The Bluebird Effect

by Julie Zickefoose

  And so the years turned, and I wondered how long this little bird would grace my studio. Chestnut feathers painted her undertail and back, bits of malelike plumage, little tokens of the testosterone that elderly female birds sometimes secrete. She sang her chattery song in the spring and still looked and listened for other orioles out her big window.

  But like a little clock, she slowly wound down. By December 2005 I knew that, if Ora Lee made it to spring, this, her seventeenth, would be her last. Her breathing had become labored, her appetite faded, and I had to come up with better and better menus to keep her interested. I could have dosed her with antibiotics, I suppose, but it seemed unfair to prolong her life. I had to let her go sometime.

  On February 8, 2006, I got up from my chair and walked into the aviary, as I had almost every morning since 1989, and found her, silent and still, in the corner of the cage floor. This is how death comes to captive birds, in the wee hours of the night, just like birth. They slip away when no one is there to notice.

  I wasn’t good for much that day. My reaction to her loss took me by surprise. I thought I was ready to let her go. I wept a long time for this gallant little bird, who lived as good a life as I could give her, for so very long.

  The caged oriole and I had much in common; we grew alike like old roommates. Bound by the welcome duties of a wife and mother, I could no more migrate in late August than could she with her crippled wing. I know I should be moving on in the fall, and yet I never seem to go. The certain slant of golden light, the songs of flocking starlings raise a lump in my throat. The quiet trill of a tree cricket in the coloring sumac makes me long for Martha’s Vineyard in October, for cockleburs in my shoelaces, for loves lost but never forgotten. The only thing that makes me feel better is to walk, to come home with pants legs covered in beggar ticks. I should have a destination, but I don’t; I walk a trail that makes a loop and ends up back home.

  It’s no different from the plink, plunk, hop, and flutter Ora Lee made around the perches in her brass cage, but it’s enough to hold off cabin fever for a while. I think about her as I wear my woodland trails ever smoother, pacing the cage.

  Touched by a Redtail

  THOUGH THEY PROBABLY know better, many local people assume that, in addition to publishing a magazine and booklets about birds, Bird Watcher’s Digest is in the avian rehabilitation business. Sad to say, for several counties in southeast Ohio, there are no active avian rehabilitators, so the magazine is the only remotely bird-related place most callers can turn to. Each call presents a fresh dilemma. BWD is no more set up to take care of an injured bird than is the office of any other magazine. Yes, there are people here who know a lot about birds, but there are no flight cages or medical supplies, no X-ray machines. So the calls are routed to my house.

  I did a lot of songbird rehabilitation when I lived in Connecticut, but I’ve been able to resist being sucked down the vortex of full-time bird rehabilitation since moving to Ohio. When I had no children, it was all right to drop everything at the ring of a phone. But fetching an injured hawk a half-hour away became much less alluring once the exercise required packing snacks, drinks, and diapers, and strapping two little ones into car seats in order to complete it. And once my toddler, Liam, figured out that he wasn’t going to be able to get out to play when we went on a bird run, he’d squawk the whole way back, then fall asleep for ten minutes, effectively trading his customary three-hour afternoon nap for a very long, cranky afternoon.

  So it was with immense relief that I punted the pickup to my bird-loving friend Leslie, who came to the door with a box full of red-tailed hawk. He’d been found at dawn by the road, lying on his keel, unable to walk or rise. Despite his odd posture, he looked absolutely terrific. He had smooth, buttery plumage, not a feather out of place; bright, clear eyes, both pupils expanding and contracting normally. He looked like a healthy but very mature bird, not a bar marring his deep russet tail feathers. A very lightly marked breast and heavy, craggy scales on his feet also spoke of advanced age. I turned the silent bird on his back and began my exam, gently palpating every bone in each wing, looking for breaks or shotgun pellets or the burned, clipped feather edges where they might have entered. Deer season had just ended, and I wanted to be sure this lovely bird hadn’t been a target.

