Fastest Things on Wings

by Terry Masear

  Just after sunset, while lounging on the bed catching up on my intake records with three cats flattened by the late-summer, triple-digit heat, I get the most wrenching call of the year, if not of my entire rehab career.

  In rapid-fire delivery, Diana describes the injuries an adult female has sustained after slamming into a picture window. From her harried description of the bird spinning in a tight circle on the ground whenever she tries to fly, I am certain she has a broken wing. Agitated and distraught, Diana insists on keeping the injured hummingbird in a cage inside her house and wants to know what kind of food to buy for her. This question is always a serious talking point. I get around twenty calls a year from people who want to keep an injured hummingbird as a pet. So I patiently explain all of the reasons why she cannot, legally or in good conscience, go down that road. But Diana is persistent, not in a pushy, arrogant manner but in a desperate, terrified way that makes me suspect some dark and menacing threat is lurking behind her hummingbird crisis.

  Understandably, most callers refuse to accept the dim prospects of severely injured birds. The majority of hummingbirds with traumatic head injuries, broken backs, and broken wings cannot be saved. But nobody wants to hear that. So I have to walk callers through the five Kübler-Ross stages of grief, from denial (backpedaling on the initial diagnosis that the bird has a broken wing), to anger (which occasionally is directed at me but more often at other people and, sometimes, nature), to bargaining (“What if I . . .” questions), to depression (despondence, regrets, tears), and, finally, to acceptance (delivering the bird to rescue despite the bleak prognosis). And usually I have to get through this thorny conversation in five minutes because other callers with the same feelings and hesitations are lined up waiting to be escorted through the same exacting process. Emotionally charged exchanges like these, which are more common than I care to recall, make me feel out of my depth sometimes, as if I should have a doctorate in psychology and years of clinical experience before I plunge into such treacherous waters. But there is no time for all of that. Hummingbirds and their finders are hurting. So all I can do is aim for the heart and hope my words hit home.

  “It’s not humane,” I finally tell Diana after five minutes of back-and-forth debate. “By keeping her, you’re holding on to a disaster that’s just going to get worse with time. She’ll suffer for weeks until she starves to death. Try to imagine yourself locked in a cramped cell with a painful injury and no nutritious food. You don’t sound like the kind of person who would put a hummingbird through that kind of torture.”

  My last comment nudges her over the edge and she begins weeping.

  “It’s just that she has always been here with us. My daughter—she’s sixteen—and I have been watching her for five years. She’s become part of the family. And my daughter is going into the hospital tomorrow for cancer surgery again and if our little hummingbird dies, I just have this horrible feeling—” She struggles to catch her breath.

  “Diana,” I say firmly, “I’m going to tell you right now, don’t do this.” My caveat causes her to break down into uncontrollable sobbing. Still, she needs to get the whole story on the table.

  “This beautiful hummingbird has been nesting and raising her babies in the magnolia tree by our kitchen window for five years,” she tells me, sobbing, “and she’s been here all through my daughter’s cancer, and some days we sit together and watch her feed her babies and she has been the only light . . . the only . . . hope that has kept us going. And now my daughter is devastated seeing her so broken and helpless like this and I just . . . can’t—” She breaks off in breathless sobs.

  “Diana, listen to me,” I counsel, surprised at the tenderness in my voice. “For all of the hard things you are going through right now, the last thing you want is for this hummingbird to suffer after the joy she has brought you. Her presence in your life has been a gift, and her injury has no bearing on your daughter’s situation. Think of her as the inspiration she has been rather than as a harbinger of bad things to come.”

  Diana continues crying so uncontrollably she can’t speak. I wait patiently.

  “It’s just so hard,” she finally says in a quivering voice. “I would feel so horrible if I had to take her to some cold animal shelter to be put down. I’d just never get over it.”

  “Then bring her to me. And remind yourself that you are showing your love and compassion by doing the right thing for her. Because in the end it’s the most humane and unselfish act for this wondrous creature and the best thing for everyone’s peace of mind and hope of moving on, including your daughter’s during this difficult time.”

