serious gaps in their education. Leaving John and the kids outside, I hurried inside and dialed the phone.

“Jayne!” I said. “I just released four robins, two grackles, and six jays and I'm a nervous wreck. How do you deal with this? What if a hawk comes by?”

“You raptor people!” snorted Jayne. “Welcome to my world, babe! There's nothing you can do except wish them luck. Those damned raptors—every time I release a fledgling songbird it ages me ten years.”

“Ten years, huh?” I said. “Then you must be about eighty thousand years old by now.”

“I will be by the end of the summer,” said Jayne.

I didn't want the kids to worry about the fledglings, so I waited until they were busy on the trampoline before dragging John into the garage.

“Don't tell the kids,” I whispered. “But I'm really worried about hawks! What if one catches one of the babies and eats him?”

“What if you get run over by an eighteen-wheeler?” he countered. “Will you
stop it? Give these birds some credit! If you're standing there in the yard—I mean you personally—and some huge thing with a curved beak and big talons comes flying at you, are you going to just stand there or are you going to run away?”

“Does he need food?”

“Who?”

“The thing with the curved beak and the big talons! Is he flying at me because he wants me to go get him some food?”

John gave me a baffled look. “Let's stay on topic here,” he said. “You're worrying about the songbirds getting eaten at the same time you're worrying about the raptors not getting enough to eat. Something's got to give here, and I think it might be your sanity.”

“Or yours,” I said.

Realizing that I had transformed the traditional predator-prey relationship into the more problematic predator-prey-rehabber relationship, I wondered what Shakespeare would have said about it and e-mailed Ed. I received a quick reply.

“‘O! that way madness lies,'” he wrote, then cited
King Lear
and proceeded to tell me that I had become the fledglings' vestigial organ. “But telling you not to care is like telling the fledglings not to fly,” he finished. “So I would say the best thing for you to do is go pour yourself a nice big glass of gin.”

At 2:30 that morning I was awakened from a fitful sleep by a horrible noise right outside my window: a cross between a scream, a hiss, and several huge nails being scraped across a blackboard. I sat upright, wondering if I'd dreamed it. I heard it again and shot out of bed, grabbed a flashlight, and bolted out the front door, all before I really knew what I was doing. I knew what the sound was, though: a barred owl.

I ran into the front yard and shone the flashlight up into a grove of trees. Perched calmly about six feet apart were two young barreds, dark-eyed, luxuriously feathered, and breathtakingly beautiful, staring at me with what appeared to be grave concern. One opened his beak and repeated the sound that had
awakened me, which was then echoed by his companion. I was light-headed with relief that they were merely conversing and not discussing matters over a fledgling dinner; at the same time I wondered whether they had mastered their hunting skills and if they needed a snack. I decided that what they didn't need was me shining a flashlight into their faces, and I returned to bed.

Our yard became a bird carousel. We ate breakfast on the deck, watching as the various fledglings acclimated to the outside world. We kept the bug pit full and put a plate of food and a pan of water under a low-hanging, protective hemlock branch. The robins weren't afraid of us, but neither were they especially eager for our company; we would see them bustling about, and if we approached too closely they'd fly to a nearby tree. The grackles and jays, however, were more open to interaction. Mac would shout, “Pay attention, you birds! There's a bug down here!” and toss them live crickets to encourage them to forage, then watch in satisfaction as they snatched grasshoppers from the weeds and caterpillars from the trees. The deck was their beach, where Skye once found Harry Potter acting as if he were succumbing to a particularly nasty form of poison. “Look!” she screamed in a panic, “Harry's dying!” She raced over to where the little jay was sitting at an odd angle, beak open, every feather fluffed out, as if caught in some awful rictus. Harry saw her coming, snapped his beak shut, slicked down his feathers, and took off like a bullet.

“He wasn't dying, honey,” I said. “He was sunbathing.”

One sunny morning I walked out onto the deck just in time to see a broad-winged hawk fly over my head and into the nearby spruce tree. Null, the smaller grackle, burst out of the tree like a racehorse from a starting gate and flew toward the field; close behind her was the broadwing, and running a distant third was me, screaming “No! No!” and shredding my own reputation as a staunch defender of the natural order. I stopped at the edge of the field, desperately searching the trees for signs of them, and found nothing.

“Where's Null?” asked Skye that night at dusk. “Look—Void is over there by himself.”

“I don't know,” I said. “But I'm sure she's all right.”

I wasn't sure of any such thing, and I told John so. “What if the broadwing caught her?” I said. “What will happen to Void? He'll be all alone. There aren't any other grackles around here. What if the broadwing comes back? Do you think it's the same one that went after Zack?”

“Maybe if he does come back you should ask him,” said John, adopting an exaggeratedly British accent. “Excuse me there, good sir, but might you be the same broadwing who, several years ago, attempted to eat our macaw? And have you, in fact, recently dined on our grackle?”

I laughed in spite of myself. “I can't stand this,” I said.