  Finding nothing amiss in the wings, I turned to the breastbone, which was hidden under muscle and fat. I smiled to find him well padded. He had been down just a few hours and was in excellent condition. Next, the legs, extended and flexed. I was delighted to find a worn U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service band on his right leg. This hawk had a story, and before long we’d have one more piece of it.

  Everything seemed to be in working order. I could only conclude that he’d taken a glancing blow from a car and was suffering a mild concussion. I fed him a mouse’s worth of raw hamburger with a chaser of Ensure, which he swallowed grudgingly, as if he only wanted to clear his palate to be ready to bite someone if he had to. A typical buteo, though, he never tried to bite and was absolutely docile and motionless throughout his exam. I put him, still unable to rise, in a large cage in a corner of the basement. If he wasn’t up and about by morning, he’d have to go to the Ohio Wildlife Center in Columbus, two and a half hours away.

  Being a compulsive nurturer, I couldn’t resist taking a peek at the crate only an hour later. I was astonished to hear the patter of talons on newspaper. The hawk was up and walking from one end of the crate to another, looking for a way out. His lovely head bobbed and weaved as he sized up the potential exit ports in the dog crate. He paused to nibble a loose thread hanging from the towel and resumed pacing. What a beautiful sight. Though happy endings usually take a lot more time and work, sometimes the stars align and things work out that way. Come morning, I’d take him out to our vegetable garden, which, thanks to the deer, has a nine-foot nylon-mesh fence around it. If he could get out of that, he’d have no need of my services. He’d find his way home in short order. Morning came, and I spent several hours with the hawk, sketching him. My drawings are all defensive poses—head-on, feathers raised—but they clearly show that I was in the presence of a living bird, and a magnificent one at that. Finally I could stand seeing him confined no longer. It was time for his flight test.

  The hawk failed his test miserably. Released in the large garden, he hunkered on the ground. Leslie and I withdrew and watched through binoculars. Finally I held him as high as I could and gave him a boost into the air. Five weak flaps, and the hawk crash-landed in the long grass. Oh, dear. It was time to call in the experts. Leslie dropped everything, we packed the hawk in a towel-lined box, and she started the long drive to Columbus.

  Ten days later, a Christmas card arrived from the Ohio Wildlife Center. The hawk was “recovering nicely and should be ready for release soon!” The clinic manager, Sylvan Campbell, and the veterinarian Donald Burton never found anything wrong, save a healthy crop of bloodsucking louse flies that may have weakened the hawk temporarily. A creepy thing, the louse fly looks like a flattened cross between a big tick and a housefly, and it scuttles through hawk feathers like quicksilver, occasionally landing on a handler’s arms and neck. I couldn’t see how parasites could ground a fat, healthy hawk, so I stuck to my concussion theory. After all, he was found by a roadside.

  The important thing was that he was going to get to come home.

  In the same batch of mail there was a certificate from the U.S. Geological Survey, indicating that the redtail had been banded as a juvenile near Ashfield, Pennsylvania, by Mr. R. F. Frock Jr., of Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania, on October 9, 1991. Ten years and perhaps eight months old! The unmarked tail and craggy feet had been good clues. He was an old bird, and with the help of a team of dedicated people, he’d have a chance to grow even older in his Ohio home.

  I wrote a letter to Mr. Frock, enclosing a sheaf of copies of my sketches. I wanted him to know that, though he would receive a certificate stating that the bird’s band number had been recovered, the hawk was far
from dead. I was delighted to receive a lengthy e-mail from Roy Frock, in which he revealed that he’d been banding hawks since the 1960s. His banding station is at Lehigh Furnace Gap, on the Kittatinny Ridge about 15 miles east of Hawk Mountain. It’s about 131 miles west of Manhattan. Of seventy-three redtail recoveries, this was his first from Ohio, and he measured it as 315 miles west-southwest of the banding site. He advised that I couldn’t be sure of the sex of the bird I’d guessed to be a male by its smallish size; that he’d handled redtails ranging in weight from twenty-five to fifty-eight ounces. No other raptor, Mr. Frock added, varies so much in size. He went on, “Another bird you might be interested in was a redtail I banded on 10-20-73. It was found dead in a trap set for a coyote in Benson, Vermont in May of 1998! It was an adult when I banded it, and it is the oldest wild redtail that has been documented. The banding office aged it at twenty-five years, eleven months!”

