Fastest Things on Wings

by Terry Masear

“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.” He brushed away tears as I handed him a Kleenex from the pile of tissues I construct faux hummingbird nests with.

  But I knew why.

  “That doesn’t seem quite right,” my neighbor observed a few days later when I described the events leading up to the meltdown of the emotional Marine he had seen pulling out of our driveway. A retired federal agent who had worked for the government all his life, my neighbor learned early on not to let the misfortunes of others affect him because, as every good bureaucrat knows, sentimentality is the most ordinary sign of weakness. “A grown man crying over a bird.” He shook his head derisively as we chatted on the sidewalk outside my house. “There’s something really wrong with that,” he insisted.

  Until it happened to him. My neighbor had agreed to keep his cats locked in the house on release days, but a few weeks later, his cat snagged a young adult I had just freed from the aviary as she was mining nectar from a fuchsia in his backyard.

  “Is she going to be all right?” he asked with trepidation as he handed the motionless young female over to me at the front gate just before dusk. After several hours of emergency care in the ICU, I was able to coax the quiet beauty back to life.

  “I’m so relieved to hear that, Terry,” he said when I called him after her second release a week later. “I don’t know why it got to me so much.”

  But someday I would know why, although it would take me a while to nail it down. The trauma of that cold winter night with the young Anna’s stayed with me, like a wound that wouldn’t quite heal. Reflecting on that loss, the details of which sharpened to a piercing point with every recall, I felt I had gone as far as I could with a wild animal. But it was not the last time my reach would exceed my grasp with a hummingbird. A larger lesson, more moving and incomprehensible in its meaning and complexity, was thundering my way.

  CHAPTER 6

  Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground

  YOU CAN LEARN A LOT about someone by his reaction to a helpless hummingbird in need of rescue. In fact, you can find out just about everything you need to know about a person. Most magnanimous souls who call hummingbird rescue are willing to exert themselves in some way. Maybe not by going out on a limb like Katie or confronting a Rottweiler like Stan, but they’ll usually make at least some effort. A few callers, though, refuse to do anything, even when they created the problem and circumstances require little of them. They call only to angrily demand that somebody else spring into action. Some people won’t take five minutes to save a life, regardless of the minimal investment it requires. Philosophers refer to this kind of myopic narcissism as “unenlightened self-interest.” Nothing good can come of it, though many who suffer from this failing won’t discover the truth until it’s too late.

  Nonetheless, most callers to hummingbird rescue rearrange schedules, postpone well-laid plans, and go out of their way to get injured and orphaned birds into rehab. Some people will do anything they can to set things right.

  Gabriel was one of these shining stars. In an anxious call one afternoon in early April, the young parking valet breathlessly reported that he’d seen a bird collide with a stretch limousine outside an Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills during a gusting windstorm and had raced through traffic to retrieve the inert bird from the middle of Rodeo Drive.

  “I’m not sure he’s alive,” the young man whispers in a lyrical Spanish accent as he hurries through my front door cradling a white cloth dinner napkin. “I’m Gabriel.” He flashes a million-dollar smile and extends a rain-dampened hand.

  “Terry.” I shake his strong hand firmly. “Thank you for bringing him in.”

  “Of course.” Gabriel glances at me from under his baseball cap with bottomless brown eyes flooded with compassion, curiosity, and all kinds of other attractive things. “I would never leave him out there like that.” He shakes his head.

  Gabriel, who has taken the Metro bus to deliver his hummingbird, lays the napkin on the table and unfolds it carefully. At first glance, I can’t tell if he has brought me a hummingbird or a wet cigar butt. The bird is so caked in Los Angeles road grime, it doesn’t look as if it could ever have been a living creature. I reach down and touch the waterlogged tangle of feathers, and the body feels as cold as ice and doesn’t flinch. I take a deep breath.

  “Is he dead?” Gabriel looks at me in alarm.

  I pick the bird up and place him in the palm of my hand, trying to feel a vibration. “I can’t tell.” I frown, certain he is dead.

