The Bluebird Effect

by Julie Zickefoose

  They know me, know my voice, my names for them. They have observed that I can’t fly up to them as their own mother would, and they have the sense to come down to eye level to be fed. They know that I live in a big house and that I pop out to pick beans and weed the flowers and hang clothes. They listen for my voice in the house and come to the window where they can watch me. They peep and I call back; they beg and I feed them. They regard me as their mother, a strange, huge, earthbound, flightless mother, but a source of sustenance and even comfort. This is deeply fulfilling to me. It is knowing what they know that utterly beguiles me, that has me humming with joy along the invisible lines that connect us.

  Late Summer

  In the end, I have only four days of hourly feedings with the orphans, but that is more than enough. Locating them in the outdoors, and waiting for them to locate me, is nerve-racking and takes almost all of my time. Gradually, I increase the interval between feedings until I feel the birds are able to sustain themselves. By August 2, their thirty-seventh day of life, I’m feeding them just before they go to roost at night, and not at all during the day. Bela hangs by the front door, sitting picturesquely in the little bonsai trees I keep. Rufus lives in a Russian prune hedge, shuttling between there and a trumpet vine tangle on the east hill. Adventure Joe hangs out in the front flower beds, guarding the red crocosmia blossoms. I hang a small feeder of protein solution by each one’s haunt, and they feed themselves. Rufus still comes to sit and peep on the garden fence whenever I pick beans, and sometimes I feed him. Adventure Joe and Bela spend much of their time in spectacular aerial dogfights, perhaps because their chosen duchies are so close together.

  AUGUST 3. It rains all day this day, and I see Bela and Joe rain bathing until they are shiny and slick. They can fly even when sodden, which is more than I can say for most songbirds.

  AUGUST 6. I’m seeing Joe and Bela many times each day. Joe has become skittish and rockets off when I approach, but he uses his protein feeder all day. Bela came down during dinner at the picnic table and prodded the orange Sun Gold cherry tomatoes in my salad, then probed the printed flowers on my shirt. When I emerge from the house with his freshly washed and filled nectar feeder first thing in the morning, Bela zeroes in and feeds from it as I’m trying to hang it up. He’s watching for me at first light.

  AUGUST 8. Because they’re getting wilder, it’s harder for me to identify my foundlings immediately. But they blew their cover when I stood by the big hummingbird feeder on the front porch. All the wild hummingbirds scattered, but Joe and Rufus came right in, exploiting the suddenly vacant ports, and lacking any fear of this big pale animal they knew as their mother. I was able to examine them at leisure as they fed, inches from my nose. What a delight. They both look wonderful. They’re forty-three days old now, and well beyond needing any subsidy. I decide to put protein solution out only in the morning. I’ve seen all three catching gnats in the air, and they should be able to subsist on natural nectar and insects, with an occasional sip of sugar water.

  I wonder about the nature of the bond I forged with the three hummingbird orphans. Would any young hummingbird become attached to its caretaker, or is this dependency an artifact of the birds’ having been hand-fed since they were in pinfeathers? I am rarely able to put a whole puzzle together, usually being given only a few pieces at a time. By the next summer, I have one more piece. On July 14, almost a year to the day after the four orphans came in, I get a call from a woman saying that a baby hummingbird has been found in a commercial greenhouse and is in need of help. I drive to pick it up and find a newly fledged bird, bits of down still adhering to its head feathers. It is weak and debilitated from its long, hot ordeal. I put it in an empty glass aquarium and place a feeder with protein solution within reach. After I bring the feeder up to its bill once, it quickly accepts this food source and is self-feeding from then on. By the next morning it has picked up considerably and is buzzing around in the lidded tank. I put up my new fifteen-by-seventeen-foot nylon-screen tent in the yard and release the hummingbird into it, hanging a feeder in the center of the tent. I keep the foundling for six more days and am pleased to see it self-feeding with increasing confidence. I feed it once, when I take it in, but never handle it again. It’s an altogether different upbringing than my four fledglings enjoyed the previous year.