  Mr. Frock, it turned out, is a longtime subscriber to Bird Watcher’s Digest and was familiar with my work. He closed his letter: “You know, Edwin Way Teale is my favorite natural history writer. I have every book he ever wrote (first editions of all except two). But in all the years I read his books, I never took the time to write and tell him how much I enjoyed them. So I am happy to have the opportunity to tell you how much I enjoy your work.”

  Already, the redtail had repaid me in spades for helping him out. Roy Frock’s letter was a gem. I wanted to honor him by getting the bird back home, but it was hard to find the time to put both kids in the car for a five-hour round trip. Luckily, a consultant to Bird Watcher’s Digest was planning a flight into Columbus and a drive to Marietta on January 3. With a few e-mails and phone calls, I arranged to have the slightly apprehensive consultant serve as a hawk taxi. The hawk arrived with the consultant and cooled his talons in a cardboard box under a desk until I could get to the magazine’s office at four that afternoon. Leslie met us at the office, and we drove out to Caywood Road, where he had been found on December 11.

  Oak- and pine-studded ridges stretched around a patchwork plain of pastures and farms. It was perfect redtail habitat, with views stretching for miles. We opened the box, and the redtail crouched, breathing hard. We stepped back, and he stayed still. I moved forward to bend a carton flap back, and he sprang from the box, wings out, head feathers flared, talons forward, perfectly conjuring Garuda, the Indonesian hawk-god.

  Seeing his chance, he gave a twisting leap and beat his great wings, gaining altitude and lining out for the valley. I couldn’t suppress an involuntary whoop of joy as his wings cut the air, beating faster than I’d ever seen a redtail flap. He turned his head as he flew, taking in the familiar contours of home, and wisely made a hard right turn toward a thick stand of white pines. He landed deep in the middle. The harrying crows would be less likely to find him there while he gathered his wits.

  That was it. He was gone, and all was as it should be. There wasnothing in the air but joy. Leslie and I hugged each other, beyond words. Then a large redtail, followed by a second, smaller individual, appeared out of nowhere, flying purposefully over the valley to land near the pines where our bird had taken cover. His release had not gone unnoticed. Was this a neighboring pair, or had his mate replaced him in his absence? With the power of redtail eyes, she could easily have recognized him as he sprang from the box. They’d have to sort it out together now.

  There were so many mysteries, past and present, encapsulated in this bird. The band had given us a couple of answers we’d never have had otherwise. We knew approximately where the bird had hatched, and when. How he had traveled 315 miles west-southwest; what had happened in the nearly eleven years since he’d last been held in human hands; how he had been grounded; and what would happen to him now would remain a mystery. But opening the door into his life, if only for a little peek, brought home to me that almost everything in nature is so much more awe-inspiring than it first appears. That redtail sitting stolidly by the highway—to you, just a blur of white hung up in the bare branches—might be older and better-traveled than you are. I thought about those who would question whether one middle-aged redtail was worth all the fossil fuel and frozen mice, man-hours, phone minutes, medical expertise, and X-ray film expended on his behalf. I’d argue that he was worth all that and more. Though it would not matter to him, in the Ohio countryside beneath his outstretched wings, he’d left a handful of human hearts, connected in joy.

  Ivory-billed Woodpecker

  Not Saying Goodbye

  IN THE WINTER of 1999, my husband, Bill, asked me to paint a rose-breasted grosbeak for the cover of his family’s magazine. I thought about it for a day or two and replied, “I can’t. I have to paint ivory-billed woodpeckers. And I have to write about them, too.”

  “But we need grosbeaks. Do we really want to put an extinct bird on the cover of the magazine?”

  “I’m not so sure they’re extinct. I have to do this. Ivory-bills are what’s on my mind right now.”