The next morning Void flew in for breakfast, but there was no sign of Null. We spotted the robins, and, eventually, all the jays, but not the little grackle. With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I started to go inside.

“What's that sound?” said Mac. “It sounds like grackles.”

I looked up. Soaring toward us, flanked by two wild adult grackles, was Null. I had never seen a grackle around our house in the summer, although I saw them regularly at the horse farm a quarter mile down the road. The small squadron flew over our heads and landed in the big spruce. When Null fluttered down to the deck railing I resisted the urge to grab her and give her a big kiss on the beak; instead I stared at the wild grackles, who were peering down at us.

“She must have gotten lost,” crowed Skye, “and her new friends brought her home! How cool is that?”

“It's very cool,” I said, a thousand questions—none of which would ever be answered—swirling around my head. Null strutted around the deck for a few moments, then joined Void at the feeding plate under the hemlock. The adults waited until she started to splash around in the water dish, then the two of them flew away in the direction in which they had come.

“Wait!” I called after them. “Don't go!”

“Maybe they're like those friends you have from New York City,” said Mac. “They like being around kids for a while, but then they get fed up and have to go home.”

The broadwing didn't return. The fledglings continued to grow and mature, to explore and discover. One day Void discovered anting, although I wasn't quite sure how he had discovered it. Anting is done by crows, jays, and grackles, as well as a number of songbird species. The birds either pick up single ants and place them in their feathers, or actually lie on anthills until the ants swarm all over them. The most common explanation is that the formic acid contained in the ants' defensive secretions kill parasites, like fleas and feather lice, which may be hiding in the birds' plumage. Some say that ants' secretions contain fungicidal properties, which would be helpful during humid summer months. Still others believe it's a vice, like drinking or smoking, that feels good but has no real purpose. At that point my only anting experience had been with crows, whom I firmly believed were in it for the cheap thrill and not the medical benefits; since I had no experience with jays and grackles, I wasn't yet sure about their angle.

In any case, one morning I went out to the deck and saw Void standing next to the food dish, picking up single ants and methodically placing them on various spots on his body. Standing next to him, watching carefully, was Null. Picking up a mealworm from the food dish she attempted to duplicate her compatriot's actions, but the worm would not cooperate. She placed it in the feathers on the nape of her neck, but the worm slid down her back; she picked it up again and placed it under her wing, where it dropped to the ground. I quickly called the kids, held my finger to my lips, and the three of us sat silently on the deck, watching as Null tried to figure it out. Finally Skye couldn't take it anymore.

“What are you doing, you crazy bird?” she hissed in frustration. “You don't use a
worm
, you use an
ant!
”

“That's why they call it ‘anting' and not ‘worming,'” added Mac. “Not that a bird would care what the word is in English.”

Day by day the blue jays lost their fuzzy adolescence and became astoundingly beautiful young birds, bursting through the foliage with the bravado of musketeers, their crests raised at rakish angles. Everything seemed to be going
according to plan, but our bright and noisy carnival had not gone unnoticed. Ten days after I released them I was sitting in the kitchen on the phone, looking out the window at the four who had gathered on a patch of ground. Suddenly a Cooper's hawk shot out of the woods, grabbed one of the little jays, and continued on out of sight.

I had never believed people who described an accident as time standing still, but I remember that moment as a photograph: the jay's dark eyes and the hawk's knife-edged intensity, a colorful young bird gripped by a sleek and lethal predator. I dropped the telephone and tore out of the house, but the other jays had scattered and there was no sign of the hawk.

When John came home from running errands I met him at the door, my eyes red. “A Cooper's hawk got one of the blue jays,” I sobbed. “I saw it happen. I don't even know who it was—maybe it was Norbert. Or Hagrid. I don't know.”

“Oh no,” he said. “I'm so sorry. Where are the kids? Do they know?”

“They're not here. I can't tell them. I know I should be teaching them all about nature, even the hard parts, but they raised those blue jays and I can't tell them.”

Later I sat on the deck stairs, watching as one of the robins pulled a worm from the bug pit. I had known from the beginning that my own silly human rules had no place in a wild bird's world. Still I had longed to be a part of it, and now that I was a part of it I was undone by one of its most basic laws.

Yet I couldn't curse the hawk. I would have been just as distraught if I'd released a young Cooper's and later watched him drop from a tree and die of starvation. “Whose side are you on?” my kids would have asked. Both, I would have answered. I'm on both sides, which means whatever happens, I can never really win.

“Where are the blue jays?” asked Mac, when I brought the kids back from their playdates.

“There's one,” I said, pointing.

“That's Ron,” said Mac. “What's the matter with him? He's acting kind of weird.”

“Maybe something scared him,” I said.

The hawk cut through the yard again late that afternoon, but the little group was not at their regular gathering spot. “Do you think he's after the fledglings?” asked Skye, and the apprehension in her face made me vow once again not to tell her what happened. The best I could do was to bring up the possibility.