I was lying in bed listening to an early evening rerun of Art Bell’s “Coast to Coast” paranormal-topics radio talk show when I heard something that I couldn’t believe. Art’s guest was a ghost hunter from Pennsylvania who was playing back voices of the dead he had recorded at haunted houses, cemeteries, and Civil War battlefields. During a commercial break, I yawned and turned down the volume only to hear Linda on the telephone in the living room.
“Sure, we’d love to raise some baby starlings for you,” she said. “We’ve been wanting to do this for a long time.”
Hardly trusting my ears, I scrambled out of bed and thudded into the next room, where I found Linda stretched out on the rug. Because of her worsening back problems, she rarely used furniture any longer except when she was eating or sleeping. Waving my arms, I managed to catch her eye as she unhitched her head from the receiver to tell me, “Guess what, sweetie? Marge Chedrick has seven baby starlings, and she’s going to let us raise them for her!”
I shook my head so hard the vertebrae in my neck popped. “Tell her we have to talk about this first.”
Linda nodded at the phone. “Tomorrow afternoon? Do we need to bring anything?”
“Another husband,” I muttered, as I scuttled in defeat back to my world of powerless disembodied entities.
In truth, I was a weak man with a weakness for starlings ever since seeing a newly molted adult up close at a pet-bird show. In contrast to the undistinguished black-and-brown birds of city lawns that are frequently lumped with squirrels, rats, and high school children as unavoidable urban pests, the European starling in his snappiest attire is an engaging dandy. His plumage resembles an outlandish costume made of cloisonné, from his black flight and tail feathers encircled by ocher borders to his white-tipped breast feathers, brown-speckled back, iridescent shoulder coverts with a hint of green, and white-flecked brown and black head. “People keep asking me what kind of bird he is,” the woman we met at the bird show told us. “They think he’s some kind of imported exotic. They’re like, ‘What?’ when I tell them he’s your run-of-the-mill starling.”
If a stunning seasonal display were the starling’s only attribute, I might have mentally filed the species away with Christmas trees and Fourth of July artillery as merely an attention grabber. But the bird also brandishes a wickedly appealing talent. It can talk, and talk as adroitly as a parrot. This fact was drilled deep into my consciousness when Linda frustrated my attempts to turn the pages of a Dashiell Hammett novel by reading long passages aloud from Margarete Sigl Corbo and Diane Marie Barras’s pet literature classic, Arnie, the Darling Starling, describing the titular bird’s verbal abilities. With all due deference to Hammett’s The Glass Key, Arnie’s chatty, friendly ways ultimately captured my attention, and I ended up reading the book myself.
“Someday, maybe we’ll have a starling of our own,” I would dreamily tell Linda now and then when my blood sugar dipped dangerously low. Along with the house sparrow and the rock dove (better known as the city pigeon), the European starling is one of three wild American birds that can legally be kept as pets, because all three are introduced species. Never mind that all three species have lived in the country long enough to have earned residency status. Starlings were brought to America in 1850 by a man intent on populating New York City’s Central Park with every bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays. No one bothered to tell the birds they were to stay within the park, and they quickly fanned out across the country. Over 150 years later, starlings are still considered interlopers. “Conservation laws in the US do not protect nongame, non-native species,” sniffs the “Conservation” note on the page devoted to the European starling in the Smithsonian Institution’s Birds of North America handbook.
Marge and George Chedrick apparently hadn’t read the Smithsonian guide, however. The European starling enjoyed strong conservation at the Chedrick house, as did the small but vocal goose that served as gatekeeper to their bustling backyard. Once we had stepped through, a quick glance in search of Marge located a flightless seagull named Hannibal, a noisy white peahen, chickens, swans, Canada geese, and assorted domestic waterfowl. Marge stood near the back porch sucking on a cigarette as she suspiciously eyed a squirrel.
“Back here again?” she demanded, as the creature stood up on its hind legs. “It isn’t feeding time yet.” At the sound of her voice, a one-eared squirrel scampered down a tree and joined the first near Marge’s foot.
