I became a volunteer because, unlike my friends who had grown up on farms, I couldn’t look at the barely feathered birds lying on my lawn and say, “For every bird that dies, hundreds will survive.” After taking several birds to the sanctuary, I wanted to be one of the people who came to pick them up, who knew what to do beyond lifting the poor things off the ground and sticking them in a shoe box.
I kept a daily log of what each bird had eaten and how it was developing, when it learned to fly around the room and was transferred to the large outdoor cage in my backyard to learn to forage on its own. There were pretty birds—cedar waxwings, Eastern kingbirds—I felt lucky to see up close and there were common birds I liked all the same because each had a distinct personality. Some robins were bent on trusting me too much and had to be discouraged from following me around; others screeched and backed into a corner, only to open their beaks, flutter their wings, and beg to be fed. The fear of intimacy and the tendency to give mixed messages, I could only surmise, weren’t the sole province of humans.
At about two weeks old, a nestling would stand up in the berry box for the first time and climb onto its edge. There, it would lean first on one leg and then the other to open and preen its wings before hopping down to explore the paper-lined floor of the basket. Birds that left the nest never returned to sit in it. I let them fly around the room and peeled them off the woven tapestry, where they landed and clung. In the controlled environment of my spare room, more birds survived than might have in the wild, with parents who wouldn’t have been able to feed their young if the weather was uncooperative or predators were prowling their feeding sites. The birds that died usually had something obviously wrong, like deformed legs or wings. Even I could say, then, that for every bird that died, hundreds would survive. The moment their nests got knocked to the ground, the nestlings had nothing more to lose: Any day they lived in my care was time they didn’t have otherwise.
I gave up volunteering after my first book was published and I started teaching workshops at summer writing conferences. Eventually I moved to the East Coast to live in a one-bedroom apartment with two cats. The care of migratory birds is strictly regulated by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The license I had in Wisconsin, through the sanctuary where I was trained, isn’t valid in Washington, DC. I’m not likely to spend another summer with birds clamoring for food inside laundry baskets in a spare bedroom. I regret the lost chance the way other people sigh over never seeing Paris again or having forgotten how to play the violin.
The main ingredient of the soupy formula I mixed for the birds was dry cat food soaked in warm water. “Veterinarian-recommended cat food with high protein content, such as Science Diet,” our rehab manual—a huge black binder of mimeographed sheets—specified. Science Diet dry food was what my cat, Dorian, ate, so he contributed to Operation Bird Rescue by sharing his food. Dorian was an old-fashioned seal-point Siamese born in 1979, stockier and more violently committed to his one human than the cats that would follow him. He bit my friends and drew blood but sat calmly on my lap while I brushed his teeth and trimmed his claws. I could hold him upside down by his hind legs and swing him back and forth, or sling him over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carry him around the house. Somehow, though, I assumed all this was about him and not about me. That cat would have let me do anything to him to spite everyone else.
But when Ernest and Algernon, the two Siamese cats who lived with me in Boston and then in DC, turned out to have serious stomach problems—feline inflammatory bowel disease, which is akin to Crohn’s disease in people—and required daily medication, I remembered the knack I’d discovered I had through my care of birds. Every year, there had been a few birds that didn’t open their mouths when I approached with the feeding syringe. I’d learned to hold each of these birds in my hand, insert the tips of my thumb and forefinger into the rubbery corners of its mouth, and press till the beak popped open, slide the syringe in before the bird could snap its beak shut, and shoot the food down its throat, careful to avoid the trachea. Both the rehab manual and the volunteer demonstrator at the training session had warned that too much force could break the bird’s beak.
