Flyaway (7 page)

I returned to my bookshelf but found no information on what to do if your single duckling adamantly rejects the duck box you have so painstakingly put together. My instinct was to comfort her and deal with imprinting later, but then I envisioned Daisy as a mature duck irreparably bonded to humans, living in a miserable gray half-world, a pet but not a pet, a wild duck but not a wild duck, her dire fate inarguably my fault. I'll just leave her in the box, I thought, then envisioned the tiny, terrified duckling bereft and abandoned, finally dying a lonely death from the large dent she'd put in her own head. Either way I was headed for Rehabber Hell. Rehabber Hell materializes around your bed at two in the morning, when you lie awake and catalogue—bird by bird—all the rehabbing mistakes you've ever made, both real and imagined, and inevitably conclude that you are nothing but a drunk driver careening wildly through the helpless bird community. This is one reason rehabbers always look so tired, even during the off season.

Finally I couldn't take it anymore. Knowing I was destined for Rehabber Hell no matter what I did, I strode into the kitchen, scooped up the frantic duckling, and marched back into the living room, where Mac sat engrossed in
The Seven Songs of Merlin
. I deposited Daisy under his chin. Without taking his eyes off his book he cradled one hand around her, and Daisy nestled in with a blissful sigh and instantly fell asleep.

A half hour later Mac deposited the groggy duckling in her feather-duster bedroom and silence ensued. Perhaps, I thought, this was all she needed to get to sleep. I'd find another duckling for her tomorrow, she wouldn't imprint, and I'd be saved from eternal damnation. Feeling very pleased with myself I readied the kids for bed, then sat down with John to watch
The Sopranos
.

During its heyday we considered
The Sopranos
sacrosanct. Most television is so awful that the Mafia drama was one of our only forms of serial entertainment. John and I would go to ridiculous lengths to avoid being out of the house on Sunday nights, and we spent inordinate amounts of time deconstructing the characters' motivations and speculating on the details of their eventual demise. At the stroke of 9:00 on this particular Sunday night we were in our usual positions: draped on the couch, wineglasses in hand, grinning with anticipation. Just as the theme song started to play, however, there was an unexpected accompaniment.

Peep. Peep. Peeppeep. Peeppeeppeep. Peeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeep Bonk! Bonk! BONK!

In that split second a decision had to be made. But factoring in
The Sopranos
made it surprisingly easy. I raced into the kitchen, and before the theme song ended I was back on the couch, wineglass in hand, duckling carefully ensconced under my chin.

With my luck it happened to be the episode in which Christopher (pronounced Chris-tu-fuh), the psychotic young lieutenant, tells Tony, the mob boss, that Christopher's slinky girlfriend Adriana has just admitted to spilling her guts to the Feds. Tony gets his soldier Silvio to drive the unsuspecting Adriana to an upstate hospital, where Christopher is supposedly clinging to life after a baffling suicide attempt. The whole thing is a setup, of course, and before you know it Silvio has pulled off the highway into a deserted wooded area, where Adriana instantly realizes the jig is up.

Now I always had a soft spot for Adriana, who was rather dim but essentially had a good heart. She'd sashay across the screen wearing a catsuit, four-inch heels, and a black eye from her latest encounter with her loutish boyfriend,
and I'd wish I could rescue her, put her in my flight cage for a month, and set her free. But it was not to be. As I lay mesmerized on the couch Silvio jumped out of the car, opened the passenger door, threw Adriana to the ground, and pulled out a giant silver gun. Forgetting all about the duck under my chin I sat bolt upright and, embarrassingly enough, actually shouted “Look out!” to the doomed Adriana. This propelled Daisy, suddenly wide awake and peeping hysterically, through the air and into a cushion at the other end of the couch. John leaned forward and picked her up, his eyes still glued to the screen.

“Here,” he whispered. “You dropped your duck.”

Daisy's sudden launching must have tired her out, for the rest of the night passed uneventfully. First thing in the morning, filled with foreboding, I tiptoed to the box. I opened the lid of the duck house and there she was, definitely alive, snuggled under the wing of a soft toy duck that Skye had donated to the cause. All I had to do now was scare up some more ducklings, and I'd be home free.

“But you're a duck rehabber,” I said into the phone. “How can you have no ducks?”

As it turned out, when you don't want a duck they're everywhere, and vice versa.

I spent the morning on the telephone, trying to find a rehabber with potential sibling ducklings. Nothing. I put a message on my wildlife electronic mailing list. “Subject: Any Duck'll Do.” No replies. My standards kept dropping. How about a gosling? I'd say. Anybody have any little wild turkeys? Daisy might end up fanning her tail and gobbling, but at least she'd know she was some kind of bird. What about a small chicken?

“I could put her in with my redtail,” said one rehabber friend helpfully. “The lion and the lamb, the hawk and the duck. Can't we all just get along?”

