As much as I had wanted to return to the goshawk nest, time passed too quickly and by the time I returned all the nestlings were gone. As I ran through the woods I could hear the young ones’ wailing cries, and occasionally I’d catch a glimpse of a large dark bird flying swiftly through the trees. I wanted nothing more than to sit under an old hemlock for an entire afternoon and wait for them, but the days of long, lazy afternoons had vanished.
I moved the two fledgling Carolina wrens and three newly arrived fledgling purple finches into the flight cage with the house finch, the catbird, and the waxwing. Maggie arrived with the wood thrush, an adult whose broken wing had healed, and the downy woodpecker, whom she had raised. When I entered the flight cage the wrens would freeze and the finches would quickly cluster around the house finch, who had assumed the role of den mother; the thrush would vanish into the underbrush, not to emerge until I had left; and the woodpecker would hike jauntily along the mesh until she was two or three feet away from me, determine that I wasn’t all that interesting, and turn around and go about her business.
Next door things were not so genteel. If the songbird flight was an English drawing room, the jay/grackle flight was the local pub: noisy, boisterous, and filled with outsized personalities looking for trouble. The grackles were slightly older and a bit larger than the jays, and occasionally seemed to be able to intimidate them through sheer size and agility. But the jays never seemed to run out of creative deviltry. They’d steal the toys, hide the food, and, waiting until one of the grackles was distracted, rush up behind them—simply, it seemed, in order to watch them jump. Once I found one of the jays flying about with a grackle tail feather in his beak; although I wanted to assume that the feather had molted naturally, I couldn’t guarantee the jay hadn’t crept up behind the grackle and yanked it out.
The one member of the group who didn’t conform to type was Norbert, the smallest blue jay, who always reminded me of the quiet, bookish mascot of a street gang. Although from time to time I would see him bathing, flying around the flight cage, and interacting with the other birds, he preferred to watch the action from a sunny perch. He had somehow convinced at least two of the other jays to feed him, and he would sit on a wide branch like a prince on a throne and graciously accept their offerings. At one point one of Norbert’s feet had suddenly and briefly become swollen, and for a few days I had to catch him for a daily foot check. This was easier said than done; for all his sedentary ways, he was surprisingly quick when he wanted to be. He dodged my net, wiggled out of my hands, and made such a commotion that by the time I caught him everyone else was in an uproar. One day he flew to a corner, and as I approached him all five of the other jays flew over and perched on branches between us. They stared balefully at me, silent and motionless, like a small squadron of bodyguards protecting their client from a familiar and not very threatening enemy.
When it came to downtime the two species would separate. The jays gathered into a small flock at one end of the flight, while the grackles perched together at the other. Occasionally on a hot, lazy afternoon I would quietly enter the flight cage and sit on a log in an unoccupied corner, where I could watch them without being obtrusive. The grackles were more aware of me and, being recent allies instead of siblings, not as affectionate with each other. Perching together but only occasionally touching, they would fluff out their feathers and relax, but only rarely did I see them close their eyes.
The blue jays, however, would position themselves comfortably, rustle their feathers, preen each other gently, and, in time, lean against each other and close their eyes; sometimes one would even tuck his head beneath a wing. And Norbert would dream. Drowsily nestling down into a soft circle of feathers, he would point his beak straight up at the ceiling and chortle and coo to himself—eyes closed, fast asleep.
“You feed those things every half an hour?” asked the woman incredulously, staring down into the wicker picnic basket. “Are you out of your mind?”
I was in my usual Saturday morning position, sitting in a collapsible chair under a tree and watching the kids play soccer, occasionally glancing at my watch and doling out mealworms to the waiting nestlings. Every now and then a parent would stop by and peer into the basket. When they likened me to Mother Teresa, I’d envision myself surrounded by golden rays of light, wearing a halo and smiling beatifically; when they questioned my sanity, I’d envision myself in an old-fashioned black-and-white striped prison uniform, scowling ferociously, holding a ball and chain instead of a wicker basket.
What was the matter with me, anyway?
I was so busy that I rarely had time for reflection, but during the occasional lull—or when asked a pointed question—I would try to consider the Big Picture. What good was I doing, exactly? Would any of the nestlings I labored over that summer survive to adulthood, then go on to breed? Could they ever overcome the huge hurdle of being raised and released by an alien species? Jayne bands her fledgling birds before releasing them and sees many of them year after year, so I know if I raise them right they have a decent chance. But with my limited time and resources, why was I raising common and plentiful songbirds instead of working to conserve habitat? Or raising money for endangered species? Or fighting global warming?
If we’re talking about the greatest return for one’s effort, then never mind the baby birds—why rehab wildlife at all?
Exactly, critics say; rehabbers are nothing but a bunch of bunny-huggers wasting their time. Populations are what count, not individuals. It’s not worth the effort.