Feeding a reluctant bird required dexterity, timing, and concentration, a combination that came surprisingly naturally to me. I had never before thought of myself as competent or capable. I broke knickknacks while cleaning the house and couldn’t hang pictures on the wall without hitting my fingers with the hammer. In cities I visited regularly, I got lost by failing to remember, or notice, some landmark that was obvious to everyone else (the bronze dome of the state capitol building, for example). I was flummoxed by tools, gadgets, and a host of inanimate objects large and small, but when an animal in need was involved, it was a different story. All the distractions fell away, and I found myself in a quiet space where every detail I noticed was larger-than-life and relevant: Together, the animal and I had entered a magic circle where I could perform any complicated task with as little effort as would be required to thread a needle under a magnifying lamp.
Like Dorian, Ernest and Algernon followed me around all day demanding to be petted and picked up, so holding them on my lap and prying open their mouths was easy. A cat’s mouth is huge and strong, with sharp teeth and a sandpaper tongue. I found it almost comical to stick my thumb and finger in, drop the pill, close their mouths, and stroke their silky throats to make them swallow. The whole procedure only took a minute for each cat. Ernest, the slender blue-point who was the picture of dignity and elegance, bolted if he sensed that I was about to give him the pill, but there was really nowhere for him to go in our small apartment, and as soon as I caught him, he went limp in my arms and assumed a resigned posture and expression on my lap. Algernon, the seal-point whose black face made him look like a little monkey, sat at my feet and watched while I pilled Ernest. Either he was more accepting or else, every night, he believed that only Ernest was getting the pill. Algernon never led me on a chase, but once I put him belly up on my lap and picked up his pill, he raised one chocolate-colored paw in protest. His claws were retracted and he didn’t push my hand away; the gesture resembled the benign, desultory wave of the Japanese Maneki-Neko mascot in a store window.
The pill routine, which started when they were seven, became a docility demonstration my cats and I sometimes performed in front of our guests. By the time their inflammatory bowel disease worsened, the cats were ten years old. When first Algernon, then Ernest, started throwing up every day and losing weight, I gave them subcutaneous fluids and Vitamin D shots. Even though I had chosen to drive myself to the emergency room after a bee sting instead of sticking my leg with the EpiPen as instructed (I did put the pen on the passenger’s seat, within easy reach, in case I started choking for breath while stopped at a traffic light), I had no problem putting first one cat, then the other, on my lap, pinching his skin, and inserting the hydration needle. When the tip went in correctly, the slight resistance felt right, like an embroidery needle sliding into a thick linen fabric. As the water began to flow, the cat on my lap closed his eyes and purred. Unlike the birds, Ernest and Algernon understood that I was only trying to help. If they could have lived ten more years, I would have sat with them every morning to watch the line of water descending the clear tube.
The birds that clamored for food had instinctively associated the beak-like shape of the feeding syringe—and through it, me—with their parents. These birds gained weight more steadily, left the nest, and learned to fly sooner than those that had to be force-fed. In the outdoor cage, where I visited them a few times a day with the syringe of food, they lined up on one of the branches I had rigged up to flutter their wings and open their mouths. I had to make sure that everyone was eating enough to stay strong though hungry enough to start investigating the seeds, fruits, grains, and worms I’d left around. The birds that continued to come to me were easier to monitor than those that hid. Still, it’s not natural for a bird to grow up perceiving a human as nurturing or benign. Reh
abilitators who raise birds that are likely to be harmed by people wear disguises or use hand puppets.
The small songbirds in my care, however, had no value as food, illegal pets, or trophies, so they had less to fear from humans. The most important lesson a house finch needed to learn before being released, in fact, was how to feed itself from the ubiquitous cylindrical seed feeders in our town’s backyards. I taught my finches by using the syringe of food to lure them to the feeder I’d hung inside the cage, getting them to perch on its metal rungs, and tempting them to peck at the seed ports by smearing the formula there. Throughout the summer, there were always six or seven finches in the outdoor cage. In each group, one finch figured out the feeder first and the others followed suit. I stopped going to the cage with the formula and watched the birds through binoculars. In a few days, every bird was eating from the feeder and the flock was ready to go. Not one finch came back to beg food from me, though more than thirty were released every summer in my backyard and, for all I knew, some were eating from the cylinder outside the kitchen window.
