Fastest Things on Wings

by Terry Masear

  “I hadn’t even been drinking. That much,” I pointed out.

  “Impressive,” Jean said.

  “Twenty-one is a lucky number, you know.”

  “Uh-huh.” She exhaled as I heard dozens of plastic feeders dropping into her sink. “We’ll see how lucky it feels a few years from now.”

  That summer, my second one shuttling desperate orphans through the city’s traffic-clogged arteries, I kept a few nestlings for myself and called Jean every day and most nights for advice. As soon as a bird fledged, I drove it to her house for the advanced stages of rehabilitation. By September of 2005, in a curious fulfillment of my neon dream, I had unwittingly rescued twenty-one hummingbirds. The number could have been a coincidence, or subconsciously orchestrated. Or it could have been the first in a series of serendipitous events that would befall me once I entered the enigmatic world inhabited by the featherweight phenoms.

  Whichever it was, my early success saving hummingbirds proved nothing less than remarkable. I took the hardest cases to Jean, so I never knew the dark flipside behind my unqualified triumph. When the nesting season peaked in June, I found myself fielding three or four calls a day. Like a seasoned combat medic, I became an expert at triage, prioritizing injuries and responding with an immediacy that shocked Los Angeles residents accustomed to waiting hours, even days, for callbacks from city services. I had my emergency routine down and it worked flawlessly. I brought unresponsive birds back from the edge of death. Injured hummingbirds rushed in prone and lifeless came out flying the next day. Nothing failed on my watch.

  “Is he going to be okay?” a trembling finder asked as she and her tearful teenage daughter watched me feed the fledgling they had accidentally locked in the garage the night before and then found sprawled unconscious on the cement floor that morning.

  “No question,” I assured them calmly, setting the awakening bird into the ICU. “It’s a done deal.”

  Just as my confidence grew with each bird I saved, my approval ratings among friends, acquaintances, and the general public soared. Colleagues at UCLA who had barely acknowledged me for ten years began chasing me down on campus and striking up conversations about their experiences with not just hummingbirds but all forms of avian, mammalian, and even reptilian life. Everywhere I went—meetings, parties, supermarkets, the car wash—people wanted to talk. Everyone applauded my unique talent. When I strolled into shelters and humane societies to pick up orphaned chicks, the staff greeted me like a celebrity, showering me with adulation and fistfuls of free syringes. Callers to my hummingbird-rescue hotline praised me for being “a saint,” “an angel,” “a wonderful person,” and, my personal favorite, “an inspiration.” I felt like an overnight sensation; attaining this lofty stature had come quick and easy. Before hummingbirds, I had been grappling with the usual nagging fears and doubts that drive people in their midforties to impulsive and embarrassing behavior. But within a few short months, I had transitioned from that insidiously creeping midlife sense of disillusionment and lack of purpose to feeling gifted and necessary.

  Everyone who starts out in wildlife rescue entertains the fantasy of edging closer to the beauty of nature and gaining an intimate understanding of other species while saving helpless lives. Since my youth in rural Wisconsin, I had been rescuing every unfortunate creature that fell into my empathetic path and, with each success, craving more opportunity. Now my lifelong dream of participating in organized wildlife rehabilitation had been realized and I was being abundantly rewarded for my charitable efforts. I woke up every morning energized and eager to work miracles. Fate had blessed me with the magic touch. I possessed a rare ability. There was no doubt in my mind that I could save anything. There was nothing I couldn’t do.

  And so, in my foolish naïveté, I blindly rushed into that proverbial land where angels fear to tread. And there was much to learn.

  CHAPTER 5

  Cry

  AFTER MY HEADY ASCENT to the peak of the curve that first year, there was only one place left to go. My introduction to the unforgiving side of rescue arrived early on, in the late winter of 2006, the start of my second year in the lifesaving business. A stylishly dressed yuppie with two young children brought me a female Anna’s just about to fledge; the first baby of the year. The Beverly Hills oak tree her nest had been in was cut down to clear space for a tennis court. The family, who kept her for a day before calling me, dropped off the emerald-green, newly feathered, and impossibly cute two-inch nestling around dusk on a misty evening in March.

  Since the kids had been feeding her sugar water in the car before they arrived, I placed the chick, still in her original nest, in the ICU in my garage, turned up the heat, and waited thirty minutes before returning to give her the protein formula we feed hummingbirds in rehabilitation. When I opened the sliding glass door to the ICU, she chirped for food, but her crop—a small transparent sac on the right side of the neck in which a hummingbird stores food—appeared full. I waited another thirty minutes before coming back to feed her. Again she cried, more adamantly this time, although her crop, which should have been flat and empty by then, still looked like a bubble. I filled a 1 cc syringe with formula and tried giving her a little, but the liquid leaked out the sides of her mouth and ran down the pale silver feathers on her breast. I waited an hour and came back. This time when she cried loudly for food, she began breathing through her mouth, and her crop was bulging. When I touched her, she felt ice-cold despite having been tucked into a nest in a 90-degree ICU for two hours. A hummingbird’s baseline temperature runs around 105 degrees, so when it feels cold to us, it’s a clear sign of slowing metabolism. At nine p.m., I called Jean in a panic.