“Watch out for Ginger,” Marge warned me. The beefy Rhode Island Red rooster circled behind me as he scratched at the ground ostensibly prowling for worms. I was his real prey. Ginger loved nothing better than launching a flying peck at the small of my back that felt as if my spine had been bonked with a hammer. I learned never to crouch down to talk to the tamer ducks and geese when Ginger patrolled the area.
“Why’s he always in such a bad mood?” I asked her.
“You’d be in a bad mood, too, if you saw both of your parents killed by hawks.”
George breezed by, a strong wedge of a man carrying a fifty-pound bag of scratch feed under one arm and a sack of mesquite wood chips under the other. He wore on his shoulder a squat white bird that sported a swiveling periscope for a head and neck. A charcoal grill that had seen better days spewed happy clouds of black smoke toward the stockade fence that kept the foundlings in and the predators out. Beyond the fence, the weathered bricks and large rectangular windows of the Victorian-style house next door hinted at a quiet city neighborhood in another world. A pair of male Muscovy ducks paused to hiss menacingly at George when he whisked past them toward a metal barn containing triple-decker cages of recuperating critters. Last time we had visited, a muskrat and two foxes were among the patients.
“Is that a—?” I gestured in befuddlement at the bird on George’s back, as he disappeared into the barn.
“That’s Ricky,” Marge replied. “He’s a two-week-old baby turkey. George’s crazy about him. Get back, Muff.” A Labrador retriever/American bison hybrid accessorized with a red bandana tried to squeeze past us as we followed Marge up the porch steps and into the kitchen. The aluminum door squeaked shut behind us. A blue jay landed on the porch railing and begged raucously for the blueberries on the kitchen windowsill. Across the room—beyond a table piled with DNR paperwork and littered with plastic containers with holes punched in the lids—pork chops nestled in a bowl soaked up a watery marinade. Marge lifted the dish towel covering an opaque rectangular box and said in a quiet voice, “Come look at my babies.” We peeked in at four tiny squirrels sleeping on a bedding of napkins and paper towels.
George came through the screen door with Ricky still perched on his shoulder.
“I love that little turkey,” cooed Linda.
“Isn’t he beautiful?” said George.
Marge shoved a shoebox toward us. “Here are your babies,” she told us, as she popped the hinged lid. A cluster of brown, feathery lumps instantly transmogrified into bright yellow flowers of wide-open beaks accompanied by a chorus of demanding squeals. Half in jest and half in genuine shock, I backed away and turned to face the sink. Spotting me through the screen, the blue jay on the porch raised his head and squawked again.
George laughed at my reaction to the starlings. “When you’re done with them, Bob, come out behind the barn.” He walked into the living room to glance at a football game on TV. “I want to show you the pond I’m digging for our heron and swans.”
“You feed them every two hours,” Marge instructed us. The hand wielding a syringe moved expertly from beak to beak, squirting yellow liquid down their throats.
“Every two hours?” I whined.
“From seven in the morning until nine at night. Just be glad you’re not doing the squirrels. They have to be fed all through the night.”
“How do you ever manage to leave the house?”
“The animals come to school with me,” Marge said, turning to Linda. “I’ve been there so many years, no one’s going to complain, and the kids love to see me feeding them. When your babies get a little older, you train them to eat worms, and you let them go. That’s all there is to it. Starlings are pretty easy.”
A crow croaked from the dining room. George reluctantly abandoned his short-lived post at the television to feed it balls of cat food.
“Does it go on like this all day?” I asked him. Though we had visited Marge and George a couple of times before the yearly baby-animal boom had started, we had never seen them in full caregiver mode.
“We didn’t eat dinner until, what, midnight last night?” Marge asked.
“We both still work,” George explained. “But when I retire in another year, this is what I’ll do all day.”
“Is that something you’re looking forward to?” I asked in disbelief.
