I received an e-mail from Ed. “I was reading The Merchant of Venice again,” he wrote, “and I came across this quote, spoken by Portia to Nerissa:
The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark
When neither is attended, and I think
The nightingale if she should sing by day,
When every goose is cackling, would be thought
No better a musician than the wren.
How many things by season seasoned are
To their right praise and true perfection!
“This morning I was birding on Plum Island,” he continued, referring to a wildlife sanctuary off the Massachusetts coast, “and with every bird I saw I thought: ‘by season seasoned are / To their right praise and true perfection.’ I expect that phrase will soon be lodged in your head, too, if it isn’t already. By the way, have you any of the above?”
“Thank you for the poem,” I wrote back. “And yes, as a matter of fact, I have a goose, although she doesn’t do much cackling. But none of the others.”
By one of those small but strange coincidences, less than twenty-four hours later my statement was no longer true. Tipped off by Tanya, a rehabber named Kelly called and asked if I could take two nestling crows.
Everyone wants a pet crow, but luckily for the crows, it is illegal to keep one without a special license. Crows, like parrots, are very intelligent, intensely focused flock birds who hate to be alone. A single crow (or parrot) raised from a nestling will want to be with its foster human constantly and will suffer greatly if ignored. A crow cannot be raised by people and then, when it gets to be too messy and time-consuming, suddenly set free; it will have no idea how to relate to other crows, find food, or recognize predators, especially the human ones. Young crows have to be raised with other crows. Luckily for me, these two came as a pair.
“Sure, I can take them,” I said, after she told me there was no way to get them back to their parents. “Can you bring them over here?”
I didn’t add, “within the next five minutes?” although I wanted to. It had been years since I raised my pair of crows, and the one who survived had long since joined the wild crow flock and disappeared. The one who died remained, buried on a grassy slope behind our house, never having relinquished her fierce hold on my heart. Because of her I watch wild crows, follow them through the fields when I go running, and gravitate to the unreleasable ones at nature centers, always marveling at their intelligence and their complicated personalities. Crows are too smart for their own good and have no sense of law and order, traits that make them annoying to many people but irresistible to me. They’re bullies and opportunists, travel in gangs, and harass better behaved birds, but they’re also loyal and affectionate and like to slide down snowbanks on their backs. When the two nestlings arrived, they gazed up at me through wondrous blue eyes, and I felt a small poignant stab of remembrance.
They were thin and their feathers a bit ratty, but otherwise they were healthy young crows. They were pre-fledglings, covered with fuzzy dark feathers and not quite ready to leave their nest. While much of crow behavior is instinctual, even more is learned from parents and extended family. Nestling crows are trusting, as their family has not yet clued them in on the human penchant for assault, murder, and mayhem. But adolescent and adult crows are well aware of it and can be difficult birds to rehab, simply because they are so terrified of their captors.
Since their hourly feeding schedule precluded them from going into the shed, I brought a medium-size carrier into the spare bathroom, lined it with newspaper, and outfitted it with a cozy nest. I added a small log, just in case they felt inclined to hop out and move around. Soon after they arrived I approached them holding an appetizing bowl of crow food—soaked puppy chow, hard-boiled egg, raisins, peanuts, vegetables, fruit bits, mealworms, chopped mouse, and vitamins. Seeing my extra-large pair of tweezers they stood up, opened their beaks, and emitted a series of loud begging cries, eagerly gobbling down each offered bite.
I felt a surge of emotion. Stop it, I told myself sternly. You are a professional. There will be no more falling for any crows around here.
The number of bird-related phone calls increased, and people called from farther away. Occasionally I would open my door to find a stranger holding a wounded fawn, or receive a telephone plea to help an injured coyote. The shed slowly filled with injured birds, the bathroom with nestlings. If I had managed to juggle four balls the previous summer, this summer I was juggling eight balls, three torches, and a rake.
“Dear Marigoldy,” wrote Skye. “What will you be doing for Summer Solstice? Will you and your fairy friends have a party? Can you tell me who will be there, and what kind of food you will eat?”
