So that was it. This was our starling. I could feel the naked, translucent-skinned belly hot in my palm as the bird slept with its head drooped on my thumb. I tucked the chick carefully into my handy baby-bird incubator—my cleavage—and the three of us went home.
It was at this point that I morphed from “Lyanda the Innocent Citizen Removing a Nonnative Bird from a Public Space” to “Lyanda the Starling Outlaw.” As it turns out, you may torture, maim, or murder a starling, but in Washington State, as in many states, you may not lovingly raise a starling as a pet. One of the ostensible reasons given by wildlife officials I spoke with was the prevention of propagation. There are already too many starlings, and people raising them as pets might eventually release the captive birds, making things worse. Something like this happened in the case of the house finch, a native bird with a geographic range that was once limited to the west side of the Rockies. The males have bright red breasts, sing all year, and are easy to keep, which made them marketable pets. In the 1940s, finches were illegally netted along the West Coast and transported east, where they were considered exotic and became popular. When there was an official crackdown on the wild-bird-pet trade, hundreds, perhaps thousands of finches were released in New York by dealers seeking to avoid charges. The birds quickly acclimatized and eventually spread across the east side of the continent.
In the case of the starling, though, that rationale doesn’t hold up. For one thing, the species has already overrun the country; it would take a huge number of released or escaped starlings to effect a noticeable increase in their population. On the contrary, it is far more likely that the removal of just one chick from the outside world could decrease the future starling population by scores, possibly even hundreds, of birds. (Starlings are able to reproduce at nine months old and often raise two broods a year. Say our bird fledged just three young its first breeding season, then those young, and all their future young, fledged three young each year… the numbers scale up quickly.) I’m not suggesting that starlings are a good pet choice for most people, but I do think the current standard makes little sense. In my opinion, if starlings remain legally unprotected, then we ought to be permitted to raise orphaned starlings in our living rooms.
It took just a few minutes to get our new chick from the park bathroom to its new home. I’d already prepared a mix of crushed dry cat food, hard-boiled egg, applesauce, calcium, and avian vitamins, with just the right balance of fat and protein for a baby starling. This I proffered in tiny bites at the end of a wooden stirring stick pilfered from Starbucks. (Baby bird, stirring sticks… my petty-theft rap sheet was growing by the hour.)
Though the bird was a decent eater, it remained sneezy and parasite-ridden. We hesitated to give it a name, not wanting to personalize our relationship and become more attached than necessary to what might be a transitory little life. Besides, we didn’t know if it was a male or a female, so picking a name would be tricky.* Tom sometimes called the chick “little buddy,” but overall we stuck with “it.”
For its first several weeks with us, the chick lived on the desk in my writing studio. Its nest was a plastic cottage-cheese tub lined with paper towels—I kept a roll handy so I could change them often. The tiny black ectoparasites that jumped off its thin skin were easy to spot against the white paper towels. I picked the nits up with tweezers and squished them. Keeping the makeshift nest clean wasn’t difficult; most songbird-nestling poo is encased in shiny, strong fecal sacs that the parent birds remove with their bills and drop over the edge of the nest, so there is not much mess. I just plucked these poo sacs out with my fingers. And like other nestlings with an unconscious evolutionary imperative to keep a clean and disease-free bed, our chick, when it got a bit older, hung its rear over the edge of the nest and let its poo drop outside—theatrically heaving its tiny bum to the plastic rim, wiggling its still-featherless tail back and forth, and letting loose its impressive dropping with seeming satisfaction before falling into one of its deep baby-bird slumbers.
Eat, poop, sleep. It reminded me of having a newborn human baby, and in some respects it was even more restricting. The metabolic needs of an unfeathered chick are high and constant. Watching backyard nests, we can observe how frequently the parent birds come and go, bearing wriggly gifts of protein-rich insects and larvae for their young. As the stand-in parent bird, I had to feed my chick several times an hour. When my daughter, Claire, now a teenager, was a baby, I could at least wrap her in a blanket and take her out with me—with this bird, I could barely leave the house. One day I decided to try packing its nest and food and bringing it along on my errands, planning to feed it as I went, but the chick quickly got too cold away from its heat lamp, so I ended up having to shop for groceries that day with a baby bird nestled, once again, between my breasts for warmth. For the most part, I was stuck at home. If I happened to be away overlong, the Feed me! baby-starling chirring sounds that poured forth from the tiny chick filled the entire house.
At a couple weeks old, the chick started getting more mobile, and though it stayed on my desk, I put its nest inside a ten-gallon glass aquarium. It would jump out of the plastic tub and slump around the floor of the aquarium, its cartilaginous legs not yet able to hold it up, but it still preferred to sleep in its nest. This it accomplished extravagantly, with its head hanging over the rim and breathing with that hot, baby-bird heaviness (the cottage-cheese tub really was getting too small, but the chick seemed attached to it and chose it over the larger Tupperware nest I offered). When the little bird’s legs began to ossify and get stronger, I added a low perch to one end of the tank, and it loved to jump on and off the stick and practice balancing there. But right from the start, its favorite place to play, sit, and sleep was on me. Tucked in my hands or on my lap, under my shirt.
Baby songbirds are not downy like baby pheasants or chickens or shorebirds or any of the other so-called precocial chicks that are born ready to run about. They are naked at hatching. Horny, sheath-covered pinfeathers emerge during the first week and take shape over the course of several weeks—the birds “feather out,” as the ornithologists say. With its prickly pins, our chick felt a bit like a hedgehog. But soon the little starling’s pinfeathers unfurled. It became as soft as a bunny and could stay warm more easily; now it liked to snuggle into the crook of my elbow and—especially—on my neck, under my hair.
Our tuxedo cat, Delilah, was only too happy to help oversee the care of the baby bird. She affected a great nonchalance, which fooled no one, and sat on my desk along with the chick, my laptop and me between them. Occasionally Delilah would lift her paw ever so slowly, and when I glared at her she’d pretend she was just about to lick her toes and do some face-cleaning. I never left Delilah alone with the chick, and because she is good at opening doors, I had to pound a nail into the molding by the doorknob so when I left the room, I could pull a thick rubber band around the knob and over the nail to keep her out. Once I forgot and when I came back to the study, there was Delilah sitting right over the chick, their faces just inches apart. Delilah was purring.
Meanwhile, my constant care and parasite-picking seemed to be paying off; the bird was flourishing. After four weeks, the shape of the iris provided the first indicator of the chick’s sex, and we gladly replaced the neutral pronoun it with she. We named the starling Carmen, which in Latin means “song.”
This excerpt from Mozart’s Starling copyright © 2017 by Lyanda Lynn Haupt
About the Author
Lyanda Lynn Haupt is an ecophilosopher, naturalist, and author of several books, including The Urban Bestiary, Crow Planet, Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent, and Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds. A winner of the Washington State Book Award and the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, she lives in Seattle with her husband and daughter.
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Books by Lyanda Lynn Haupt
Mozart’s Starling
The Urban Bestiary
Crow Planet
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Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent
Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds
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