Fastest Things on Wings

by Terry Masear

  The mystery surrounding Gabriel is enhanced by the white spot on his crown that Jean pointed out when I first saw him as a fledgling four years ago. Some reptiles have what is called a third eye on top of their heads. Although it’s not really an eye, the coloration on the skin resembles one, and researchers believe this spot is connected to the pineal gland, which is sensitive to changes in light and heat. Like reptiles and birds, humans also have a pineal gland. In ancient times, people believed the pineal gland, or third eye, held mystical powers and facilitated insight into the spiritual realm. In the seventeenth century, the French philosopher René Descartes posited that the pineal gland was the location of the human soul. Recent research indicates this gland is responsible for the production of melatonin in humans and is connected to circadian rhythms. Avian studies suggest that it may account for birds’ capacity to detect magnetic fields and therefore functions as the center of navigation during migratory flights. As I gaze at Gabriel’s white spot shining in the sunlight breaking through the clouds, my mind reels at all the magical possibilities his third eye conjures up, if not in reality, at least in my colorful imagination.

  While contemplating the significance of Gabriel’s third eye, I glance over at Pepper, who is perched quietly in the cage next to him and following my every move. As I approach her to offer the thrilling adventure of flight, my phone rings. The caller tells me he has two baby hummingbirds in a nest and wants to bring them to me right away. When I try to pin him down on the specifics of the nestlings’ age and circumstances, he balks and insists on delivering them immediately.

  “Where did they come from?”

  “I’m not sure,” he answers hesitantly.

  “How old are they?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “Well, it’s best to try and get them back to their mother if that’s possible.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I continue to press him about returning the nest to its original location, but he keeps asking for my address, and finally I relent.

  While waiting for him to arrive, I give Gabriel a handful of red columbine and exercise Pepper before carrying them into the garage to clean their cages and fill feeders. A young male Anna’s brought in at sunrise after being found grounded under a pine tree during a windstorm the night before has been floundering around on the bottom of his cage since being dropped off. I spent most of the morning bathing and examining him with my surgical glasses and discovered that nine flight feathers on his right wing were missing. Beyond that, the young bird appears robust and struggles desperately to fly. After stressing over him for five hours, I’m falling into a funk and have been avoiding a decision that is almost certainly headed toward a sad conclusion.

  After filling feeders and changing the paper towels in the bottom of Gabriel’s and Pepper’s cages, I hear a car pull into the driveway and head out to the front gate to meet the caller with the twins. When he slides slowly from the passenger’s seat and shuffles toward the gate, I feel foolish and embarrassed about grilling him with so many questions over the phone. He is at least ninety years old, carries a walking cane, and appears nearly blind. A young woman talking on her smartphone waves to me from the driver’s seat as I usher the old man through the gate. As we pass the aviary, his face lights up in astonishment. He tilts his head toward the aviary and stands listening with an expression of childlike wonder.

  “This way,” I coax softly as we start moving again and he shuffles along with me toward the garage. Once inside, I open the Earl Grey tea box he hands me and find a nest with two dinofuzz babies wiggling around inside. Because the chicks are in such perfect condition, my first reaction is that he has cut the nest in the mistaken assumption that the mother had abandoned it. But then I wonder how he could have been watching the nest in the first place.

  “Where did you find these?” I ask in confusion.

  “My cat,” he answers matter-of-factly.

  “Your cat?”

  “Yes.” He nods resolutely. “He brought the nest into the house, through his door.”

  I look down at the perfectly intact nest and the undisturbed nestlings huddling together. “Really? Just like this?”

  “Uh-huh,” he asserts proudly, pointing to the nest with a wrinkled and trembling hand. “He brought it into my bed this morning and set it on the pillow by my head.”

  I stare at the nest in speechless awe.

  “After that windstorm, you know,” he adds.

  “That’s right,” I agree. “There was a lot of wind last night.”

  “Yes.” The old man smiles. “And my cat loves to go out early in the morning and look around after a storm.”

  “But—” I hesitate for a second. “Sorry to ask, but how did you know they were hummingbirds?”

  “Oh, my housekeeper.” He gestures toward the car in the driveway. “She’s from Costa Rica and she knows birds. So she asked her son, he’s six, to look up hummingbird rescue on her phone and he found you in less than a minute.”

  We stand together in the garage in silence as I marvel at the confluence of events and the unlikely cast of characters that brought these lucky twins to my door. A midnight windstorm, a curious and compassionate cat, a sleeping blind man, a Costa Rican bird enthusiast, and a six-year-old tech whiz.

  “They seem healthy,” he volunteers as I place their nest in a plastic cup in the ICU.

  “Yes, they do,” I agree, wondering how he could possibly know such a thing.

  “What’s wrong with that one?” he inquires, pointing in the direction of the young male Anna’s who is flailing awkwardly around the bottom of his cage in a frustrated attempt to fly.

  “Oh, he has a lot of wing feathers missing,” I answer despondently. “He’s a tough case because it takes so long for them to grow back that the bird usually breaks off the ones on the other wing in the meantime.”

