Chapter 35
TURNING LEAVES
“I found him on the ground at the golf course,” said the male voice. “He couldn’t fly—he wasn’t even trying—and his head was going back and forth. Can I bring him to you?”
When I opened the cardboard box the red-tailed hawk seizured, staggering backward and thrashing for what seemed like an eternity. When he finally quieted, I transferred him to a padded carrier and draped a towel over it.
“It could be any number of things,” I said, handing the man a pen and paper. “I need your name, address, and phone number for my records, but I’d also like the name of the golf course. Some of them use a lot of poison, and that could be the problem.”
“Could you call me when you find out?” he asked. “He’s such a beautiful bird, and I’d just like to know.”
I couldn’t rule out that he had been hit by a car or suffered some other kind of trauma, but when I examined him a half hour later I could find no signs of it. He was alert and only slightly thin. I gave him fluids and was putting him back in the crate when he seizured again. In less than a minute he was dead.
I called the golf course and demanded to know what kinds of poison they used. I was transferred to the groundskeeper, who tried to be helpful.
“We’re very careful about poisons,” he said. “We don’t use many at all, compared to some of the courses around here. We use Merit, Sevin, Telstar, and a few different fungicides.”
Merit contains imidacloprid, a chlorinated nicotinoid compound that affects the nervous system and, according to the label, is “particularly toxic” to earthworms and bees; Sevin contains carbaryl, a cholinesterase inhibitor, and is “extremely toxic” to bees and fish; Telstar contains bifenthrin, which is “moderately toxic to many species of birds, toxic to bees, and very highly toxic to fish, crustaceans, and aquatic animals.” This lethal cocktail was being poured all over an area frequented by wildlife—and this was the careful golf course. That was bad enough. But how did I know the golf course’s snack bar wasn’t using rodenticides, a far more likely cause of the redtail’s death? I was livid. Determined that someone would pay for this beautiful hawk’s terrible death, I called Shawn Rogan, who works for the Putnam County Health Department. Shawn responded with his usual swiftness.
“Are you going to be home this afternoon?” he asked. “I’ll stop by and pick the hawk up, then I’ll send him to Ward. Don’t worry, we’ll find out what happened.”
The New York State wildlife pathologist is Ward Stone, who has worked for thirty years diagnosing and tracking causes of wildlife mortality, including chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides (such as DDT) and organophosphate pesticides (such as diazinon, which was banned from use on golf courses and sod farms in 1987, after Ward testified as principal expert for the EPA). Although his budget is slashed with depressing regularity and he works with a skeleton crew, Ward and his staff have monitored outbreaks of botulism and the secondary poisoning of raptors by rodenticides, followed the deadly trail of PCBs through the Hudson Valley, and documented the initial outbreak of chronic wasting disease. Despite the obviously critical importance of this position, New York is one of the few states that have an official wildlife pathologist.
I had known Ward for years, and always marveled at the way he managed to combine his passion for his job with being a father to six kids—who, unsurprisingly, were always jumping out of windows and dragging things into the house from the woods. “How are your kids?” I asked, when I called him two weeks later.
“They’re so much fun,” said Ward. “They’re such great kids. I was just teaching Jeremiah to fly-fish the other day.”
“Where did you go?” I asked, envisioning one of the paradisiacal upstate trout streams.
“Well,” he said, “actually, we were in the living room. I didn’t mean to do it, it’s just that he asked the question and I wanted to answer him before we were distracted. Speaking of which, your redtail was positive for West Nile.”
I was shocked, even though I knew about the devastating effects the mosquito-borne West Nile virus (WNV) was having on bird populations across the country, especially on raptors and crows. My second trusty electronic mailing list was Raptorcare, a list devoted solely to raptors and moderated by Louise Shimmel, the director of the Cascades Raptor Center in Eugene, Oregon. All summer the list had buzzed with desperate rehabbers pooling information, trying to come up with a protocol for a disease that was not yet fully understood—in birds or in humans—and had no proven treatment. Doctors treating West Nile in humans were contacted; the information from those willing to discuss possible raptor treatments posted; contact numbers for drug representatives able to give discounts to rehabbers were exchanged. List members wrote painstakingly detailed summaries of treatments that seemed to be working, hoping their observations might help a rehabber in another part of the country save a stricken bird.