“I love it,” George answered, with a wide grin and no trace of irony. “There’s nothing I’d rather be doing than this.”
“Do you guys have syringes?” Marge asked us.
“We might have a few at home,” said Linda.
“Take some. I’ve got syringes up the ying-yang.” She grabbed a handful from a jar and presented us with a margarine tub of starling-food goop from her refrigerator. Linda copied down instructions for mixing up a batch of our own. Kitten chow, chicken entree for infants, liquid vitamins for children, plus water were mystically combined and mushed up in a blender to yield the hummus-colored concoction, which I hoped would never end up on my dinner plate by mistake. Just as we were about to leave, a woman met us at the door. She had talked to Marge on the phone earlier that day, and here were the eight baby starlings her husband had found in a nest on their trailer hitch. She had packed the nest and birds inside an inkjet-printer box.
“Want some more starlings, guys?” Marge asked.
Both of us vigorously shook our heads.
After feeding blueberries to the blue jay on the porch, we returned home to our slightly more manageable menagerie and tried getting through our first day with the starling chicks. The process wasn’t as easy as Marge had made it look, and I was grateful to be relegated to understudy status. Linda wanted to care for the starlings on her own and, taking her cue from Marge, she even took them to work, carting the birds and food goop to her housecleaning customers’ homes via a miniature version of our faithful cat/duck carrier. She bravely resisted my assistance until the middle of day three, when the unruly tykes began to wear her down.
“Two hours seems like a long time when you’re doing something you don’t like,” Linda lamented. “But the two hours between feedings seems like about five minutes.”
I could see her point as I tried my hand at the job. The complicated process began with fetching the plastic carrier that contained the starlings, opening it, and standing back in disbelief at the shrill cries of the birds as they clamored for their meal. The noise was actually loud enough to cause my ears to ring, if I bent my head too close to them for more than a few seconds at a time. Our eight starlings were neatly arranged in three napkin-padded margarine tubs inside the carrier, but they didn’t stay in their bowls for long. Being unable to fly in no way impeded the hopping ability of these animals that seemed to consist of nothing but open beaks on legs, and if I were slow on the draw with the syringes, several chicks would inevitably pop out of their plastic nests.
Getting the food into the birds presented little problem, since few easier and willing targets exist in nature than the mouths of hungry starlings. Keeping the food in their mouths was another matter. No sooner did I feed a chick than the bird would shake its head and spatter itself, its neighbors, and our kitchen wall with unswallowed food. Once the birds had eaten, they would raise themselves up and hoist their posteriors over the rim of their bowls to release an impressive amount of poop. The trick was waiting until all birds had relieved themselves before removing the soiled napkins from the carrier and tubs, cleaning the plastic surfaces with a washcloth, and replacing the napkins. Miscalculating the timing of two chicks forced me to have to scrub one of the bowls three times. When I had finally finished, closing the carrier lid on the birds and returning them to the back room where Ollie slept at night was one of the most satisfying deeds of my entire life.
“This will drive you nuts,” I told Linda with frazzled awe, as she wiped droplets of thrown food off the wall and countertop. “I don’t know how you stand it.”
Later that week, I feared that caring for the starlings had sent her over the edge when I strolled into the kitchen to find her waving a hair dryer over the birds.
“Are you okay?” I asked her in a reasonable imitation of a calm and soothing voice. “If you wanted to lie down for a while, I could finish, um, styling and setting the birds.”
“Their heads were caked with dried food,” she said.
“That would explain the hair dryer,” I suggested gently. “I’ll bet the dried food comes right off if you get it warm enough.”
She shot me an unhappy look. “I’ve already washed them off. But their feathers weren’t drying, and I don’t want them to catch cold, so I’m using a blow-dryer.”
“Sorry,” I said. “That makes perfect sense.” But just to be on the safe side, I sneaked into the bathroom and hid the curling iron.