The finches in the outdoor cage learned through imitation, just as they would have in the wild from their parents, who flew with them for a week or two, showing them the food sources and roosting sites. Then the first-year birds would have dispersed among the larger flock, leaving the parents to lay the next clutch of eggs. Birds don’t stay with their parents or siblings once they know how to feed themselves. A few species mate for life and many flock with their own kind, but not with their original family.
The summers I volunteered at the sanctuary, I was in my midthirties and married for nearly ten years. People were finally beginning to believe my husband and me when we said we didn’t plan to have children.
“I spend the whole day with other people’s children,” Chuck explained. “I don’t have to come home to raise ‘my own.’”
Chuck taught first-graders at an elementary school. He was good with children. If he had married someone else, he would have become a father. My job was at a college, where I taught mostly juniors and seniors.
“I’m the one who doesn’t want kids,” I said. “I’m uncomfortable with young children. I can’t imagine becoming a mother.”
I couldn’t have been more explicit, but most people assumed that I was forgoing motherhood in favor of my writing. Only a few women, themselves childless, understood that human babies didn’t appeal to me. These women laughed with recognition when I told them, “When I look at babies, I just think, Why can’t they be furry? I don’t get why people make such a fuss over them.”
The presence of fur, though, wasn’t the deciding factor. Dorian had been eight weeks old when I met him at his breeder’s house. Like most Siamese kittens, he scarcely had any fur; his long pinkish tail resembled a rat’s. In the spare bedroom where he was being raised, Dorian left his sleeping siblings, sauntered over to me, and began to rub his mouth against my finger. His lips were parted just enough to reveal his tiny teeth, sharp as dressmakers’ pins, but he was purring. His whiskers vibrated as his wet gum slid back and forth. Though I didn’t know as much about cats then as I would later, I realized that he was marking me with his scent and claiming me for his own. He was mine, I was his, and there was no going back. When I pulled back my hand in order to pet him, he bumped his forehead against my palm over and over and wouldn’t stop. He wanted to be the one to pet me, not the other way around. I was amazed by the sense of recognition and inevitability that came over me. A few minutes into our first meeting, he was already my cat or, to put it his way, I was his human.
My devotion to Dorian was instantaneous, all-exclusive, and ever-lasting—the way I imagined a mother’s love would be for her children. No one else had a claim to that same bond with me, but sometimes, the nearly naked, lizard-like nestlings in the laundry baskets opened their mouths, fluttered their bony wings, and caused me to believe that satisfying their hunger was the most important thing in the world. With the birds, I knew that our bond was temporary, that loving them, or respecting their essential nature, meant letting them go in the end.
I didn’t experience a fraction of my bird-nurturing urge—let alone my total obsession with Dorian—with any human child. Babies repulsed me with their faintly sour odor; when they cried, I wanted to run screaming from the room. I was keyed to respond only to the wrong babies, animal babies. Left alone with the young of my own kind, I panicked the way other people did when a bird flapped around the house and threw itself repeatedly against a closed window.
I didn’t know that Chuck was afraid of birds until, a few months after we moved in together in our twenties when we were students, a starling and its fledgling fell through a hole in the siding of the house we were renting and ended up behind our dining-room wall. I came home from my morning class just in time to see the adult bird fly out of the space where the pocket door that separated the dining room and the living room slid in. Dorian, who had been sitting nearby, remained in his spot, too stunned to chase a live toy. I picked him up, carried him to the bedroom, put him on the bed, and shut the door. By then, Chuck was chasing the bird from the dining room to the kitchen and back, his head covered with an afghan that was usually draped on our couch. He had opened the windows of the dining room and was trying to direct the bird to them.
