Chapter 13
MOMENTUM
“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.
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:
JOHN [ENTERING THE HOUSE]: Hello everybod—
ME: Close the door! There’s been another jailbreak!
JOHN: Not really! How unusual!
ME: Quick—grab Hagrid!
BOTH KIDS [STOPPING DEAD]: But that’s not Hagrid, it’s the Professor.
JOHN: Here, I’ll get Harry—
SKYE: That’s not Harry, it’s Ron.
ME: I’ve got Norbert!
MAC: That’s not Norbert, it’s Albus Dumbledore the Second.
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.