Breathe in. Feed the nestlings.
Breathe out. Feed the nestlings.
Breathe in. Feed the nestlings.
Breathe out. Feed the nestlings.
Oh, is there more to life?
It was pouring rain, the kids were in day camp, and I was leaving to see Dr. Wendy. Strapped to the backseat was the closeable wicker picnic basket; inside, tucked into various nests, were the current nestlings—two house wrens, a tufted titmouse, and a chipping sparrow. Riding in carriers in the back of the Jeep were a herring gull and a Canada goose.
“A goose!” I’d said to the man who called. “Can’t you find any injured flamingos? I only take healthy adult songbirds, but I’d make an exception for a flamingo.”
“What?” he said.
John had not been as easily sidetracked. Appearing just as I was about to back out of the garage, he cast a suspicious look into the car.
“What have you got in there?” he asked.
“Just the nestlings!” I said.
“I don’t mean in the basket—I mean in those carriers. Those carriers that seem to be too large for nestlings, unless they’re nestling pterodactyls.”
“I promise you,” I said solemnly. “I will never accept a pterodactyl from a member of the public.”
John opened the back door and peered behind the towels covering the carriers. “You’re on a slippery slope, aren’t you?” he said.
“I’m not keeping the goose,” I explained. “I’m taking them both down to Wendy, and she’s going to give the goose to another rehabber. But I have to go, because she’s waiting for me. Bye!”
I drove slowly, peering through the rain and following a line of traffic. When I was halfway there, the driver two cars ahead of me hit a large woodchuck. He tapped his brakes briefly, then kept going. The driver directly ahead of me made a wide circle around the woodchuck, who stood, fell over, rose drunkenly, and fell again. I yanked the steering wheel to the right and pulled off the road, watching incredulously as car after car avoided the staggering creature and continued on its way, barely slowing down.
Half of my brain ordered me to pull back onto the road and follow their example. The other half shouted, “Fer Chrissakes, hurry up before some idiot kills him!”
Cursing, I jumped out of the car, opened the back, and grabbed the blanket covering the gull’s crate, also snatching two small cardboard trays that happened to be propped up between the crates. I marched into the middle of the road and threw the blanket over the woodchuck, suddenly realizing that I knew very little about them. I thought furiously, trying to remember the woodchuck questions from my New York State Wildlife Rehabilitation Exam.
Which of the following animals normally hibernates during the winter?
My grandfather once told me that all knowledge has value, although knowing that woodchucks hibernate in the winter did not seem especially valuable to me as I was standing in the middle of the road. Assuming that if I suddenly grabbed a wild woodchuck he would bite me whether or not he had recently been clobbered by a large car, I swaddled him in the blanket, put one cardboard tray under him and one over him, picked him up like an overstuffed sandwich, and carried him back to the Jeep. Cramming the whole package between the two crates, I slammed the back door shut, going on faith that during the next five minutes the woodchuck wouldn’t somehow wiggle out of the blanket and start running laps around the car.
During the short drive to the veterinarian’s office I considered my situation. As John had noticed, I wasn’t doing a very good job at drawing the line. But there was a terrible shortage of bird rehabbers in my area, and I had never been good at saying no to an animal in distress. It’s just a facet of my personality, I decided. Some people are unable to pass a chocolate truffle lying on a table without grabbing it and stuffing it into their mouth, and I am unable to pass a woodchuck convulsing on the road without grabbing it and stuffing it into the back of my car. At that particular moment I reached the office, thus concluding my haphazard psychological self-assessment.
I parked the car, unstrapped the basket, and sprinted across the parking lot, trying to avoid jostling the baby birds as I ran. Reaching the door, I flung myself inside, breathless, disheveled, and dripping wet. Janet looked up from her desk, pursing her lips in a desperate attempt not to laugh.
“Lovely day for a picnic,” she said.
Wendy, ever positive, walked into the waiting room and regarded me with a look of pleasant surprise, as if I had just strolled in wearing tennis whites and holding a mint julep.
“It’s not enough that I have a goose and a gull and all these babies,” I told her. “Now I have a woodchuck.”
“Room number one,” said Wendy, without missing a beat. “Need help bringing him in?”