I didn’t remember seeing a blow-dryer in Marge Chedrick’s kitchen. Clearly she hadn’t told us everything that we needed to know about our task. Unfortunately, she was so busy coping with the endless stream of baby birds and injured animals people brought to her door at all hours of the day that returning phone calls from harried starling stepparents understandably occupied a low priority. With time, we figured out a few essentials on our own, such as feeding each bird only a small amount of the yellow goop per syringe shot, which greatly reduced the incidence of food flung around the room. Simple common sense—and the displeasure of retrieving flapping birds from the crack between the wall and microwave or the narrow space beside the refrigerator, where the vacuum cleaner just about fit—told us when it was time to transfer the birds from their plastic bowls to a cage.
HAVING TAUGHT OURSELVES to feed the starlings, it was time to teach the starlings to feed themselves. Marge had told us to simply scatter a few live crickets on the bottom of the cage. “They’re attracted by the motion, and it just comes naturally that they start pecking at them.” Following avian instincts hadn’t ever seemed to occur to our birds before. They didn’t even comprehend the principle of perching without extensive coaching. Grasping a wooden cage perch with their feet was as alien to them as learning to strum the strings of a lute. Linda managed to get one of the older starlings to wrap its toes around the perch, but that merely necessitated a separate set of lessons on posture, balance, and gracefully recovering from a fall. This didn’t bode well for their hunter-gatherer skills.
The crickets supplied by Marge came in a mesh container with, of all things, an open top. Crickets, unlike starlings, are incapable of jumping straight up, and so the insects were trapped in the tube as if sealed inside a tin can. True to Marge’s word, the starlings were indeed fascinated by the movement of the crickets. I placed their cage upon a porch shelf that a few years earlier had borne the burden of holding homemade ceramic mugs, vases, plates, and other unsaleable items from our basement pottery studio. Then I shook a few crickets into my hand and dropped them through the top grate of the cage. The starlings stopped all other activity, trained their eyes on the insects, and watched with deep interest as the crickets by trial and error wriggled through the bars to populate remote regions of our porch. I tried blocking the insects’ egress by threading adding-machine tape in and out of the bars, forming a two-inch-high stockade fence around the bottom of the cage. This did in fact slow the crickets down, but given an infinite amount of time by the uncomprehending starlings, the bugs parlayed their random jumping and crawling into other means of successful escape.
Mealworms proved easier to deal with than the crickets. Although the birds were just as clueless about their ability to eat these visitors, the worms weren’t jumping anywhere. The best they could do was crawl to the edges of the cage and slip beneath a folded sheet of newspaper, where we could retrieve them and try again. To kickstart their gourmet instincts, Linda picked up a mealworm with a tweezers and thrust it into the open mouth of a pleading starling. The eager youngster instantly clamped shut his beak, opened it again in bewilderment, and allowed the worm to fall out and crawl.
Despite these setbacks, after just under one debilitating month with the birds, the day finally arrived when they were dining on worms from the bottom of the cage and we could set them—and ourselves—free. Marge suggested that we move their cage out to the barn and let them leave at their own pace and return to the cage if they couldn’t find food on their own. All of the birds elected to leave at once, though it took them a bit of flapping and cricket-style hopping to locate the yawning barn door. With syringe in hand, Linda checked the premises a couple of hours later to fortify any recidivist with goop, but the barn was empty except for yipping turkey Hazel and her sequestered sister, Lizzie.
I was pleased that the starlings had gone. Their departure was not only proof that we had nurtured them correctly, but it also considerably lightened our load, since feeding them every two hours had bent our regular animal-chore schedule to the breaking point. After dinner, buoyed by a mood of blissful release, I volunteered to go out to the barn and treat Hazel and Lizzie to their evening apple while Linda relaxed by washing the kitchen floor for the fourth time that day. I fed both turkeys by hand without losing a finger. On the way back to the house, I took a detour around the huge pine tree out back to check on the progress of Linda’s vegetable garden. Although I carefully avoided the sprinkler, two of our released starlings had been less savvy. I found them fluttering in a patch of weeds soaked to the hollow bone, unable to fly, and potentially easy catches for our outdoor cat, Agnes. Popping them back in the birdcage that I retrieved from the barn, I placed them on their familiar porch shelf overnight for release in the morning after their feathers had dried.