“It is like they are seeing demons,” wrote Marge Gibson, who founded and runs the Raptor Education Group in Antigo, Wisconsin, and who created a West Nile informational database when the virus first appeared. “Hallucinating. We need to think brain insult, with neuro pathways having to regrow and reconnect. All you can do is wait and see what happens next, then watch and adapt as you treat the symptoms. WNV birds are some of the most emotionally and physically draining patients you can have. Remember to take care of yourselves.”
During the summer I printed out all the West Nile information that had come in on the electronic mailing list, and I collected it into a separate gray three-ring binder, hoping I wouldn’t be called upon to use it. I read heart-wrenching e-mails from raptor people in the Midwest who had received dozens of wild hawks and owls with West Nile, who had spent days wrapping their flight cages in mosquito netting only to watch several of their beloved long-time education birds die in convulsions. Although I had read that several dead birds collected by the public from areas nearby tested positive for the disease, until now it had all been slightly unreal. Until now.
“If I get other birds and suspect West Nile, should I send them to you?” I asked Ward.
“Absolutely,” he replied. “We need all the information we can get.”
During the next ten days I took in two crows. One died ten minutes later, the other lasted a half hour. Shawn sent them up to Ward, and both tested positive for West Nile. I braced myself for what I was sure would be a flood of West Nile birds, only to have the disease disappear—for the moment—from my doorstep.
I resumed my long-neglected daily run. Spooked by West Nile I traversed the woods, searching for the goshawks whose young had left the nest months before. Within a few days, they found me. As I ran toward a high overlook I heard a strange little grunting noise, a bit like a squirrel but not like a squirrel, which seemed to follow me up the trail. I stopped. It was the male goshawk, and as soon as I spotted him I heard, floating through the trees, the clarion call of his mate. “Uh-oh!” I called to him. “Sounds like your wife is on the warpath again!” Moments later she blazed into sight, screamed a few epithets at me, and flew off. I spent several minutes talking to the male, flattering him and cooing at him, and when I finally continued on my way he came along for the ride.
We headed up the trail, I running, he flying from branch to branch, until we came to a small clearing bathed in morning sun. He settled on a thick limb, I on the mossy ground below. Fluffing his feathers and shifting his weight, he kept one eye on me and the other on his surroundings, while I leaned back against a huge old oak tree. Before long he lifted one foot, a sign of comfort and peace.
I tried to live in the moment, to think of nothing but the deep blue of the sky, the warmth of the late September air, and the goshawk perched, miraculously, above my head. But I couldn’t shut out the world at the edge of the woods, where a deadly disease that originated thousands of miles away could claim the lives of both goshawks and I would never know it. Once again, I could neither protect nor save them.
Here be dragons.
But I still had the ability to turn away from an overwhelming reality. I forced the dark thoughts aside and raised my eyes, wondering if the wild hawk who had given me the gift of his company could sense my gratitude. Finally I rose and continued my run, heading for the top of the ridge. From time to time I’d see the goshawk flying through the trees, sometimes ahead of me, sometimes to the side. I reached the summit and noticed two quick shadows pass over my own. Looking up, I saw that the male’s mate had joined him. Flying wingtip to wingtip, they vanished into the canyon.
“Mom,” said Mac.
I was sitting at my computer, printing out a long e-mail message from Linda Hufford, an Austin, Texas, rehabilitator who knew far more than I did about caring for great blue herons and was happy to share her expertise. I looked up from my computer. He and Skye were standing side by side, looking like a pair of sad-eyed waifs from a Keane painting.
“Go ahead,” I sighed, familiar with the look. “What do you want?”
“A dog,” said Skye.