In the meantime, I didn't have the heart to leave the fragile, desperate little creature alone. I left her in her box for short periods so she'd get used to it, but otherwise I carted her around in the crook of my elbow. She watched TV with the kids. I let her follow me down the uncarpeted hallway, her frantic footsteps sounding like a stick being dragged across a picket fence at high speed. Once John found me at the kitchen table, lost in thought, Daisy sitting Buddha-like on my lap.

“Don't worry,” said John. “You'll find her a buddy.”

“I know,” I sighed. “It's just that…I can't believe they whacked Adriana.”

On the third morning we filled the bathtub with warm water, slid Daisy in, and witnessed firsthand the phenomenon we came to call duck joy. (“Duck joy!” said John. “It sounds like something you'd order from a Chinese restaurant.”) Daisy gamboled, she shimmied, she dunked her head in and out of the water half a dozen times in a row; she'd rear back, pull her body up, and flailing her legs and wings, high-step across the top of the water in a frenzied version of the Maori haka. Mindful of the dark tales I'd heard of rehabbers who'd left ducklings alone in water for only a few minutes and returned to find them all drowned, I never allowed Daisy to bathe without a spotter; whenever she grew tired or chilled there was always a helping hand to lift her out of the tub and onto a heating pad by a sunny window.

That morning I received a call from Maggie: she had a mallard duckling, maybe a week old, a possible companion for Daisy. “There's only one problem,” she said. “He's neurologic.”

There were a daunting number of explanations as to why a duckling would be unable to control its movements. Bacterial and viral diseases, environmental poisons, genetic anomalies, a blow to the head. “The woman who found him said she saw the family swimming around on the other side of the pond and they were all fine, so I doubt it's anything contagious,” said Maggie. “I took him to the vet and they couldn't find anything wrong. He probably got stepped on. You can try it, and if it doesn't work out I'll take him back.”

Maggie's duckling was a half-size bigger than Daisy—an impossibly cute, fuzzy little creature, but one to whom the fates had been especially unkind. He'd lurch from one side of the box to the other and then flip onto his back, where he was unable to right himself. When he was at rest, though, he was fine. He'd look around the box and up at me with an interested expression, and when I held him steady by the food dish he'd eat heartily. I moved Daisy's heated duck house into a cardboard box, rolled up several hand towels, and positioned them at odd angles, like the walls of a maze: when the little mallard
flipped onto his back he could push himself up against one of the towels and so get enough leverage to right himself.

He and Daisy were clearly happy to see each other, often ending up in a sleepy little duck pile wedged next to one of the hand towels. I thought the new duck might benefit from water therapy, so twice a day I'd draw them a bath. The first swim was alarming: the new duck spun in a circle, rolled upside down, and needed a quick rescue. But with each subsequent swim he became stronger and more adept, until I started to feel “cautiously optimistic” about his chances of recovery.

When both ducks finally settled into a routine I was ready to tackle the mystery of Daisy's identity, as when they were side by side it was fairly obvious that they were not the same species. I sat down at the computer, typed two words into Google, and closed my eyes. When I opened them there was a perfect picture of Daisy.

She was
Aix sponsa
: a wood duck.

“It's a good thing I didn't know you were a wood duck,” I told her later, “or you'd probably be a dead duck.”

There are a number of knowledgeable, intrepid souls out there who specialize in wood ducks and have their care down to a science; my friend Wendi Schendel used to raise them for a university-sponsored project in Montana, and would release up to a couple of hundred a year. But for most rehabbers, the orphaned wood duck mortality rate is above 90 percent. On one hand, I felt cool and powerful: Yes! I am Super-Rehabber! On the other, I felt a little like Rosie Ruiz, who had won the 1980 Boston Marathon by hopping onto the subway for the hard part. Sure, I'd won the Wood Duck Marathon, but I'd done it by cheating the system—something I thought about every time I heard Daisy's furious tap dance following me down the hallway.

Then there were Null and Void, who had made great progress in bonding with each other but still hadn't quite kicked the habit of landing on my head. I tried to enter their flight cage and feed them in a brisk and businesslike way, but it was difficult. Filled with standard young-bird joie de vivre, they carried
crumpled leaves around in their beaks, stole pebbles from each other, and attacked the hanging ropes; they'd jump up and down in place, energetically flapping their wings until sheer momentum spun them around in a circle, like old-fashioned prop planes. Occasionally I'd relent, reasoning that I didn't want them to
dislike
me; I'd bring them toys, like pinecones and seed pods, or toss a pebble into their water dish, inspiring furiously flaphappy bouts of bathing.