A minute later I hurried back in through the front door, balancing the woodchuck sandwich between two soggy cardboard trays.
“Hey!” caroled Janet as I disappeared into the examination room. “You want some mayo on that groundhog?”
Wendy closed the door and pulled at the blanket, searching for the beast within. An opening appeared and the woodchuck burst into view, blood dripping from his nose, chattering in what I would term an aggressive way even though at the time I had no basis for comparison. Wendy calmly grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, felt around for broken bones, shone a penlight into his eyes, and finally announced that he looked fine but could probably use a shot of cortisone. Depositing the woodchuck gently on the floor in the corner, she tossed the blanket back over him and left the room.
I opened the picnic basket and fed the nestlings, keeping a wary eye on the blanket in the corner of the room. I’d fed the last one and was closing the lid when the blanket started moving ominously. Should I act casual, I wondered, or run back into the waiting room and hide behind Janet? Get ahold of yourself, I told myself sternly. Wildlife is wildlife; it’s just this one is huge, hairy, and has giant rodent fangs instead of a beak.
Wendy returned with a hypodermic and a large cardboard box. As soon as she bent down and gave the injection, the woodchuck shot out from under the blanket and ran straight toward me. Leaping into the air, I did a lively Mexican hat dance, silently vowing that someday I would rewrite the New York State Wildlife Rehabilitation Exam with more pertinent questions:
A woodchuck has been hit by a car, dragged into a veterinarian’s office, held by the scruff of the neck, given a shot, and is currently racing around the office floor sounding like an enraged lawn mower. Should the rescuer fear that the woodchuck will bite her foot?
Wendy intercepted the woodchuck, deposited him into the large cardboard box, and covered the box with my blanket. “There we go!” she said cheerfully. “Now—who’s next?”
The goose and the gull both had broken wings. The rehabber Wendy had contacted was a kind woman named Marylyn Eichenholtz, a mammal rehabber who had agreed to provide temporary care for the goose until she could pass her along to a waterbird rehabber up north. That left me with the herring gull, normally a big strapping creature with wide yellow eyes and a bad attitude. This one was thin and weak, having been grounded in a parking lot for two days before someone rescued him. This did not prevent him from methodically biting my hand at every opportunity; it just meant that, at this point, his bite didn’t hurt.
“That’ll change,” promised Wendy. “Believe me, you’ll know when he’s starting to feel better.”
After both birds had been treated and their wings wrapped, Wendy lifted the blanket and regarded the woodchuck.
“I would bring him back where you found him and let him go,” she said. “Unless you’re really dying to take him home.”
“No,” I said. “Believe it or not, I’m drawing the line.”
I made my way through the waiting room, carrying the gull’s crate and the basket of nestlings, while Wendy followed behind me with the woodchuck. “Suzie!” cried Robin Sista, the other receptionist. “Janet tells me you’re doing mammals! Can you take a coyote?”
I drove back to where I had found the woodchuck, pulled off the road, and squinted through the downpour at a heavily wooded steep slope. This couldn’t have happened next to a nice level field on a sunny day, I thought grumpily. I opened the back of the Jeep, picked up the woodchuck’s box, trotted across the road, and began staggering up the slope, trying to maintain enough momentum to keep me moving upward but not so much that I would lose my balance and somersault, box and all, down onto the road—where, no doubt, cars would make a wide circle around me and continue on their way. I finally slowed to a stop and, gasping, set the box down in the mud. Through the drone of the rain I could hear the sound of angry chattering.
I pointed the box uphill, tipped it over, and pulled the blanket away. The woodchuck bolted out, took a few strides, then made a U-turn and started galloping back down toward the road.
“%$@$&*!” I shouted. “You %@$#(# &%*#% &%*$#@!”
I raced after him until the ground gave way and I found myself sliding. The woodchuck looked to the side and found that the human he had spent most of the afternoon trying to get away from was mudsurfing beside him, wobbling dangerously and howling like a beagle. He slammed on the brakes just as I hit an exposed root; eventually I rolled to a stop just short of the road. I looked up groggily and watched as the woodchuck loped up the hill, paused for a brief moment, and disappeared into the woods.