When Linda opened the cage the following day for a test flight on the porch, both birds propelled themselves into the air, but only one of them managed to stay aloft. The aerodynamically challenged starling skittered across the floor like a spring-loaded mouse, while his brother flew in frantic circles against the nearest window. Linda snagged the floor flapper and confined him to his cage, then flung open the porch door and allowed the airborne bird the opportunity to soar into the wild blue yonder. He soared only as far as the front yard hackberry tree, joining three of his siblings, who apparently defined freedom primarily in terms of boundless dining privileges.
“It was a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds,” Linda said, shuddering, when I returned home from work that afternoon. “Here I thought we were finally rid of the babies, then I went outside to work in the garden, and two birds suddenly landed on my head and started pecking me. Then two more landed on my shoulders. I had to run inside and get the syringe to feed them.”
“I don’t suppose they left after that.”
“Didn’t you hear them out there?” she asked incredulously. “They’ve been hanging around all day. I’m surprised you made it from your car to the house without getting dive-bombed. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve had to feed them. Oh, no,” she groaned. Her expression darkened as she glanced out the kitchen window. “They’re on the gate again, begging.”
“I’ll feed them,” I volunteered, recalling the noisy but otherwise well-mannered blue jay that haunted the Chedricks’ porch. I didn’t see the problem. A few hungry birds on our property couldn’t possibly be as difficult to deal with as a cage full of clamoring starlings in the kitchen. My thinking changed as soon as I stepped outside the kitchen door holding the tub of yellow goop. Starlings hovered around my head, hammering their needle-sharp beaks into my scalp. When I tried to brush them away, they clung to my hand with their toenails, pecking my knuckles as I pumped food into the bird that had settled on the gatepost. One by one, as I filled the bottomless mouths with the syringe, the birds returned to their tree almost too heavy to fly.
“At least they’re out of the house,” I gasped from the safety of the kitchen.
“No they’re not. Didn’t you notice the one on the porch?”
“What’s the matter with him?”
“He still can’t fly, and I don’t think he sees very well. Every time I try to feed him, he bobs and weaves his head around, and I keep missing him with the syringe.”
Weaver, as we came to name the miniature ostrich, would flap his wings like mad without gaining an inch in altitude. Even Ollie, the worst flier we had ever seen, could make it across the room on sheer gliding power. Weaver fell like a crumpled wad of paper whenever we urged him to give his innate abilities a fresh try. Fearing he had an insidious wasting disease, I took him to Dr. Fuller, who spread one of his wings and made the diagnosis, “Poor feather development.” And it was true. His flight feathers resembled porcupine quills dipped in fluff, and they leaked more air than a window screen.
“It was probably caused by a vitamin deficiency,” he said.
“But he ate the same food as everyone else.”
“The deficiency may have come at a crucial stage of his early development.”
I left before he started quoting Freud and resigned myself to the fact that we couldn’t release Weaver until he had gone through a molt. But by then, I knew, he would probably be too tame to ever adapt to life on his own outdoors. That meant I had moved from reading about Arnie, the Darling Starling to suddenly having an Arnie of our own, though the darling aspect was definitely up for grabs.
Although he couldn’t fly, Weaver still insisted on coming out of his cage to scamper around the top of the kitchen table in search of imagined caches of his beloved mealworms. If we didn’t accede to his demands for freedom, he would throw himself flapping against the bars until we feared he would injure his body or his excited heart would explode. Unlike most birds, whose beaks wield considerable clamping strength—especially when my finger is involved—a starling asserts its jaw muscles by opening its beak and prying things apart. It’s a handy skill for enlarging a hole in the soil to access hidden insects or for widening the spaces between stitches in a woven placemat. And while Weaver lacked a parrot’s talent for picking up small items and throwing them on the floor, he compensating by whacking them croquet-style with the same end result.