  Bill knew better than to argue, wheedle, or strong-arm. I can’t say why I was moved to write this piece that long, gray winter of 1999. Nothing fresh had been heard from the supposedly extinct woodpecker for many years. David Kulivan’s sighting of a pair while turkey hunting in Louisiana wouldn’t come to light for another six months. Tim Gallagher and Bobby Harrison wouldn’t fix astonished eyes on the white-paneled wings of an Arkansas bird for another six years.

  But I’d been thinking about ivory-bills since I was eight, trying to find a way to connect with the unattainable, and this is what came out. Oddly, all that has been done and written about ivory-bills—the countless human hours of bayou slogging in the Big Woods of Arkansas and the panhandle of Florida; the mysterious and equivocal Luneau video; the blurred and indistinguishable bits of photographic evidence; the miles of often vituperous online commentary about whether or not this bird still exists—have not changed my feelings about it by a molecule.

  I think the ivory-bill is still out there. At least, I hope so. Here’s the 1999 piece.

  You can think about heat like this from the comfort of an air-conditioned home or nestled in the remove of winter. But until you’re out in it, it isn’t real. This is the kind of heat that makes you sprint for your car and turn on the blowers to full, gasping and soaked through to the skin. Admittedly, I’m a tenderfoot; at home in Ohio, we’ll have a week or two of high nineties and be done with it. Here, in deepest backwoods Florida, I am amazed to see people going about their business, even being cheery, occasionally pulling out handkerchiefs to wipe their brows, but otherwise hardly acknowledging what to me is a crushing, all-defeating overlord. Add to that the hordes of mosquitoes that have evolved with the image of a minivan in their tiny brains, knowing instinctively that within lies exposed human flesh. They ping and bing off the windows, probing with their fine needles around the weatherstripping, waiting for the window to roll down so they can flood in. I am here to watch birds in the pine-ringed cypress swamps, and so I spray myself one last time with repellent, roll down my sleeves, button up my collar, and launch myself once again into the barrage. The scope is heavy, and it cuts into my shoulder as I alternately walk and wade to the place where I heard something yesterday, something I had never heard before.

  Dusk falls faster down here. It almost feels like the tropics, the way the sun kind of lazes, then crashes down to the horizon, going from twilight to pure dark in a short period. I was sloshing down the ghost of a trail, listening to the insect chorus swelling, when I heard a high, nasal ank. It was distant, but I could tell it was given with some volume. It was the call of a big bird. Turkey? I wondered. That’s it, the yelp of a turkey. Again! That’s no turkey, I muttered. Really, it sounded like a giant nuthatch. I didn’t let myself think what it might have been. I waited until insects and nightfall forced me back to the car. Later, in the hotel room, with the clarity that comes only with time, I admitted to myself what I had heard. I would be out at first light, waiting, tomorrow.

  If it went to roost
here, giving a couple of calls just before going to sleep, it would be here at first light. Hurriedly, I pick my way back up the trail, a tiny headlamp beam bouncing along the ground. Moths spiral and hit the lens, to be replaced by mosquitoes as the light continues to grow. It’s already oppressively hot and damp. Finally, I reach the spot where, last night, I’d impaled a tissue on a twig, and switch off the light. There’s no way it has left its roost, if roost it is, yet. I wait, and the sky brightens to gray, then to rose, then yellow-white. The sun’s up! Should I stay another hour? Two? And then, a sound to stop my heart. HENK! And again. And the calls are punctuated with the lusty whack of a strong bill hitting wood. Ba-bam! An ivory-colored bill.

  A silent scream rises in my throat, and I quell it with difficulty. I will the bird to stay near its roost hole. The irregular whacking and chipping continue. I can’t believe my luck. I’ve tracked pileated woodpeckers countless times, following the sound of their working. It’s far easier to zero in on than a call. Warily, I slip into the underbrush, spider webs draping across my face. It’s farther away than I thought, but I should be seeing some motion soon. It’s not very high off the ground, by the sound of it. There’s a huge hackberry ahead missing tea-tray-size pieces of its bark, riddled with round holes. It’s a mess. I close in on it. I’m too close, and the chipping suddenly stops.