First, when any potential critic looks down on me from his lofty position and deigns to grade my effort, I tend to ignore (or mock) him out of principle. But this is an argument easily won. Although wildlife rehabilitation begins with the individual, there is a ripple effect that extends far beyond the single animal. If critics of wildlife rehabilitation are looking for numbers, they will find them not in the release rates of a single rehabilitator but in the numbers of people who have been reached and educated because of her (or him).
This is not to denigrate the principle of wildlife rehabilitation because, unlike biologists, we rehabbers do believe in the value of the individual. It is easy to dismiss an unfamiliar group, whether it be a flock of bluebirds, a herd of elephants, or a village of Tanzanians. I have never seen a bluebird, one might say, I have never been near an elephant, and I don’t know any Tanzanians. But all that changes with contact and familiarity.
My friend India Howell, with whom I lived on the farm in Maine, took a trip to climb Mount Kilimanjaro when she was in her mid-forties. She had never been to Africa and knew little about the Tanzanian people, outside of the occasional news reports of villages devastated by poverty and AIDS. But while she was on vacation she was offered a job as manager of a safari company, and when she moved to Arusha she began to encounter the street kids mentioned in the news reports. Once befriended they were no longer nameless and faceless, and no longer the blurry part of a problem too large to address. India founded and now runs the Rift Valley Children's Village, an orphanage outside Keratu, and she channels certain donations to help the surrounding villages.
Wildlife rehabilitators find themselves in the same position but faced with a more skeptical public, many of whom seem to believe that wild animals are little more than programmed robots. Some loudly and indignantly question why rehabbers “waste” their time with animals when they could be helping people, a query even more absurd than asking a pilot why he or she is not a firefighter. Just as India saw something in the children of Tanzania that she could not turn away from, so rehabilitators see something in a wild animal that can be found nowhere else. We crave a connection—no matter how brief or tenuous—with a wild creature, and we are willing to play by rules that seem designed to break our hearts in order to do it.
We clean, feed, study, attend conferences, amass arcane knowledge, and learn to handle the creatures who fear us. Our triumph is to accept an injured wild animal, treat its injuries, carefully learn each one of its quirks and preferences, help it heal, and then let it go. If things go according to plan, we will never see it again.
Somehow, this is enough.
“Do you ever fall in love with the animals you take care of?” I asked a rehabilitator, naively, years and years ago.
She gave me a small, rueful smile. “Every single one,” she said.
What rehabilitators learn all too quickly is that each animal, each bird who comes through the door is unique. Species may share general traits, but each individual is different, each one is memorable. And as soon as this becomes clear, the enormity of what humankind is doing to the natural world becomes all the more harrowing.
Critics may look for numbers, but from that point of view all nonprofit work is the veritable drop in the bucket. Millions are under seige; what’s the point of helping fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand? The point is in the value of the individual, and in the ensuing ripple effect. The drop in the bucket is the convulsing mockingbird; the ripple effect is that a woman brings it to a rehabilitator, who convinces the woman to stop using pesticides on her lawn, and the woman returns home and convinces her neighbors to do the same. The drop in the bucket is the nest of owlets fallen from a chain-sawed tree; the ripple effect is that a man brings them to a rehabilitator, who dissuades the man from clear-cutting the rest of his property, and the man brings up the effects of clear-cutting at the next town board meeting.
Ninety-five percent of wildlife injuries are the direct result of human activity. Our recent national leaders have championed business and money at the expense of everything else, and deemed a robin’s life—since it has “no commercial value”—barely worth noticing. If there is nowhere for a member of the public to bring a single injured wild animal, then the animals’ collective lives will become even cheaper than they already are. If the average person’s initial concern over an injured bird is met with nothing but shrugs and apathy, he will conclude that wildlife really isn’t worth saving, and the war over intrinsic value will truly be lost.
There is a story that every rehabilitator knows, written by the renowned anthropologist, ecologist, and writer Loren Eiseley. A boy walks down a beach covered with stranded starfish, methodically picking them up and throwing them back into the sea. An old man sees him and says, “Why are you wasting your time? There must be thousands of them! How can what you’re doing possibly make a difference?”
The boy picks up another starfish, tosses it into the sea, and regards the man. “It made a difference to that one,” he says.
I sat in my chair at the soccer game, alternately feeding and cheering, unable to reduce my tweezers and worms and picnic basket filled with hungry nestlings to a clever and convincing sound bite. Eventually I would reach the point of admitting that I was just too exhausted to raise children and songbirds at the same time, but halfway through my first summer I still believed that I had the will and the energy to do anything.
“Are you out of your mind?” asked the woman.
“Yeah,” I said with a shrug. “I guess I am.”