  But Gabriel, who doesn’t miss a thing, breathes heavily and knits his brow as though he is about to cry. “I got him here as soon as I could. And I tried to give him some sugar water like you said,” he says in a protest against life’s unfairness.

  “You did everything you could,” I assure him as I gently lay the motionless bird down on the napkin. “And that’s what matters. It’s tough out there for these guys. Especially in this kind of weather.”

  “Yes, all of a sudden the wind blew so hard,” Gabriel tells me. “I was watching him flying down to another hummingbird sitting in the top of a tree across the street. He kept flying over the other bird four or five times. I don’t know why. But he was going really fast and—”

  I start to interrupt and explain how his hummingbird was involved in a common courtship ritual, but Gabriel can’t wait to finish his story.

  “Just as he came down, the wind made a . . . a big . . .” Gabriel waves his hands in the air like a magician.

  “Gust?”

  “Yes, gust, and he went straight down.”

  “Did he hit the car?”

  “Yes!” Gabriel nods vigorously. “He bounced off the top of the car and fell into the street. So I ran out and got him before the other cars hit him.”

  “I guess you’re lucky, then.”

  “I know.” Gabriel rolls his eyes and shakes his head in disbelief. “I didn’t even look before I ran out there. I was so scared for him.” As Gabriel is detailing his death-defying rescue, I glance down and think I see the bird’s foot twitch slightly.

  “Wait a second.” I raise a palm toward Gabriel and then cup the icy bird in my hands and blow warm air onto him several times. I discovered the miracle of this technique after retrieving a fading hummingbird from a city shelter on a frosty winter night the year before. The fledgling was so cold when I picked her up that I feared she would die before I could get her home to the ICU, so as soon as I got in my car I cranked up the heater, cradled the frozen bird in my hands, and blew the life back into her. Within minutes she revived and began gulping formula from the syringe I had brought along. I administer this same heat therapy to Gabriel’s bird, and just as I am about to give up, a tiny claw rubs almost imperceptibly against my palm, triggering a memory I can’t quite recall.

  “He’s alive.” I turn toward the back door.

  “Really?” Gabriel’s eyes widen with childlike wonder.

  “I’ll be right back.” I race the bird into the garage and place him in a natural nest inside the ICU with several babies who, out of habit, begin bobbing for food even though they ate less than ten minutes ago. Using my rubber-tip dental tool, I wedge his bill open slightly and inject one-tenth of a cubic centimeter of nectar into his mouth. The shock of the food causes him to sway backward involuntarily before collapsing on his side. I right him in the nest and crank up the heat before returning to the house.

  “Is he alive?” Gabriel asks excitedly when I come back in.

  “So far.” I nod.

  “Oh, I’m so happy!” he exclaims, clenching his fists in celebration.

  “But it will be a while before I know for sure if he’s going to make it,” I caution. “Injuries like this can take a long time to recover from, and you never know which way they’re going to go. They can really drive you crazy.” And in that moment I could not have imagined how prescient my words were. “I’m taking care of quite a few birds right now, but I’ll do my best.”

  “I don’t mean to . .
. to . . .” Gabriel begins. “I mean, I know you are a good person. But if there is someone else who can help him more or who . . .” He trails off uncertainly.

  “No, I can do whatever it takes,” I assure him.

  “Terry, please.” Gabriel pulls back apologetically. “Don’t misunderstand me. I mean, if you are too busy. If there is somebody else I can take him to, I will do that.”

  I think of Jean, who, with fifty rescues at her house already, needs another hummingbird right now like she needs a hole in her head. “No, the other rehabber lives south of downtown and it’s a long way.”

  “I don’t mind,” Gabriel jumps in. “If you are too busy.”

  When I gaze into Gabriel’s soulful brown eyes and realize he really would ride the bus four hours to Jean’s house and back for a battered hummingbird that has little chance of surviving, I almost cry. “No, I can save him,” I promise Gabriel, as if saying so will make it true.

  “Thank you so much, Terry.” He smiles with relief. “Here”—Gabriel reaches into his back pocket and takes out his wallet—“I want to give you this.” He pulls out eight one-dollar bills, all that he has.