Even when standing in one spot, Weaver was constantly in motion, exercising a repertoire of tics and twitches that aided his deliberation over a tabletop project. Cocking his head and scissoring his beak, he would unhurriedly study a situation from every possible angle before getting down to the business of toppling a saltshaker or shredding a paper napkin. Whenever I felt especially generous, I would place a few curls of adding-machine tape beside his cage, and he would arrange and rearrange them obsessively, lifting a loop and stepping through it, positioning it vertically into a wheel, or grabbing the tape by one end and tugging it behind him.
Even though I saw nothing of Stanley Sue’s white-hot intelligence in his actions, Weaver had the most soulful eyes I could ever imagine a bird possessing. Neither judgmental, like a parrot’s eyes, nor as innocent as a turkey’s, they spoke of emotions every bit as lively and deeply rooted as the fat, luscious grub of his dreams. Whenever I brought Weaver’s cage into the back room at night, just before covering him, I’d sit down for a moment in the chair at Linda’s desk and talk to him while I marveled at his eyes. “You’d better start flying soon,” I’d tell him. “You need to stop pooping on the kitchen table.” He’d hop to the perch closest to me to give my suggestions the deliberation they deserved.
A bird looks directly at you by looking at you sideways. It’s an odd thing to get used to, and I can never help but wonder how Stanley Sue, Howard, or Ollie’s brain simultaneously integrates an image of me with a completely different panorama on the other side of the bird’s head. But a starling’s eyes are positioned just above the base of its bill and shoved slightly forward toward the front of its head, the better to study the patch of ground that the bird is probing. Because of this, whether Weaver turned the side of his face toward me or squinted at me down the length of his beak with both eyes, I received the full weight of his attention. And I couldn’t shake the impression that his eyes held a nagging question. I seldom studied his face without encountering the query.
If only I could figure out what Weaver was asking me.
“Where’s my food?” was my best guess, based on his voracious appetite. Weaver’s lifeblood coursed with a current of sheer joy. When Linda or I would walk into the dining room, he was so pleased to see us, he would literally hop up and down with happiness. His exuberance was greatest when we came bearing food. He ate each and every meal as if it were his one and only meal of the day. Never mind that we might have filled his dish three times in a single afternoon with a dollop of canned cat food sprinkled with avian vitamins, or with minced red grapes, or with several wriggling mealworms. He would still attack the treat with all the ferocity of a child tearing the wrapping paper from a birthday present. His passion for his food dish became the most effective means of engaging his interest. This soon became important. Two months of Weaver’s unflagging devotion to eating yielded a healthy set of flight feathers and the ability to elude us at will whenever we set him free in the dining room.
Weaver was smart enough to discriminate between our trips into the room on rabbit business and our ostensibly nonchalant visits aimed at surprising a roaming starling and returning him to his cage. If we were lucky, he might light on my hand at first sight of the purple plastic feed dish I was carrying and ride the dish to the kitchen sink for a brisk cleaning, to the refrigerator for replenishing, then back inside his barred enclosure. But if we needed to pen him up before his hunger got the better of his penchant for flying free, we were forced to chase him from the dining room table to the window sill, from the top of the refrigerator to the curtain rod over the sink, and from the antenna of our portable TV to the summit of another birdcage before he might finally decide to surrender by hopping onto one of our heads.
“What’s that little sound you’re making?” Linda asked one evening during dinner.
“I don’t know, I guess I’m chewing too loud.”
“Not you. Weaver. It sounds like he’s trying to talk.”
“He’s saying ‘buzzy buzzy.’”
“‘Busy busy.’”
“Whatever it is, it isn’t talking,” I insisted. “He’s just making buzzing noises. We might as well be keeping a bumblebee.”