  “It sounds like her crop is blocked.” Jean sighed. “Do you know what they fed her?”

  “No, but I have their phone number. I’ll call them.”

  When I reached the woman who had delivered the bird, she assured me that they had given the chick only sugar water. I called Jean and reported this information with relief.

  “She’s not telling the truth,” Jean countered flatly.

  “Why would she lie?”

  “Because she knows she screwed up. And now she’s afraid you’re going to jump all over her.”

  “Well, that’s crazy,” I insisted. “I just want to save the bird. I’ll call her again.”

  I called the finder back and explained that I wasn’t going to get angry but that I needed to know what she had fed the nestling so I could decide how to proceed.

  “Nothing else, just sugar water,” she said.

  “Are you sure? Because I need to know if there was anything else,” I pressed. With a little more prompting, she confessed the kids had fed the chick some ants.

  “Ants?” I repeated in horror. “Hummingbirds never eat ants. Ants have a hard exoskeleton that won’t pass through their digestive system. Why would you let your kids do that?” I demanded.

  “We thought she needed some protein,” the woman pushed back. “I’m sure she’ll be fine,” she added dismissively.

  “You think so?” I scoffed, preparing to unload the last two hours of stress that was expressing itself through a brain-mashing headache. But my tone alerted her to the attack that was coming and she waved a white flag.

  “I’m sorry. We didn’t know.” She fell silent as, despite my promise not to get angry, I upbraided her for not telling me sooner and then hung up, leaving her, I’m sure, crying guilty tears.

  I called Jean and reported the disheartening information.

  “People do that a lot.” Jean sighed with disdain. “They think all insects are alike. Now you’re going to have to siphon her crop.”

  “Siphon her crop?” I repeated in horror.

  “It’s her only chance, Terry.”

  “But I have no idea how to do that,” I sputtered. “Why don’t I just bring her to you?”

  “There’s not enough time for that. If she’s mouth-breathing, you have to do it right away,” Jean said, and then launched i
nto instructions on how to perform a procedure that seemed to require the delicacy of brain surgery. “And be careful to position the angiocatheter in the right place and not to siphon too quickly or you’ll rupture the crop and she’ll die,” she added flatly at the end.

  Two minutes later I was back in the garage in a heart-pounding panic, holding my breath as I managed to extract a syringe full of cold sugar water from the chick’s crop. Within minutes she looked infinitely relieved, so I fed her and waited. Thirty minutes later, her crop was bulging and she began mouth-breathing again. Out of desperation, I repeated the siphoning and then fed her an almost imperceptible amount of nectar. But the same thing happened, and the nestling continued to peep loudly. I called Jean, who suggested I put warm water in the syringe and try to dissolve any flinty debris obstructing the crop. I followed her directions, with the same dismal result.

  “The ants are blocking her digestive system,” Jean said with resignation during my third call at eleven p.m. She suggested that I try to clear the digestive tract by massaging the chick’s abdomen, but it didn’t sound promising. “Beyond that, there’s not much you can do.” She sighed. “I’m sorry, Terry.”

  But Jean wasn’t sorry simply because she had been unable to find a way to relieve the nestling’s suffering. She was sorry for what she knew was about to happen to me. Between my first inadvertent rainstorm rescue two years earlier and my twenty-one lifesaving triumphs since, I had come a long way in my education. And although Jean never said it directly, there had always been one last bridge to cross. A final test upon which all else depended. She was leaving me anxious and alone with the failing nestling, and her intent was clear: You want the full experience of hummingbird rescue? Well, here it is, in its uncut version. Make no mistake: if you choose to pursue this dream, this is one of the nightmares you’re signing up for.

  Although the hands on the kitchen clock were sweeping toward midnight and I already felt spent, I couldn’t bear to leave the chick alone and crying in the incubator. I returned to the garage, took the nest her mother had artfully camouflaged with lime-green paint chips and that I had placed in a plastic salsa cup out of the ICU, and sat on the floor with her beside a small space heater. When she began thrashing and struggling to breathe, I lifted her out of the nest and held her in my hand. Using Reiki hand-warming techniques that a refreshingly enlightened hummingbird finder had introduced me to the year before, I was able to raise her body temperature a few degrees. At one in the morning, after she’d settled down and I’d started to fall asleep sitting against the brick wall, I tried to put her back in the nest, but she gripped my hand with her tiny claws and refused to let go. Each time I tried to place her in the nest, she anxiously clawed her way up onto the sleeve of my sweatshirt. So I sat holding her in the dim light as she stared up at me with unblinking dark eyes.