  Rescuing any kind of wildlife is a costly enterprise. In the case of these hummingbirds, except for the food and feeders provided by the nonprofit with which Jean and I are affiliated, every dollar comes out of our own pockets, and it can add up to thousands when you take into account equipment and supplies. Still, I’m not about to accept Gabriel’s last eight dollars.

  “Thank you, but no.” I wave him off. “His expenses are taken care of, so he can focus on his recovery.”

  “Ah, Terry, you are so great.” Gabriel shakes my hand effusively. “I know you will save him.”

  “Hmm.” I purse my lips as the image of the young Anna’s who drove a knife through my heart two years earlier comes creeping out of its dark night. The memory of her death has altered my frame of mind, informing my interactions with every bird that has come through the door since. And in that sense, my long-lost fledgling will never die.

  Ever since that agonizing night on the garage floor, the specter of failure has been hanging over me like the sword of Damocles. Although most injured and orphaned birds that have come into rehab fly out healthy and robust a few months later, a certain number—those with broken wings or concussions, the newly hatched—don’t make it. And each hummingbird that dies bruises and toughens me a little more. After two years of easing suffering birds to their final ends, I have not become hardened. But I have not regained my early confidence either. Instead, the heady self-assurance I once paraded around like the belt of an undefeated champion has been replaced by a fearful anxiety, punctuated by moments of sheer terror, at the enormous responsibility I have taken on.

  Like all rehabbers, I endure periodic meltdowns that fill me with a withering sense of frustration and hopelessness. Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as compassion fatigue, the mental and emotional trauma caregivers experience as a result of empathizing with the pain and suffering of those who cannot be saved. For doctors and nurses who reach the limits of their empathy, this can lead to flipping the switch and turning off emotions completely. With rehabbers, this feeling of hitting the wall arrives like clockwork at the same time every year, in late June, as broken and young rescues continue flooding into already overcrowded facilities.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” I complained to Frank late one afternoon the summer before as I sank into a kitchen chair after a punishing day spent sweating over six new intakes: two irreparably injured adults, two badly damaged juveniles from a yard-clearing incident involving an electric bush trimmer, and a pair of unpromising, day-old hatchlings with eggshells still stuck to their lumpy bald heads. “Everything coming in is almost or already dead. I’m running a damn morgue.”

  “What did you expect?” Frank asked philosophically as he slid into a chair beside me. “If only healthy and lucky hummingbirds were flying around out there, they wouldn’t need you. Why do you think they call it rescue?”

  “It’s just so depressing.” I sighed as I feverishly stuffed rolls of tightly wound Kleenex into stacks of plastic salsa cups.

  “It’s always going to be that way,” he told me. “‘And while the sun and moon endure / Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure. / I’d face it as a wise man would, / And train for ill and not for good.’”

  “Who said that?”

  “A. E. Housman.”

  “Well, thank Professor Housman for the reality check.” I blinked up at Frank dejectedly. “But tell him I still never thought it would be this hard.”

  “Nobody does,” Jean consoled me later that evening when I recounted our conversation to her over the phone. “If you’d known, would you ever have started?”

  At the time, her question seemed rhetorical. But gradually, along with the heightened angst created by helpless hummingbirds, came a larger understanding of the nature of existence. One that demanded accepting the inevitability of death. Not in coldly rational terms, but in a mature, tempered way that involved learning to absorb the anguish, both my own and that of others, that comes with life’s hardest of realities. Because if one lesson had sunk in over the past few years, it was that nobody wants to watch a hummingbird die. That’s where rehabbers come in. We take the pain for everybody.