  The old man closes his eyes, cocks his head in the direction of the Anna’s cage, and listens intently for several seconds before shaking his head. “Not missing,” he finally concludes. “Still there, I think.”

  “Well, I examined him for a long time this morning,” I begin confidently, “and I couldn’t—”

  He raises a quivering hand in the air before I can finish.

  “Check again.” He knits his brow. “I think they’re still there.”

  “Okay.” I shrug, unconvinced.

  “That one will be fine too.” He points in the direction of Pepper resting silently on her perch. “Just needs more time,” he avows as he shuffles out the garage door. I glance at Pepper, who is sitting motionlessly in the corner of her cage and has not so much as flinched since we came in. I follow the old man out the door and across the patio, but he pauses by the aviary again.

  “Like a helicopter,” he shouts before wandering toward the gate.

  After escorting him out, I stop by the aviary on my way back to the garage and close my eyes. I never realized what a racket hummingbirds’ wings make. The buzz from the eighteen young adults flying around inside is so deafening, I can hardly hear the ambient traffic and construction noise emanating from the urban machinery churning ceaselessly around us.

  When I get back to the garage, the young male is still spinning and tumbling across the bottom of the starter cage in a futile effort to get airborne. I reach in and lift the panting bird out. I put my surgical loupes on again, gently pull the right wing away from his body, and examine it. As before, except for the longest outer feather, all the primary feathers seem to be missing. I run my thumb and index finger down both sides of the feather a couple of times. After a few swipes, my finger comes across a hard bump about halfway down. I turn the bird over in my hand, examine the feather closely under magnification, and discover a nearly invisible lump of dried tree sap glued to the underside of his wing. After setting him back in the cage, I hurry into the house, warm a tablespoon of canola oil in a plastic cup in the microwave, and bring it back out to the garage. When I rub the oil down the
feather several times, the lump suddenly breaks and dissolves, releasing nine primary feathers that magically pop out into a perfect hummingbird wing. I wash the oil off with warm soapy water and rinse the squirming bird thoroughly in a tub before placing him on the bottom of the cage outside in the sun. Ten minutes later, the nimble young adult is gliding smoothly back and forth between high perches as if nothing happened.

  Astonished by his surreal transformation, I move the vigorous male into a large flight cage with the intent of running him through the advanced stages of rehab. But it quickly becomes clear he has already been out on his own, and the capable young adult shows growing impatience with this rescue business. I toss a rotten banana peel crawling with fruit flies into the bottom of his cage and head into the house, where a trio of jealous cats is, as always, waiting for me.

  Our three cats sit in a lineup inside their caged, outdoor walkway every morning watching me tend to the hummingbirds on the patio. Occasionally they plunge into loud, fur-flying wrestling matches to call attention to themselves. The second I step through the back door, they race one another to the kitchen, darting between my feet and tripping me all the way down the hallway. They engage in this ritual twenty times a day, which is good exercise for them and has improved my balance considerably.

  Observing the tree-sap bird from inside the house, I can see him buzzing gracefully back and forth between perches but I don’t believe he is catching any fruit flies. Until I head back outside. As I approach the cage, he flies the length of it and I see his bill twist slightly for a split second before he alights on a perch. When I glance at the banana peel, there isn’t a fruit fly in sight. I gaze in admiration at the practiced hunter and he stares back at me with annoyance, as if to ask, Are you happy now? Five minutes later, I open the top of the cage and let him go. As I watch him disappear over the Pacific Design Center in a blur, the irony of his rescue is not lost on me. After inspecting this seemingly doomed young flier for half a day with all of my youthful faculties and my high-powered microsurgery glasses, it took an ancient blind man less than ten seconds to show me the way.

  CHAPTER 19

  I’ll Be There for You

  BY THE FIRST OF JUNE, Pepper is able to fly short distances between perches in her starter cage. At various points during my ongoing trips around the patio to fill feeders, I stop and invite Pepper onto the twig, then raise and lower her in the cage until she spins her powerful wings and flies to the high perch. She can execute intermediate forward flight with ease now and strains with focused intensity each day to achieve vertical lift. Judging from her steady progress over the past two weeks, I no longer doubt that Pepper will recover as thoroughly as the blind man foresaw.

  Gabriel, however, still spends most of his time sitting on a low perch watching the rehabbed birds around him come and go, though lately he has started to tumble across the bottom of the cage by half spinning his wings. Gabriel’s wings are synchronized and flap with moderate speed, but he still cannot get full rotation, which is typical for a back injury. Nevertheless, like young birds learning to fly, he responds to my words of encouragement by exerting greater effort. Each time Gabriel finishes buzzing across the paper towels on the bottom of his cage, he hops onto the far perch and looks at me questioningly. I want to reassure him that everything is going to work out, but Gabriel has been with me far longer than any adult hummingbird I have taken in, and my confidence in his recovery swings between excited optimism and grim despair. Since his arrival, several injured adults have come in and failed to make it for one reason or another. But unlike the badly damaged birds that fall on their backs as their condition deteriorates and have to be relinquished, Gabriel maintains an unusually straight posture and never falters. And because of who Gabriel is and what he represents, I cannot bear to give up on him.