  I estimate the female fledgling, which Phoebe names Sylvia Salvia, to be around twenty-eight days old when I release her. I take her feeder and hang it conspicuously just outside the tent, then draw back the flaps and tie them open. She buzzes out and feeds, then settles in a birch tree. I dismantle the tent and replenish her feeder with fresh protein solution several times daily. And the oddest thing happens. Even though Sylvia is self-feeding, she seeks me out in the yard. She’ll land on a low twig right by my face and peep. When I speak to her, she ruffles her feathers and preens companionably. I know that this behavior has little to do with food, because I’ve hand-fed her only once. She’ll leave to visit the flower garden or her feeder, then return to perch near my face. As time goes on and she gains flight prowess, she’ll hover in front of my nose, chipping irritably until I bring my finger up in front of my face. And she will land on it, fluff her feathers, and settle down for a good preen and talking-to. Seemingly satisfied, she’ll then rocket away on some pressing hummingbird business.

  I cannot describe how it feels to have a free-living, essentially wild hummingbird seek me out for companionship. I search for an answer to this delightful conundrum. I decide that, lacking a mother, she simply needs to make contact with someone she knows. And somehow, having a person speak lovingly to her fills that need. Perhaps she made the connection between food and me during her confinement in the tent, and she still associates me with that form of comfort and fulfillment. Whatever is going on, I know that I will never be through learning about how birds’ minds work, even the tiniest ones.

  Epilogue

  Everyone who met the three hummingbirds I raised and released in 2003 asked if I thought they’d return to our Ohio sanctuary the following spring. An image of the United States, the Gulf of Mexico yawning beneath it like a huge mouth, would pop into my head, and I’d hesitate before answering. Those baby hummingbirds would have to fly from southern Ohio to the Gulf Coast. There, they’d double their weight before launching themselves on an 18- to 24-hour, five-hundred-mile nonstop flight across the Gulf, trying to reach landfall in Mexico. If their wings stopped beating for more than a few seconds, if a storm hit, if a headwind sprang up, they’d fail, and there would be glittering green feathers in the flotsam. All I could say was “I sure hope they come back.”

  My three hummingbird orphans left on migration in September 2003, and I spent the winter wondering if they’d made it to Mexico, and the early spring wondering if they’d make it back home.

  On April 17, 2004, my husband, Bill, stepped out, coffee mug in hand, to take in the morning sun. A male ruby-throated hummingbird zipped up, hovered in front of his face, then poked his beak between each pair of Bill’s fingers. It was as close to a handshake as a hummingbird could manage.

  Later that day, I looked out to see two male hummingbirds sitting shoulder to shoulder on a twig by our front door, one that had been their favorite as youngsters. I rummaged around until I found the small feeder they’d used the summer before and filled it with the protein-rich solution the three had been raised on. As I reached to hang it from a branch, three adult male ruby-throats wove through my arms and around my head, fighting to be the first to feed. Seven months and two ocean crossings behind them, my hummingbirds were home, right where they belonged.

  Osprey

  Hooked by Round Talons

  AT FIRST I thought I might lose my mind. This was the third day I had sat, slowly fading my hair and clothes in the July sun, which bounced off the silvered dock and waves all around me. My spotting scope was trained on a nest full of ospreys: three young, with occasional cameos by the parents. And for the third day they did nothing. Sometimes t
hey preened, some times they ate; they dozed and loafed.

  It was tranquil, too tranquil, and I ached for some action. I have always loved to draw small birds, which rarely do any one thing for long. Now my sketchbook was full of loafing ospreys. My mind wandered to Jane Goodall, my idol since early childhood, patiently taking notes on the slightest move her animal subjects made. And slowly it dawned on me that I would have to enter fish hawk time, to shed my impatience and stop counting the hours, or I would never see the world through the yellow eyes of an osprey.