Our apartment was on the second floor of the house, with large sliding doors that led from the living room to the balcony. I ran to the living room to open those doors; the starling came soaring across the house, flew through one of the doors, and disappeared. We couldn’t see where it went, which meant that the chirping that began a few seconds later and got louder and louder was coming from behind the wall.
We were afraid to move the pocket door and crush the bird by mistake, so we borrowed our downstairs neighbor’s saw and cut a hole in one of the wooden panels on the wall. We shone a flashlight into the opening and glimpsed a fledgling with peach fuzz on its head. It was hopping between the exterior and the interior walls, chirping loudly. I tried to coax it out with sunflower seeds from our pantry, but every time I reached in, the bird hopped farther back toward the exterior wall. Soon, I had to return to school for another class.
“Dorian can stay in the bedroom till I come back,” I said to Chuck. “Maybe the bird will come out and you can catch him.” Chuck had gone canoeing in the Boundary Waters and spent a week sleeping in a tent. He had lived in the country, where he once helped a friend kill some chickens because he didn’t believe he was entitled to eat meat unless he knew where his food came from. It never occurred to me that someone who did all that would be afraid of a bird that was small and clumsy enough to fall through a hole in the wall.
Three hours later, when I returned, Chuck was sitting in a chair a few feet away from the opening we’d cut out, holding his tennis racket.
“The bird keeps coming out and then hopping back in. The next time he comes out, I’m going to block the hole with this.”
Almost as soon as he said that, the bird emerged. Chuck sprang up and slammed the racket over the hole.
Startled, the bird fled across the dining room toward the kitchen, hopping, then flying low, landing, hopping, flying again. “Great, he knows how to fly,” I said. “You can put him out on the balcony where the other one went. That must have been his mother.”
When I went to the living room and opened the balcony doors, I was astonished by the loud clamoring—like a chorus of squeaky violins—of the starlings that had gathered in the trees.
I ran back through the house, relieved that the fledgling wouldn’t be lost on its own. Though this was a decade before I became a rehabilitator, I knew that birds didn’t abandon their young just because a human had touched it. Here was a whole flock gathered to take care of its own.
In the hallway outside our kitchen, the fledgling was crouched in the corner, rocking on its feet and screeching at Chuck, who was holding a broom.
“Come on, Buddy,” Chuck said, reaching gingerly toward the bird with the bristles of the
broom. “Let’s go. I’m only trying to help.” The bird lunged at the broom, causing Chuck to stagger backward, and flew into the kitchen, where it landed next to the stove. All its feathers were puffed up; its beak was wide open as it screeched. If that bird had been a cat, Chuck would have understood that the poor thing was hissing and growling and getting ready to pounce in desperation because it perceived the broom as a weapon rather than the helpful tool—similar to a traffic-cop’s baton—that Chuck intended it to be.
Chuck was eventually able to get the bird to turn around, to hopfly through the house onto the balcony. As soon as we closed the doors, several starlings landed next to the fledgling and flew with it into a nearby tree. Dozens of others were waiting. The fledgling hop-flew to the higher branches and disappeared among the leaves.
“You should have told me you were afraid to touch that bird,” I said to Chuck. “I thought you wanted to be the one to let it out, after waiting all those hours while I was at school.”
“I don’t like handling little animals,” he said. “I’m afraid they’re going to bite me and I’m going to freak out and squeeze them to death by mistake.”
For years afterward, Dorian and I played a game called “Chuck and the Bird”—in which I chased Dorian around the house with a broom, calling out, “Take it easy, Buddy. Don’t bite me. I’m only trying to help you.”
I occasionally play “Chuck and the Bird” with Miles and Jackson, though Chuck and I have been divorced for eighteen years and he hasn’t met the current loves of my life.
We got divorced because after thirteen years of marriage, I decided I was happiest alone. I didn’t want to live with anyone, not even Chuck, who was easygoing and accommodating, willing to give me all the time and space I needed. I moved to a small apartment across town with Dorian, who was by then fifteen.
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