  Diana’s sudden silence makes me fear she is about to go off on some enraged and defensive tirade the way callers stuck in the anger stage, who insist on keeping injured birds despite my best efforts to dissuade them, sometimes do. Finally, after taking deep breaths to regain her composure, she says, as if a curtain has lifted, “You’re right. Thank you, Terry.” Still, Diana wants to discuss the matter with her daughter before bringing the bird over. I tell her I’ll be waiting.

  By the time I hang up, I’m a nervous wreck, more stressed than I felt in my worst moments battling the afflictions of West Nile. Thinking about Pepper and how the prospect of losing her had me by the throat yesterday, I can only imagine what dark corridors Diana’s thoughts are racing down with a hummingbird who has been in her heart and imagination for five years and is so closely associated with her daughter’s survival.

  Diana’s breakdown leads me to reflect on my own experience over the past twenty-four hours. The tortured images swirling through my mind as I contemplated Pepper’s possible death finally brought the hummingbird equation into sharp relief. This was the lesson that the long, lonely night on the garage floor what seems like a lifetime ago had been pointing to. I can almost hear the young Anna’s voice in my head: You cannot accept my death or that of others until you have come to terms with your own mortality, and all that entails. Remember that thing you felt slipping away as you sat holding me in the garage on that cold winter night two years ago? That was you. Watching me die, you saw your own life, and you cried as much for you as for me. Because part of what makes you who you are and guides your understanding of yourself is your connection to me.

  And this is why so many callers are coming apart at the seams when they encounter a dying hummingbird. People feel so tightly bound to hummingbirds that the birds become miniature mirrors. In urban communities throughout Los Angeles, hummingbirds are the poster children for primal innocence, both theirs and ours. They symbolize the beauty of pristine nature before human civilization came tromping into paradise with its rough, heavy boots and mucked everything up. And despite our ongoing interference, these fearless spirits continue living alongside us, serving as a reminder of what once was, and what can be. This is why their deaths, as small and insignificant as they may seem, have the power to drive the hard truth of our own mortality straight home. Because in the end, as much as we work to deny it, our fundamental condition is not so different from theirs.

  This is the emotional war Diana was waging with herself when she called me. Being so closely tied for so many years to a hummingbird whose death, in Diana’s mind, signaled the end of her daughter’s life made the grim conclusion impossible to face. But an hour later, when Diana shows up with the hummingbird in a black-velvet-lined jewelry case, her relief is unmistakable.

  “Thank you so much for taking her in.” Diana snuffles with red eyes as she hands the exhausted bird over to me. “As soon as I told my daughter what you said, she insisted I bring her over immediately because she said that she understood”—I hand Diana a tissue as she struggles to explain through her tears—“what it’s like to feel pain and to be frightened, and she doesn’t want the hummingbird to go through that. And she said she will always carry her in her heart, no matter what happens.” Diana weeps from somewhere deep inside. “She was so strong.”

  Going to bed that night with a sense of steadily rec
overing health, I realize that Diana’s tragedy has delivered the last piece of the puzzle that finally brings clarity to the complex and elusive feelings I have been carrying around since my first traumatic loss. With her hummingbird’s broken wing threatening to shatter everything around it, Diana’s daughter, having been confronted with the prospect of her own death at such a young age, has been pushed to that same precipice I teetered at the edge of two years earlier. A precarious ledge that demands letting go of everything we think we know. And only by opening our minds and allowing our connections to these magical creatures, who have so completely taken our hearts hostage, to extend beyond our immediate physical experience with them can we make peace with our loss.

  CHAPTER 27

  Any Day Now (My Wild Beautiful Bird)

  EXCEPT FOR A HANGOVER HEADACHE and residual fatigue, I bounce back from my battle with the dreaded West Nile virus a few days later. Pepper, too, has recovered completely, and Gabriel is flying with near-normal efficiency, although he still has some trouble going in reverse off a perch. This will come.