  Since Pepper’s appearance a month ago, thirty additional hummingbirds have come into my rehab facility, totaling eighty-five for the year. Of the thirty-five adults who have been released, many have stuck around to take advantage of the seven one-quart sugar feeders dangling around the patio’s perimeter. The health and success of these early releases provides the encouragement I need to face the exploding number of babies that will flood into rehab during the approaching peak of the nesting season, as the most demanding month, with its onslaught of lost and distraught fledglings, looms large.

  By the first week in June, I’m feeling the strain when I get up every morning at five but still remain fundamentally strong and convinced I can endure the next three months without being overtaken by the escalating demands of nonstop phone calls and the daunting workload they deposit at my house. With the spring quarter at UCLA wrapping up, I am about to make the transition from juggling rehab and teaching to plunging full-time into saving hummingbirds for the summer. Although the season is half over, like running a marathon, early strides in the race come quicker and easier than the numb slog toward the end.

  With the transition from spring to summer, tree-trimming victims are beginning to come in at a faster rate. Over the past month, in addition to three cut nests that for various reasons could not be reattached, I have received two dog-found nestlings, a nest of twins taken off a porch chandelier by real estate agents, a nest cut from ivy by exterminators, pinfeathered twins whose mother hit a window and died after being frightened from her nest by kids blowing noisemakers at a birthday party, and several grounded and slightly injured fledglings, three of which came from city animal shelters.

  As the weather turns hot and dry in June, mites arrive, and every bird that comes through the door has to be isolated and dusted with a special insecticide. Female hummingbirds pick up mites from the flowers they eat and then transfer the roving insects to their babies during feeding. In warm summer weather, mites proliferate on feathered nestlings and suck their blood. Some chicks are so covered with mites in the photos sent to me that I can barely see their bills. In nature, these birds stand no chance of surviving, though most are healthy and beautiful once we get them cleaned up, dusted, and hydrated. When people call about mite-infested nests, I coach them on how to dust the nest and babies with diatomaceous earth—a term nobody can pronounce—if they have a swimming pool and cornstarch if they do not. These home remedies work on all but the worst infestations, which we direct to rehab as an alternative to the nestlings’ certain death.

  Mites, which represent nature in its rawest, most unforgiving form, create their share of distress in callers. The first week in June, Kristin calls and describes how two nestlings in the schefflera just outside the door on her front porch are being devoured by mites. She hasn’t slept all night and is desperate to get the chicks into rehab. Before Kristin can finish explaining the problem, she begins sobbing so hard she can’t speak. She puts her husband, Kyle, on the phone, and he apologizes for his wife’s implosion.

  “So what’s the backstory here?” I prompt.

  “The backstory is we had a hummingbird nest in the same tree last summer and the babies got mites. My wife was pregnant at the time and we were so preoccupied we didn’t do anything to help, so the mites got worse. Then one day ants attacked the nest and the next morning when we got up, both babies were dead, and my wife had a miscarriage later that afternoon.”

  “So you’re expecting again.”

  “Correct. And, well, you can imagine.”

  “Of course,” I say sympathetically before asking Kyle to send me a photo of the nest. A minute later I get a photo of two feather-duster Allen’s with squinty eyes and upturned bills who are covered with mites. I call Kyle back immediately.

  “It’s pretty bad, so we have to act fast,” I tell him. “So here’s what I think we should do. Take a wet Q-Tip and wipe the mites off the chicks’ bills. Then—do you have any diatomaceous earth?”

  “Any what?”

  “Diatomaceous earth. It’s that gray powder you put in swimming-pool filters.”

  “Ah.” He brightens with sudden recognition. “No, but my neighbor down the street i
s a pool guy.”

  “Perfect. So get some from him and, using a Q-Tip, dust the nest and the babies with the diatomaceous earth. Put it on pretty thick, being careful not to get it in their eyes. And make sure you dust heavily under their wings, on their bellies, and especially all around the inside of the nest.”

  “Okay,” Kyle says haltingly, as if he’s writing everything down. “But won’t this make the mother abandon the babies?”

  “No, you’re doing her a favor, and hummingbirds know it.”

  “That’s amazing. They’re so smart,” he exclaims.

  “You have no idea,” I agree. “Now, when the chicks get weakened by mites, the ants move in because they smell death, so get some Vaseline and coat the vertical section of the trunk supporting the branch the nest is on. Put the Vaseline all the way around and as thick as you can. That way the ants can’t get to the branch the nest is on and the chicks won’t get Vaseline on their feet when they fledge. Do this right away, okay?”

  “I’m all over it.” Kyle embraces his assignment before hanging up.

  Three days later Kyle sends me a photo of two bright-eyed Allen’s and calls to report his victory over the parasite invasion.

  “The mites are gone and there are no ants on the tree. The babies look great and Kristin has totally mellowed out. I don’t know how to thank you, Terry,” he says in a tone steeped in gratitude.