  It occurred to me that the young birds must be hungry; they had had nothing to eat since the morning before. Their crops, normally comfortably rounded as though tennis balls lay within, were flat. I pulled a sun-warmed sandwich out of my pack, hoping the mayonnaise was still good, and forced part of it down while I watched.

  Suddenly the female, who had been dozing, snapped to attention. Her lumpy form became all angles, and her eyes pierced the sky. Though I could not yet make him out, the male must have been on his way in, and from her demeanor I figured he must have a fish for his family. As one, the three young birds dropped their heads and began their wheedling pipe of hunger. He hovered for a moment overhead, the shredded head of his prize a fierce red in the blue sky field, and dropped to the nest in an exquisite one-footed landing, just long enough to release the fish to the quick bill of his mate. Over the long afternoon, as she patiently dissected and fed the fish to her young, I filled a sketchbook with images—eyeless, footless drawings, quick gestures and bits; toes and nostrils, even tongues, as I tried to understand how these strange, leggy hawks were strung together. Though I had fretted at first, I was now one of the legion of those who can’t take their eyes off ospreys.

  I was to spend part of two summers watching this massive stick nest on a Nature Conservancy salt-marsh preserve in Connecticut. A friend had approached me about illustrating a manuscript on his studies of ospreys. Reasoning that I needed to spend a lot of time sketching them from life to create believable drawings, I jumped at the chance to spend time with the great chocolate-and-white birds. Though the book illustration job never materialized, I’m grateful now that I spent part of two summers that way. Sitting under an osprey nest isn’t something I could justify doing now that child care and career have taken the front seat in a busy life. If ever there were a period of my life when I could afford to enter osprey time, it was then. As I think about it, no other raptor would allow me to draw it in every phase of its life, cheerfully foraging, preening, mating, tending its young, and fighting its battles while people swim, sail, and ski all around it, as I sat beneath the nest in witness. In its phlegmatic acceptance of us, the osprey seems almost to acknowledge its debt for safe, artificial nesting platforms. Yet we were very nearly its ruin.

  In the mid-1970s, Connecticut’s osprey population hit an all-time low. Eggs, shattered by the weight of the incubating hens, lay wasted in deserted nests, the females who laid them too contaminated by organochloride pesticides to produce normal shells. Ninety percent of the ospreys nesting between New York and Boston vanished between 1950 and 1975, reports Alan F. Poole in Ospreys: A Natural and Unnatural History. New England was hardest hit. While DDT was used to control agricultural pests in other parts of the osprey’s range, here the deadly chemical was sprayed directly on salt marshes in a misguided attempt to control mosquitoes. The silent mist settled on the ospreys’ nests and on the grasses and water, where its molecules were quickly bound up in the fatty tissues of small fish. Larger fish, eating them, concentrated the poison. Ospreys hooked a deadly dose, for they eat solely fish. Osprey populations suffered a 31 percent annual decline in Long Island Sound in the 1950s and ’60s. Reproduction fell to almost nothing. By 1974, one active nest remained in Connecticut.

  Ospreys became bellwethers for the health of bird populations overall, as their nest failures due to eggshell thinning from organochloride pesticides were so spectacular and unequivocal. The lanky birds played a large role in alerting the public to the dangers of persistent pesticides. DDT was banned in 1972. Thirty-five years later, the New England population is still rebounding. Connecticut had 250 active nests in 2005; Maine boasted over 2,000. And yet there is still a long way to go for the bird’s population build up to historic levels. Ospreys were described as abundant, with Connecticut boasting perhaps 1,000 nests in the 1800s. The lower Connecticut River alone had 200 nests in 1938. Current limits on population appear to be fish abundance and predation, with great horned owls and raccoons leading the list of osprey predators.