Skye’s fairy notes were always on my daily To Do list, although they were always the last to actually be accomplished. Rising at 6 A.M., I would head for the kitchen, make myself a cup of tea, then head off to the spare bathroom for the first nestling feeding of the day. I would check the critical-care birds, if I had any, steeling myself in case they hadn’t made it through the night. Returning to the kitchen, I would soak puppy and kitten chow and chop fruits and vegetables for the birds in the shed and the flight cage, finishing up with an array of dishes filled with various enticing food combinations. I’d get the kids up, feed them breakfast, and get them dressed and ready in time for John to come in from his writing cabin and take them down to the school bus. I would spend the day feeding and caring for birds, fielding phone calls, giving people directions to my house, and accepting the wounded and orphaned, somehow sandwiching house and family chores and errands in between.
When the kids jumped off the bus at 3:20, I’d take them to the pool or to the store, usually lugging the nestlings along with me. Then there was homework or, during the last few weeks of school, an unending series of activities. Odds are Tanya would have called sometime during the day, and would arrive with a wounded bird who needed immediate attention right around 6:00. This was the time she finished work and was driving past my house, but it also happened to be when the family dynamic had reached its crescendo: the kids were hungry, the parrots were screaming, and John was walking in from his cabin with the pipe dream of enjoying a leisurely beer on the deck.
“I’m sorry,” I’d say to him. “I’ll be as quick as I can.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he’d sigh, and start to prepare dinner.
Occasionally we all went outside after we’d eaten, or watched a movie, but inevitably I would be called away by a phone call or the arrival of an injured bird. When I put the kids to bed, John and I could finally spend some time together, then about 11:00 or so I’d suddenly remember the Marigoldy notes and have to race off to find paper and colored markers. I’d slip the finished note under Skye’s pillow, yawning and wondering how long this phase would last; but when she read the note the next morning, giddy with delight and awed by the magic in the world, I hoped it would last forever.
I had never worked so hard in my life, and the weekends were worse than the weekdays. But like Skye, I too was awed by the magic in the world, the kind that allowed me to watch a bird grow from a tiny naked nestling to a healthy fledgling, or to see an adult bird recover from an injury that would otherwise have doomed her. At times my learning curve was so steep it felt almost vertical, and I often despaired over my own ignorance. Once I posted yet another question on one of my electronic mailing lists and followed it with an emotional declaration of incompetence, triggering a flood of e-mails filled with support, generosity, and kindness.
“Don’t start getting crazy on us,” wrote one veteran rehabber. “I’ve been doing this for thirty years and I still don’t know what the heck I’m doing.”
“You’re doing a great job,” wrote another. “Hang in there and try not to stress out too much.”
“I don’t know what I’d do without all of you,” I wrote back.
“Don’t tell us you love us,” cracked another. “Just send money.”
There were complications with many of the summer’s nestlings. There were some whose parents, knowing they had such serious defects that they could never make it on their own, probably pushed them from the nest. There was one small nestling whose head was twisted to the side; when it gaped for food, its head turned upside down. Another’s back was hunched, its legs crossed and feet curled. There was one with missing toes and half a wing, another whose head moved slowly back and forth, like a metronome. Had I received two from the same nest, or even the same town, with similar problems I would have reported it to the Department of Environmental Conservation, as perhaps there might have been a provable connection to heavy pesticide use in that area. But they came in one by one, over a period of two years, and all from different directions.
There were the otherwise healthy ones who were victims of human interference. A sparrow whose leg, tightly encircled by a piece of string the parent had used in making the nest, came off when I tried to free it; the fuzzy little almost-fledgling whose wing had been ripped off by a cat.
It fell to me to let them go. When the healthy young nestlings were released, they would live out their lives as wild birds. If any of the others survived, they would spend their crippled lives in a cage. There was not a ghost of a chance that they could someday live the way they were meant to live.
I couldn’t let a suffering bird languish in a box until he died, as it could take hours, even days. The first time I dug a small hole in the woods and gently laid a mortally wounded nestling down, his obvious pain sent my adrenaline surging and allowed me to do what I would never have thought I could. Placing the heavy shovel above his neck I whispered, “I’m so sorry” and brought it down, stepping on the edge to make sure it was over. I filled in the hole and then sat beside it, trembling, my face in my hands.
It never became any easier.