It was not a new request. The dog idea had started the previous fall and continued sporadically through the summer, during which any mention of another creature to care for had sent me into a wild-eyed frenzy.
“A dog,” I said slowly, as if I had never heard the word before. “Let me ask you something. If you had the choice of getting a dog or going to Disney World, which would you choose?”
John and I had discussed the dog idea. Although I wasn’t eager for a dog, I honestly believed the kids should have one; John was simply not eager for a dog, period. Both of us thought it should be put off. The plan had been: (1) avoidance, (2) distraction, (3) bribery. We had already covered the first two; Disney World was the bribe. Since we had not yet taken the kids there, it seemed to be a perfect way to combine plans one and three. It was not something offered lightly, either: if I died and went to hell, I would find myself either in a shopping mall or at Disney World.
“A dog!” they chorused, loudly and without hesitation.
“Hmm,” I said. “Let me think about this.”
John and I had a summit. “If I give up doing baby songbirds, we could have halfway normal lives and the kids could have a dog,” I said.
“With one hand she giveth, with the other she taketh away,” said John.
The kids were delirious. I was a confirmed stray dog owner and had never bought a dog in my life, but suddenly I wanted to know exactly what we were getting. We hit the Internet in quest of the perfect dog, and after hours of searching, a photo popped up on the screen of what looked like a Labrador with poodle hair. There was a moment of silence, then a rush of approval from—astonishingly enough—both kids. “‘Curly-coated retriever,’” I read. “That’s a nice-looking dog! Maybe we should…hey, wait a minute! They’re bird dogs!”
As it turned out, curly-coated retrievers had been bred since the 1700s to retrieve the wild birds their owners slaughtered in the field. “Guys,” I said, “this could be a deal-breaker. Think about it—what happens if I finally release a bird and the dog brings it back?”
We went to a New Jersey dog show, met two curly-coated retrievers, and were assured by their owners that a puppy who grew up around birds could live in harmony with them. Exchanging looks of trepidation, John and I signed on for a puppy. “Now we just have to wait for the phone call,” I told the kids. “We’re last on the list, and the mom might not have enough puppies for us to get one. Meanwhile, I’ll have to contact some other breeders. Best case—it’ll be a few months.”
“Ohhhhh,” they sighed mournfully. “What will we do until then?”
With few birds to care for we took day trips, went to the movies, and at the end of October, all drove down to the Bronx Zoo. We spent the day wandering through various exhibits and habitats, saving the enormous World of Birds building for last. We entered a warm and humid jungle, a bird lover’s dream, lingered along beautifully photographed informational areas, and finally found ourselves in a darkened hallway. The exhibits before us were like living dioramas, habitats filled with light and live plants and flowing water, separated from human spectators by a single railing and the fact that birds won’t willingly leave the light and fly into the dark. It was a weekday afternoon, the crowds were sparse, and when we reached the North American Forests exhibit the four of us were the only spectators. We spotted a robin, a junco, two goldfinches. They weren’t the one we were looking for, however.
“There he is!” cried Mac.
At the end of the summer I had only one unreleasable bird: the friendly little nuthatch, raised in captivity after being found as a nestling with a broken wing, whose fracture had not healed well enough for him to live in the wild. Nosy and energetic, he had always greeted us by creeping along the mesh-covered ceiling of the flight cage upside down, then stopping and emitting a cheerful “henk henk!” A greeting we always returned.
He was in the back, investigating a knothole in a pine tree. He looked up, flew toward us, and landed on a tree in the very front of the exhibit, perhaps five inches from where I stood. He peered up at me. “Honey!” I said. “How are you?”
He crept up and down the tree, chattering, and when we walked to the other side of the exhibit he followed us, landing on a nearby limb. As a small crowd of people entered the room, he flew to a far corner and watched them from the safety of the pine tree. As soon as they left he returned, hiking jauntily across the rough bark, having picked four familiar faces out of the river of humanity constantly flowing by.
“Henk, henk,” he said.
“Henk, henk,” we all replied.