I bought a programmable space heater, a long table, and a set of plastic drawers. The shed was drywalled and painted. John installed a fluorescent ceiling light and a spotlight over the exam table, which was an old card table I had dug out of the basement. The kids helped me move in all the crates and equipment I had accumulated. I made a sign:
BRING THEM BACK, THEN LET THEM GO
and we hung it over the doorway.
Occasionally I would refer to it grandiosely as “the Clinic,” but mostly it was “the shed.” And once it was set up, I was ready to go to my first New York State Wildlife Rehabilitation Council Conference.
Wildlife rehabilitators have a surprising number of groups they can join: the National Wildlife Rehabilitators Association, the International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council, and the International Association of Avian Trainers and Educators, as well as various state and local associations. Most host yearly multiday conferences where rehabbers can attend lectures, participate in labs, go on field trips, buy all kinds of supplies, and schmooze with kindred spirits. At its yearly conference, the New York State Wildlife Rehabilitation Council (NYSWRC, pronounced “nicework”) honors a veterinarian for his or her outstanding work with wildlife. This year it would be Wendy, who had been nominated by Maggie and Joanne.
The conference was in upstate New York, the award ceremony the first night. During the first day I attended lectures on avian antibiotics, the reintroduction of bluebirds, wound management, caging for injured accipiters, and a lab on principles of fluid therapy. I wandered through the sales area and bought the basic medical supplies I was missing, all the while thinking that I’d better get cracking on my money-making newsletter. I found Denise, who had sent the heron to me, as well as several other rehabbers I had met through the years. I chatted with rehabbers I’d never met, all of whom were cheerful and friendly and welcomed me as one of their own.
When the dinner hour arrived I entered the dining room and quickly spotted Maggie, Joanne, Wendy, and Wendy’s husband, biologist Fred Koontz. As I made my way toward them I passed a table where five or six rehabbers were eating heartily, all listening to a woman describe a raccoon who had been caught in a trap.
“This deep,” she said, putting down her buttered roll and holding her fingers two inches apart. “The tendon’s in ribbons. I go poking around inside, and the whole thing is filled with maggots.”
Instead of recoiling in horror, her dining companions leaned closer. “Was it necrotic?” demanded a man sitting nearby, holding his lasagna-laden fork in midair. “Any gangrene?”
I felt a quick rush of exhilaration: it was dinner time, yet my conversational topics were limitless.
I didn’t know the four other people at Wendy’s table. I took the empty chair between Maggie and a friendly-looking woman, and introduced myself.
“Jean Soprano,” the woman replied, shaking my hand. “From Pennellville.”
“What do you do?” I asked her.
“Bears,” she said.
“Get out!” I said, before I could stop myself.
“I do!” she said. “All the large carnivores—bears, coyotes, bobcats, foxes, raptors.”
“You have to come visit me,” I said, “so you can tell my husband how good he has it.”
“Get Jean to tell you a bear story,” said a man sitting across the table.
“Please!” I said to her. “Tell me a bear story!”
“Come on, Jean!” urged the other three.
“Okay, okay,” said Jean good-naturedly. “Here’s a good one. This just happened, so none of you have heard it. So, one night about ten o’clock a couple is driving down a dark road in one of those little hatchbacks. They come around a corner and right in the middle of the road is a big female black bear. The guy slams on his brakes, skids down the road, and bang! Plows right into the bear. Knocks her cold.”
“Ahh! Arghh! Oh, no! Poor thing! How badly was she hurt?” the whole table chorused. When it comes to stories involving cars and wildlife, there is no better audience than a group of rehabbers.
“The couple both jump out of their car and run over to the bear, who is lying unconscious in the middle of the road,” continued Jean. “They were really upset, and they didn’t have a cell phone, and they didn’t know what to do, so somehow—and don’t ask me how they did this, she was a big bear—they pick her up and put her in the back of their little tiny car.”
“They put a bear into the back of their car?” we all gasped.
“Then they drove like hell home. They get home and the bear’s still out, so they back the car up to the garage, haul her out of the car and onto a blanket, then they shut the garage door and run inside, where they proceed to call everyone they know. Everyone either asks if they’re crazy or hangs up on them.
“Finally they call the dog warden, who says she’ll be right there. The dog warden arrives—all five foot two inches, ninety pounds of her—and immediately takes charge. All three of them go back into the garage, where the bear’s still out, and they pick her up and put her into the dogcatcher truck, and the bear and the dog warden go off.
“The dog warden brings her to a local rehabber, and the two of them get the bear—who’s still out—into a big crate and latch the door. The rehabber calls me, I arrive the next morning, and we put the crate, with the bear inside it, into the back of my car. At this point the bear is conscious but still groggy, so I head off to my vet, John Davis, who works with another vet, Kevin Hammerschmidt. As we’re all dragging the crate into an exam room John discovers that the latch is broken, which means that at any time during the hour’s drive to their office she could have gotten out and I would have had a groggy bear loose in my car, just like that couple in the beginning of the story.”
The gathered rehabbers were all howling with laughter, wiping tears from their eyes and elbowing each other in the ribs; Jean, laughing herself, tried her best to continue.
“John and Kevin open the door a crack to look inside, and evidently the bear was feeling better, because she comes barreling out and starts trying to dig a hole through the office wall. So they throw on their big gloves and wrestle her down and give her a shot of tranquilizer, then as soon as she conks out again they drag her over to the X-ray machine and find out she has no fractures, just a concussion and probably a whopper of a headache. They put her in the crate and wire it shut, and put the whole thing back in my car, and when I finally drove away I could tell they were really, really happy to see me go. The bear spent three weeks with me and then I released her way up north.”
We all clapped, drank more wine, and swapped more stories, and later gave Wendy a standing ovation when she received her award. I returned home two days later bursting with inspiration, my wallet crammed with phone numbers and my notebooks heavy with information. John and the kids detailed their lives since I had been away, including sporadic sightings of our released birds, appearing occasionally for food but all of whom were spending more and more time away from the yard.
We saw Null and Void more than the others, although they, too, would disappear for days at a time. Then one Sunday afternoon Mac and I were clearing barberry bushes from an area halfway down the driveway when we heard a strange sound. It was loud and grating, as if a heavy metal object was being dragged down a concrete road. Mac and I glanced around, then at each other. “Grackle migration!” he said.
As we hurried up the driveway the huge flock of grackles flew over our heads and blanketed the woods around the house, perching on tree limbs, poking through the fallen leaves, and emptying the bird feeders, all chattering noisily and turning the land dark with their sheer numbers. Skye hurried out of the house and John out of his office, and we all sat on the deck to watch the spectacle. A half hour later they began to disperse. For the next two days the huge group would come through once or twice a day, eat the seed we’d thrown on the ground, and take off again. One day they failed to appear, signaling that they had moved on and that we wouldn’t see them again until the following fall.
For a month I continued to put out the usual plate of grackle food. It would be eaten by an assortment of passing birds or, if it wasn’t gone by nightfall, finished off by an opossum or coyote. But our swaggering yellow-eyed bandits were gone.
“They joined the other grackles,” said Skye firmly. “They have a family now.”
“A really huge family,” said Mac. “Think about it—it would be like having a thousand Skyes around you all the time.”
“Shut up, Mac!” said Skye.
Putting on my sweats I ran to where the woods were thick with sugar maples. The late October sun poured through their brilliant yellow leaves, turning the forest into a glorious, glowing cathedral. I sat on a fallen tree deep in the radiant woods, as I did every year, listening to the birdcalls and running my hands through the crisp autumn air. Believing, just for a moment, that the world was a perfect place.