  We remained locked in the grip of this unbreakable embrace for the eternity of an hour. It was just one tiny bird in the palm of my hand, but her disarming vulnerability and desperate desire to live coupled with my sad inability to help brought an avalanche of pain crashing down on me. By two o’clock she had me on my knees on the garage floor weeping, despite my efforts to be strong and professional. I had been fairly warned, from Jean and other rehabbers, of the danger that lay down this road. Signs of the anguish awaiting me in wildlife rescue lurked all around those first few years. Anybody could have seen it coming. Still, I had managed to deny it all, believing I would somehow sidestep the land mines. Most painfully, as I held the trembling nestling in my hand, I couldn’t accept how a creature so innocent and perfect could die such an agonizing death because of a careless mistake.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered as tears dropped from my eyes onto her elegantly arced wings that would never know the magical flight for which they had been so ingeniously crafted. “I wish I could do something.”

  By three her heart rate had dropped from the hummingbird’s usual resting rate of two hundred fifty beats per minute to less than one hundred. When it slowed to around sixty I could no longer tell if the light pulse I felt in my hand was hers or mine. As I sat gently stroking her head with my index finger and watching her miniature white eyelashes blink heavily, I felt as if something inside me was slipping away with her. Finally, her tiny vibration diminished to almost nothing. Ten minutes later, her eyes closed for the last time, and she was gone. And I no longer was, or ever again would be, that unflappable genius who could miraculously save anything that came her way. It was not that I hadn’t seen something die before. I grew up on a Midwestern farm where death was everywhere and often, to my unending horror, intentional. But this was the first time I had been entrusted with saving a life and failed completely. All of my self-assurance and bravado shattered to pieces on the hard concrete floor that starless night in the middle of March. And something else crept in and took its place: a gnawing anxiety tugging at the edges of my psyche that I couldn’t quite bring to consciousness and that I wouldn’t come to grips with until two years later.

  Eventually it happens to everyone. Every rehabber suffers an early loss that won’t let go. This young Anna’s was mine. But losing her didn’t make me brick up my heart and run for the exit. Instead, watching her die so unnecessarily hardened my resolve and made me promise, as I watched her tiny spark fade into the darkness, to save hundreds of unlucky victims like her. It was a vow I would make good on that summer, and the next, and the next several years after that. But my smooth-sailing confidence had run aground on nature’s rocky shoreline, and the recovery would prove a long one.

  I got involved in saving hummingbirds because their delicate beauty and poetic flight spoke to my soul. I had no understanding of the thousand ways they could tear your heart out. Creatures die randomly and uneventfully in nature every day. But uncommon pathos surrounds the passing of hummingbirds. Their deaths hit hard. And you don’t have to be a sentimental slob to be floored by them. I have seen jaded filmmakers, hardheaded corporate executives, and calloused construction workers cradling nestlings like fragile glass figurines in their Paul Bunyan hands shed serious tears over these little birds. I’ve seen everybody cry. I even had a crime scene investigator break down in my garage one night when her rescued fledgling died on arrival. Although she had become accustomed to wading through unspeakable horrors in gritty neighborhoods crouched in the shadows of downtown Los Angeles, watching a young hummingbird fade away with a distressed beat of his tiny wings cracked her professional armor wide open.

  “I see people with their heads cut off”—she grimaced through tears as she stared at the unresponsive young male lying on the counter in front of us after my attempts to revive him had failed—“I don’t get emotional.” Only after fifteen minutes of soft talk and fistfuls of Kleenex was she able to her pull herself together enough to drive home.

  That same spring, a heavy-metal guitarist’s roadie delivered a nestling to me, one of two that survived after being knocked out of a bottlebrush tree while people were stringing lights around the musician’s patio for a party. The guitarist later tearfully confessed he felt responsible for the death of the young bird’s sibling.

  “You won’t tell anybody I cried, will you?” he asked during his second follow-up call. “It would destroy my image.” He laughed nervously.

  “Everybody cries about hummingbirds,” I assured him. “But don’t worry. Your secret is safe.”

  Few are immune to a hummingbird’s misfortune, regardless of the form it takes. Callers often come unglued over nests that contain only eggs. Every time I advise someone to let a nest of eggs go because the logistics of saving it from housepainters, termite tenting, tree trimmers, and nursery tree purchases prove too complicated, I get the same response, spoken in the resolute tone of someone refusing to give up on a lifelong dream: If it were another kind of bird, I might. But these are hummingbirds.

  With all of the distress that unhatched eggs create, it’s the loss of the young that really tears people up. In the spring of 2007, durin
g my third year of rehabbing, an ex-Marine came apart in my garage one rainy afternoon as his nestling took its last breath a few minutes after he arrived with her in a Macanudo cigar box. He blamed himself because he’d cut the nest while trimming the rosebushes and then put off bringing me the surviving chick until the next day. After the nestling died, he described, with a distant look in his eyes, how his young son had been killed in a freak accident a few years earlier and how his death had precipitated a bruising divorce that left him feeling hopeless and alone.