But a few days later I walked into the dining room while Weaver was in his cage indulging in his favorite noneating pastime of splashing around in his water dish. He took more baths than any bird I had ever seen and would probably have loved living outdoors with the ducks and geese, though he wouldn’t have given them a chance to use the pool. I was toweling up the floodplain at the far end of the table when I distinctly heard him interrupt his happy twittering to greet himself with a hearty, “Hi, Weaver.” Unlike shy performers Stanley Sue and Ollie, who refused to vocalize if we were in their field of view (and that applied to Stanley Sue’s whistles), Weaver flaunted a bold stage presence. He excelled at ventriloquism by keeping his beak neatly closed as he repeated the phrase for me again, “Hi, Weaver. Buzzy buzzy, hi, Weaver.”
Linda shared my elation at having a readily talking bird in the family. “Maybe he’ll tell us what he wants, like Arnie.” Occasionally, Margarete’s starling would pipe up with a prescient comment in an appropriate context, but Weaver’s commentary was a far cry from including pithy observations. Within another few days, he had picked up, “Whatcha say, Weaver?” from me, raising doubts as to which I should improve first, my grammar or my diction.
“You hear that?” I asked my parrot Stanley Sue accusingly, as Weaver practiced his repertoire. “Are you going to let a starling show you up? You could talk better than that if you wanted to. I’ve heard you do it.”
I should have known better than to even jokingly pit Stanley Sue against another bird, especially when the other bird’s affectionate hitchhikes on my head, hands, and other body parts had begun kindling the parrot’s jealous side. If I walked around the dining room with Weaver clinging to my shirt, Stanley Sue would race behind me on the floor biting my shoes as an attention getter. Why she never exercised her own talent for flying was a riddle, since she could easily have flapped up to my shoulder and shoved him off. The closest she came to taking to the air was launching a snapping leap in Weaver’s direction whenever he foolishly decided to share the top of her cage. Such aggressiveness raised our fears of another Stanley Sue–Howard-type rivalry and resulted in our decision not to let the parrot and starling out together.
One afternoon, while slowly emerging from an extended winter afternoon nap, I heard an unfamiliar trilling from the dining room. Weaver was flying free, and Stanley Sue was shut in her cage where she shouldn’t have been able to cause him any harm. But the shrill cry alarmed me, and I hurried into the kitchen and dining room area only to find blood spattered across the top of the refrigerator and puddled on the table next to where Weaver stood forlornly on one leg. One toe on his right foot had been neatly amputated just above the toenail, and the presence of said joint with toenail in front of Stanley Sue’s cage implicated the parrot, who must have been hanging upside down from the top bars just waiting for Weaver to land within reach of her beak. The incident also solved the mystery of how Elliot, our canary, and Howard, our dove, had managed to sustain foot injuries from time to time. Within an hour of losing his toe, Weaver was briskly chatting away in his cage, but three full days passed before he resumed using his right foot. From then on, we always draped a towel across the top of Stanley Sue’s cage when the other birds were loose.
Weaver’s escalating friendliness toward us was matched by his increasing restlessness. If I were working upstairs on a writing project and needed a cup of coffee in hope of jogging a few brain cells into action, I was forced to weigh my craving against undergoing a pestering blitz from the starling. When I walked into the kitchen, Weaver would land upon my head and gleefully begin drilling for dander and sebum. Brushing him off only glued him to my arm, and from there he would migrate to my hand and peck at whatever task my fingers attempted to accomplish, knocking coffee out of the measuring spoon or dipping his beak into the stream of water from the faucet. Meanwhile, the confined Stanley Sue protested every moment that Weaver flew free, with squawks that reached upstairs and defeated whatever concentration benefits my dosage of caffeine had conferred. As soon as I returned home from work, Stanley Sue insisted on prancing around the dining room climbing the drawer pulls or bothering the rabbits. She loathed the briefest imprisonment in the afternoon, especially if it was for the sake of the starling. For his part, Weaver thrashed around and squealed inside his cage whenever Stanley was at large. Two incompatible birds clamoring for simultaneous freedom presented us with a problem.