  The unanticipated sorrow that came with rescuing wildlife drove me to another recognition as well. Staring death in the eye every day gets tough after a while. As in war, there’s a cumulative drag on the psyche as the bodies pile up. Especially when you find birds on their backs in the ICU at five in the morning before you’re really awake, or ready to face anything. Losing three or four in a day is excruciating. It’s impossible to imagine the spiritual drain until you’ve been through it. So you can’t just brush it off and go to bed like nothing unusual happened. Because if they don’t kill you in the daylight, they’ll creep in and get you in the dark. So you have to find a way to cope. Or get out. But joining wildlife rescue is a little like getting involved with the Mob: once you’re in, it’s for life. When you’re a rehabber, you can’t quit and walk away. Too many things depend on you. So you begin searching for something that makes it all possible. Drinking is not a long-term solution. I have to get up before dawn every morning. Drugs are worse. Because if you don’t stay focused with birds who require special diets, need to eat every thirty minutes, break like glass, and move quicker than the eye, things can go very wrong, very fast. Western philosophy, which trained me in logical analysis while I was studying for a master’s degree during my restless youth, was far too rational for hummingbirds. So I turned my gaze east, to my old standby Lao Tzu, whom I had often consulted during times of hard luck and trouble. One night, I randomly opened the Tao Te Ching in response to the stress and pain brought on by too many hurt hummingbirds. Lao Tzu’s advice was simple: Practice nonaction.

  “Easy for you, Lao Tzu,” I scoffed. Maybe if you’re meditating beside a bubbling brook on some scenic bluff out in the middle of the forest with nothing else to do but contemplate the meaning of life. But what about when you’re juggling fifty hummingbirds in rehab with the phone ringing day and night and more casualties rolling in every hour? How about when hundreds of birds walking that thin line between life and death are depending on you every minute of the day for six months straight? And what about when desperate parents with children in tears show up at your door at nine o’clock at night pleading for help? Then what do you do, Lao Tzu? Say, Sorry, I’d love to help, but I’m practicing nonaction right now?

  Rescuing young hummingbirds from the overheated streets of Los Angeles is about as far from nonaction as you can get. Most wildlife centers won’t even let them through the front door. Every rehabber will tell you that immature hummingbirds are the most demanding, high-maintenance, and stress-inducing birds under the sun. Why do you think so few agree to take them on? Concluding that I might not be ready for Lao Tzu’s wise counsel yet, I tossed the book on the nightstand and resolved to revisi
t enlightenment at a later date.

  Apart from the suffering I witnessed every day, there was another problem. Because it wasn’t just about the birds. As much as I agonized over the misfortune of the hummingbirds I couldn’t save, I would be disingenuous if I didn’t admit that I spent some of those long nights with dying birds crying for myself. My first year, when I couldn’t lose, I was dancing on top of the world. But gradually, with each disheartening loss, I began to feel more and more sorry for myself. Why would anybody do this with her Friday nights? I wondered when two handsome film-industry couples from London on their way to a celebratory dinner at Spago dropped off a young adult who had slammed into a Beverly Hills office window and sustained a serious concussion. When I greeted the jaunty, impeccably dressed foursome at the door in my navy blue scrubs and nectar-streaked T-shirt that I had put on at six o’clock that morning, before twelve hot and sticky hours managing hummingbirds, the contrast between their fashionable attire and my grubby uniform, as well as our respective prospects for fun that evening, did little to lighten my mood.

  Of course, once again, I had been forewarned. Years ago, when I first expressed interest in rehabbing hummingbirds to Jean and remarked on how thrilling it must be, she turned, looked me dead in the eye, and said, “Oh, trust me, you don’t want the thrill of this much misery.” Admiring the collection of elegant fledglings buzzing around her cages, I laughed it off at the time. Three years later, standing in the doorway clutching the Tiffany box containing the wobbly hummingbird as I watched the carefree partygoers bounce back into their air-conditioned, jazz-pumped Audi coupe, I wasn’t laughing anymore. Who in her right mind would invite this kind of agony? I could be out with clever and literate colleagues from UCLA for an end-of-the-quarter Mexican buffet and margarita fiesta at happy hour. Or drinking French champagne and savoring takeout from the best Italian restaurant on the west side with my ironic international friends next door amid easy laughter about nutty neighbors, bumbling politicians, and the insufferably bad movies coming out of Hollywood that summer. After so many protracted nights spent reviving dying hummingbirds over the past few years, I had begun questioning whether the thankless work I did served any real purpose.