  On a clear August day, as I sit on the dock before the nest, I can see twelve ospreys in the air at once while newly fledged juveniles try their luck in a brisk northwest breeze. One clatters into a red maple, trying to land in the thin, leafy branches, and comes out again, a leaf impaled on one talon. He lands on a sturdy, dead snag and looks around ferociously before bending to tear the evidence of his ineptitude off his toe. I love watching these new fliers, as they show how difficult I always thought flying must be. Like kids sailing Sunfishes on choppy water, they screw up regularly and spectacularly. It is the young birds, too, that give me some insight into osprey consciousness.

  A nest of ospreys, like that of most raptors, often holds young of graduated size and age. The third or fourth egg laid is usually smaller than the first two. That youngest bird is also the smallest, and it gets fed only when its siblings are full, and sometimes not at all. I watch the male drop a fish to the three, now well feathered and able to carve it up for themselves. Although I can’t be sure, I’ve assigned them sexes according to their size and markings. Females are usually larger and marked with chocolate on crown and breast.

  As always, the oldest female commandeers the prize. The second largest, a male, joins her and rips off a hunk of flesh for himself. The youngest shifts her feet, screams, then savagely bites a stick, tearing the bark and scoring the wood deeply. She will be lucky and will not starve, as youngest ones often do in lean years. Late in August, though, she is the last in the nest, and I watch her pick in a desultory way at a dried fish tail. Her siblings are mere specks in the blue, but she is stubbornly alone. Studies show that this is a vulnerable period for the smallest sibling, for this is when she should be learning to fish while being subsidized by her parents. In 1978, R. C. Szaro observed adult ospreys at Seahorse Key, Florida, dropping pieces of food into the water while their offspring practiced diving for them. This bird should have been learning to dive, feet-first, into the shallow waters of Niantic Bay.

  Nearby lies a whole menhaden, but she cannot eat it, for it is aswarm with yellow jackets. She tries several times to drag it nearer, but their angry buzzing dissuades her. Were she more agile or confident, she might pick it up and airlift it to a nearby snag to finish it off. But she is resisting independence. She shakes her head and scratches her face with her huge black talons. Before long, her parents will leave for southern oceans, and she will have to put those great feet to use and beat the air with new wings.

  As an artist, I find endless fascination in osprey architecture. I’ve had two ospreys in my hands, the most recent being one found dead and presumed shot. I hurried to the scene, hoping to find evidence. As any bird rehabilitator can tell you, raptors are still being shot for sport. But no bullet had felled this beautiful young bird. Its feet were charred and blackened, one hind toe and talon melted. Even its tail had been burned off. I looked up to see power lines just overhead.

  The ornithologist Noble Proctor, who has consulted about raptor casualties with power companies, explained how it happened. A large raptor lands on a power line, not in itself a dangerous thing. As it teeters for balance, it lightens its load by defecating, sending a stream of whitewash behind. If this hits the ground wire, a charge leaps back up the stream, down the bird’s legs to the perch wire, burning off the tail on its way and killing the bird instantly. The rounded breast and gleaming plumage speak of the bird’s good health. If the world had to lose a young osprey, at least it had been
quick.

  Such a strong, lean, and sinewy bird! Its body is smaller in girth than a good fryer, but much longer. Its legs, though long and slender, are hard as iron, closely feathered like an owl’s, the tarsi armored, ending in magnificent outsize, sea green feet. Fish scales still cling to the horny scutes on its toes, a detail that moves me inexplicably. The enormous talons, strongly hooked, are almost round in cross section, not concave on the ventral surface like those of other raptors. People frequently speak of ospreys “locking on” to an oversize fish and drowning, but the truth is that ospreys are perfectly able to release the talons when necessary. If their talons locked, how would they release the fish to turn it around and carry it head facing forward; how would the male be able to deliver fish to the female at the nest? Perhaps the smooth, rounded surface helps with that. The outer toe on each foot can swivel through 180 degrees, giving the bird a choice of a conventional three-toes-forward grip, or two forward, two back. This trait, called “functional zygodactylism,” it shares with owls but with no other hawk.