“He needs a flight cage,” Linda informed me, as we tried eating lunch one Saturday while a caged starling fussed at us from the other end of the table. “This one’s way too small. If he had a big cage he could fly around in, he’d be a whole lot happier.”
“I’ll build him one,” I said.
Actually, I said no such thing, though the potential cost of buying a large cage made me seriously consider expanding my carpentry skills to include making straight cuts with a saw and springing for a powered screwdriver. For the moment, I dodged the issue by asking her, “And where would we possibly put a flight cage?”
Linda had no ready answer. Stanley Sue’s cage and a beat-up chair consumed one wall of the dining room, while three rabbit cages and three birdcages lined the windows of the adjacent wall. The opposite wall was out of the question, because it didn’t exist—a countertop divided the kitchen and the dining room instead. The fourth and final wall, a short and stubby run of Sheetrock across from Stanley Sue’s wall, struggled to accommodate a Jurassic-scale hanging fern and required space for a door to the outside to open, but it was the most logical spot for a cage. That door eventually provided a solution to Weaver’s housing problem.
All eight of our birds regarded the dining room, the top of the refrigerator, and an area around the kitchen sink as the extent of their territory. Only Howard occasionally flew into the living room to perch on a coat rack and hoot derisively at Grapey, Linda’s purple stocking cap. On the extremely rare occasions when another bird blundered into the living room, the bird considered itself lost, abandoned, and easy prey for passing eagles, even though the brightly lit dining room beckoned loudly through the doorway. Similarly, our birds expressed zero interest in the great outdoors. Any activity that transpired just beyond the quarter-inch thickness of glass that dominated two walls may as well have taken place in Capistrano, for all they cared. But Linda and I still exercised great caution whenever we used the dining room door to step outside when any of our birds were loose. One day, though, Weaver was just too fast for Linda. As she darted outside, he accompanied her and, without the slightest hesitation, disappeared into the open sky.
I was devastated when I learned the news. Next to Stanley Sue, Weaver was my favorite bird, and I couldn’t accept the fact that he had simply flown away. The situation was eerily reminiscent of a scene in Arnie, the Darling Starling, where Arnie slipped out into the yard just as a monstrous storm was brewing. As ominous clouds swirled above our heads, Linda and I combed our property calling for Weaver, the wind gulping up our pleas until a drenching rain drove us inside. A sorry and soggy Arnie had eventually returned to his owner Margarete. I hoped Weaver would do the same, and to help him find his way back home, I revived my owl-calling trick. The following day, I made a tape of starling vocalizations from a birdsong CD and walked around the nether borders of our property broadcasting them from a portable boom box. I even drove through the trailer park a half-mile away from us, cruising past green areas where starlings gathered, calling, “Weaver, Weaver, Weaver,” from the car window until I feared the residents would call, “Police!”
Day after day, whenever I went outdoors to change the pool water for the ducks or visit our turkeys, Hazel and Lizzie, in the barn, I trailed pleas for Weaver behind me. I was stubborn about the loss, furious that Weaver would have chosen a perilous existence for which he was ill prepared over the pampered life that we had given him. “You’d think he would at least let us know that he’s okay,” I insisted illogically to Linda. “You’d think he would show a little gratitude.”
Eventually, it dawned on me that perhaps the question that had loomed so large in Weaver’s eyes was, “When can I go free with the others?”
Raising and releasing him had been our original intention, after all, and I felt better once I began to view his escape as the realization of our interrupted plan. I also loved the thought of unleashing a talking starling upon the world. I pictured a groggy resident of the trailer park stepping out of her front door early one morning in a terrycloth bathrobe. Bending down to pick up the newspaper, her hand would twitch, and she would spill her coffee as her body stiffened at the sound of a small, shiny black bird that looked identical to every other small, shiny black bird. But this one would interrupt his gleeful pecking at the ground to observe in a clear voice, “Pretty boy, Weaver. Pretty boy, nice nice.”