The wing of the adult robin who had lost the bird fight had healed nicely, and he was in the second flight cage with the house finch, the song sparrow, and a small group of fledgling robins who were eating on their own. Although the adult robin did not appear particularly paternal, he did provide a good example for the fledglings by eating, perching, and flying around like a robin. He also taught them how to comb through the bug pit, a square area of deep organic soil held in place by split logs. The kids would dump their containers of small earthworms and miscellaneous bugs into the bug pit, then cover them all
with leaves and grass. As we watched from the outside, the adult robin would stride over and expertly turn over the leaves to find the bugs underneath while his avian students watched in fascination.

Fledgling Song Sparrow

There is nothing sweeter and more appealing than a fledgling songbird. They have an air of bright-eyed bewilderment, as if they find the strange new world around them entrancing but slightly confusing. When I first released the young robins into the flight cage, one hopped up on a perch and stood still, regarding her new surroundings with surprise. The house finch quickly joined her, but evidently didn't receive the response he was looking for. The finch hopped to the robin's other side, then behind her, in front of her, and finally onto her head, where he stood briefly before jumping back down to the original perch. The finch did this twice while the robin remained immobile, looking more and more perplexed.

That afternoon Jen Bowman, who had given me one of the grackles, called. “I just wanted to see how the grackle was doing,” she said. “And ask if you might have room for a fledgling cedar waxwing.”

“A cedar waxwing!” I exclaimed. “How soon can you get him here?”

Cedar waxwings must be among the most beautiful birds in the world. Their buff-colored bodies, regal crests, striking black masks, and brilliantly red and yellow scalloped tail-feather tips all give them a slightly Asian, otherworldly air. Their trilling voices are like tiny bells. They love blueberries. They travel in flocks and land together in trees, the sight of which few bird lovers can ever forget.

Jen's waxwing had been delivered to her as a nestling with a broken leg. Now healed and feathered and eating on his own, he just needed some flight-cage time and, in a perfect world, another waxwing for company. I put him in with the finch, the sparrow, and the robins, entranced by his delicate beauty and praying to the nature gods for another waxwing. Though shy and unsteady at first, within days he was swooping, banking, and turning in midair, learning to forage by combing the flight for the berries I'd painstakingly impaled on dozens of branches each morning. When I entered the flight cage he'd fly to a
high perch and look down at me with calm self-assurance, like a small, impeccably gowned emperor from the T'ang Dynasty, while I did my chores.

I tried not to stare at all of them. Prey species (such as songbirds) have eyes on the sides of their heads, giving them a greater range of vision; this way they have a better chance of seeing a predator species, whose eyes are on the front of their heads, coming toward them. In the wild, staring at a bird is a clear signal that you intend to do him serious bodily harm, and I didn't want to cause alarm by steadily watching them all with my predatory human eyes. But I couldn't
not
watch them; each one was so breathtakingly beautiful, every one of their movements so remarkable, that sometimes I ended up facing away and watching them out of the corner of my eye until the resulting headache forced me to stop. Occasionally I would pause, close my eyes, and listen to the sound of their wings. When the sparrow flew by it was like the whispered roll of an Italian
r
, the mysterious half sentence of an overheard conversation. I stored the wing beats of each bird in my memory, each one a quick riff from a different song, so I could replay them all at the end of the day.

I e-mailed my friend Ed and told him about the burgeoning bird population. “Hamlet said, ‘there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow,'” he wrote back. “I might add, as well as the fall of a wood duck. And a finch. And a group of jays. And many robins. And now a cedar waxwing. Is there anyone I've missed?”

“Who the heck knows?” I wrote back. “Sometimes I lose track.”

It was over two weeks since the blue jays had arrived. They were fuzzily feathered and bouncing out of their nest, so I moved them into a roomy reptarium. The reptarium was filled with tree branches for perching and leaves, pinecones, and acorns for play. One day another rehabber delivered a single jay, only slightly older than ours; he quickly fit into the Harry Potter clan and was christened Albus Dumbledore II, in honor of the smallest nestling who had survived only a few days.

By the third week feeding them was an adventure. They were filled with energy and dying to fly but weren't yet eating on their own, so I couldn't put
them in the flight cage. Whenever I'd unzip the top of the reptarium in order to feed them, they'd burst upward like large kernels of blue popcorn and bolt off through the house, with the kids and me galloping behind in hopeless pursuit. This led to breathless exchanges:

Sometimes, after we herded them back into the reptarium, we carried it into my bedroom and placed it on the floor next to the screened door. I put a shallow dish of water on the cage floor and the kids took turns spraying the jays through the mesh with a water-only plant mister, encouraging them to preen and readying them for their eventual encounters with rain. At first they cowered together, frightened by the unfamiliar sensations, but soon they were spreading their wings to catch the drops, fanning their tail feathers, and crowding into the water dish. Later they took up positions on various perches, drowsing in the sunshine that poured through the screen door and listening to the sounds of the outside world.

“You'll be there soon,” promised Mac.