  On Wednesday morning, in a sudden flash of insight, I decide to put Gabriel in the large flight cage with Pepper, a move that will serve the dual purpose of giving him more space and easing her fear of adult males. The second I pop Gabriel into her cage, Pepper flies to the far perch in alarm. But Gabriel, who has been eyeing the silver-feathered beauty from across the room for three months now, cannot contain his interest and follows her, landing on the same perch about six inches to her left, leaving her with ample personal space. After studying Gabriel for a minute, and likely being drawn in by his dark, handsome good looks and polite demeanor, Pepper shimmies over on the perch and pokes his chest lightly with her bill the way hummingbirds feeling camaraderie toward one another do. Gabriel returns the gesture, and the relationship is officially solidified. They remain together this way for five days, pirouetting through the sunlit air by day and sleeping side by side at night. But autumn’s wingèd chariot is hurrying near, and neither bird really needs the training afforded by a large flight cage. Pepper has been in rehab for three months, and Gabriel has been out in the real world for four years. And as the late-summer sun slants at a lower angle at the end of each day, I sense it is time for both to move ahead.

  On Saturday I release the eight birds in the aviary. This time, seven of eight, including the UCLA hybrid, choose freedom. The only one that stays on is Powder, who hangs back warily when I open the doors. Even after she’s spent three cycles in the aviary, the integrity of her primary feathers is still compromised by the sugar-water diet she endured during her deprived youth. She continues to make progress, and I agree with her decision to stay another round.

  After scrubbing down the aviary and placing handfuls of freshly cut cape honeysuckle around the perches, I put Pepper, Gabriel, and the last four caged birds in it. All are mature adults, which makes for a rare and fascinating group. Unlike feisty fledglings and cocky young adults, older birds recovering from serious injuries rarely fight in rehab. There is an odd, collective sense that everyone is a survivor with nothing to prove. They all know how to catch fruit flies and mine flowers. Baths are old news, as is sleeping in a tree at night. They are by far the most self-possessed group I have seen all year. The only wildcard is Iron Mike.

  Iron Mike landed in rehab after colliding with a spoke on the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica pier. He bounced off the steel spoke and plummeted to the wooden pier below, where a pit bull on a leash grabbed him in her mouth and then obediently relinquished her prize to her pet guardians. When the young couple arrived at my house with the bird; their four-year-old son, Michael; and one of the sweetest dogs I have ever met—she licked my hands tenderly from the half-opened back window of the car—the male Anna’s was nearly unconscious. As Michael’s father recounted the chain of events that had brought the family to my door, the young hero could not resist adding a few critical details to the story.

  “I was riding the black horse with a balloon,” Michael suddenly interrupted his father’s pragmatic account.

  “You were riding a black horse when you found the hummingbird?” I asked in amazement as I fed the patient before popping him into the ICU.

  “When he fell out of the sky and Annie picked him up,” he added, twisting the front of his yellow SpongeBob T-shirt into a knot.

  “What color was the balloon?”

  “Red,” Michael answered after a moment of reflection.

  “So you were riding a black horse with a red balloon when this Anna’s hummingbird hit the Ferris wheel and fell out of the sky onto the pier right in front of your pit bull, Annie?” I recounted in wonder, marveling at the whimsical world kids, like hummingbirds, inhabit.

  Michael looked up at me with enormous brown eyes and nodded in serious silence.

  “He’s mixing up the chronology,” his father said, stepping in. “He was actually riding the black horse with the red balloon on the carousel about ten minutes before Annie picked the hummingbird up off the pier,” he reported in a didactic tone.

  “Well, I’m very proud of you,” I told Michael. “You’ve done a wonderful thing bringing this little bird to someone who knows how to take care of him.”

  Michael studied the hummingbird in the ICU for a few seconds before nodding in complete agreement.

  Within an hour of their departure, Iron Mike was up and flying, but when I put him in a large flight cage, he wobbled unsteadily on the perch, signaling a mild head injury that demanded a stint in rehab.

  Iron Mike is a first-year male, but his crown and gorget are almost entirely cloaked in shimmering magenta, indicating he was born in late winter and has been hanging around the beach for several months. As the youngest male in the group, Iron Mike still has some unresolved ego issues. Iron Mike boldly claims the center perch the moment he gets into the aviary, and he lifts off every few minutes to patrol his domain, hovering in front of each cage mate with flashy bravado before moving on to impress his next subject. As I observe the brazen showoff making his rounds, I can almost see the chink in Iron Mike’s armor. Any recovering bird who looks that tough and invulnerable is fundamentally dishonest. Because in the end, injured hummingbirds are all scared and under pressure. And Iron Mike’s displays of self-importance are comical, as the adults ignore him with puzzled indifference. Still, I am worried that his need for recognition might prompt him to attack Pepper, which would send her screaming back to a flight cage. But Iron Mike is a perfect gentleman with Pepper and the other females. It’s the rocketing rufous that drives him crazy.

  The adult male rufous arrived earlier in the week. He’d slammed into a Century City high-rise and dropped onto the cement ledge just outside a window. Fortunately, the young administrative assistant who discovered him edged out onto the fifteenth-floor ledge during lunch hour and retrieved the knockout before calling me, thus sparing my fragile nerves from a late-summer breakdown. The stunning, scarlet-bibbed rufous had some trouble with vertical lift his first several days in a large flight cage, but the minute he got into the aviary, he came roaring back to health. Now he is one of those rare birds that can fly so fast, he’s a blur. His quickness is so unprecedented that I cannot come close to following him with my eyes. For exercise, he flies laps around the aviary at the speed of light. This irritates Iron Mike, who feels inclined to pursue him during his fast-paced workouts. But because Iron Mike can go only about half his speed, the rufous keeps ending up on Mike’s tail during the chase. And instead of stopping and turning around, Mike just looks aggravated and strains to fly faster in a futile effort to catch up.

  Adding to the comic relief of this last group is One-Eyed Jack, a male Anna’s brought in a few weeks earlier by Leslie, who gave him his name because she once worked the tables in Vegas. One-Eyed Jack lost his left eye after colliding with some unidentified flying object but is otherwise quick and sound, and he has learned to compensate for his loss of binocular vision by flying backward much of the time. I have never seen a hu
mmingbird make such a radical adjustment, but he is mesmerizing to watch as he spins around the aviary, suddenly braking in midair to grab a fruit fly before returning to his reverse rotations. Amazingly, despite his impressive speed, One-Eyed Jack never collides with another bird or any object inside the aviary.

  The antics of the adult group provide endless entertainment, but after a day I release the lightning-fast rufous so Iron Mike, who is becoming increasingly defeated by his supercharged antagonist, can get some rest. Gabriel and Pepper settle in comfortably with this refreshingly peaceful group of battered casualties that includes an adult black-chinned female who lost two wing feathers to a cat, and the still undersize but now mature Powder. Every morning, with a rush of relief, I get up at dawn to hang feeders and a freshly watered fuchsia in the aviary then head back to bed. My twenty cages sit clean and empty in the garage. The ICU has been vacant for weeks.

  Free from the ceaseless demands of healing hummingbirds, I return to my ritual of taking our cat Bobo for a walk on a leash every afternoon. Bobo is the kind of feline who was born with a brain far too big for his species and he therefore requires daily excursions around the neighborhood to stay mentally stimulated. One sunny afternoon in mid-August, as Bobo and I are passing the community garden across the street from our house, I notice a prominent sign on the entry gate posted by the city that reads Warning: West Nile virus has been detected in the area. I smile wistfully as I recall my terrifying Sunday morning with Pepper two weeks earlier. With hummingbirds, so many things happen so fast and change so quickly that recent events always seem as if they occurred much longer ago. Bobo turns left at the end of the block and then makes another unannounced left at the next corner, and we run into Jonathon, who took in the newborn kitten from the Santa Monica shelter several weeks ago. When he catches sight of us down the block, he waves in friendly recognition.