Extraordinary Birds

by Sandy Stark-McGinnis

  I close my biography. “If I would’ve stayed more like a bird, maybe my mom wouldn’t have left me. She got to where she was afraid of … everything.” I stroke the feathers on Teresa’s wings. “I’m not afraid of anything, though. Well, I wasn’t until I came here, and now I have to make sure I don’t end up like you.”

  “December?” Eleanor is right outside the door.

  “Coming.” I’m nose to beak with Teresa. “I know she’s the one who did this to you,” I say, and hope Teresa’s owl friends that are still alive hear me, with their amazing auditory systems. “I’m going to have to hide you, okay?”

  I put my biography and Teresa in the back corner of the closet and grab my bag of sunflower seeds for dinner.

  At the kitchen table, I notice Eleanor has set places for both of us. There are two glasses of water. She’s given herself a fork, but not me. I just have a plate. We’re sitting next to each other.

  I slide my plate and water to another spot, on the other side of the table from Eleanor, and reach into the bag of seeds. When Eleanor sits down, she doesn’t say anything about me moving. She takes a bite of her spaghetti and closes her eyes like the spaghetti is the best-tasting spaghetti in the world. I wait for her to start talking about everyday things. This is what foster parents do. They think it helps take my mind off the fact that I’m really living with strangers. But Eleanor isn’t talking at all. She keeps her eyes on her spaghetti and doesn’t even look at me as she takes a drink of water. She looks out the window instead, probably keeping a watch out for birds.

  The only sound is the crack of my sunflower seed, the pooof when I spit the shell, and the flat click as the shell hits my plate. Maybe Eleanor is thinking about where she’s going to display me once I’m stuffed. She won’t keep me in the shed. That would be a waste.

  “How long have you been eating only seeds?” Eleanor asks, twirling spaghetti on her fork. It looks like a clump of worms.

  “I eat other things sometimes, too. I just like seeds best.” I’m going to have to hide my sunflower seeds. She could spread them across a glue trap.

  Eleanor squints her eyes at me and nods. For every bite of spaghetti she takes and swallows, I crack and eat five sunflower seeds.

  I’m not sure yet what kind of bird Eleanor would be. I’ve identified many of my foster parents as snowy owls. Snowy owls have razor-sharp talons that could easily attack a human’s head and eyes, though they’ve never been known to kill anyone. But Wes was definitely a southern cassowary, the meanest bird. It has razor-sharp spurs that can slice things open, and it has a strong kicking force. If someone’s ever out in New Guinea or Australia and they come across a cassowary, it’s a good idea that they turn around in the opposite direction and avoid contact. That’s what I would do with Wes, too. Whenever I’d see him sitting alone in a room, I’d turned around and walk the other way.

  Eleanor is going to be hard to figure out. On the surface she doesn’t seem like she falls into the Top Ten Birds Most Likely to Kill Humans, but if she’s capable of doing what she did to Teresa, who knows what else she’ll do.

  I think the hardest part of trying to stuff me will be getting me to fall for her trap.

  “Did you get enough to eat?” Eleanor asks. “I know you really like seeds, but I have apples. Would you like one?”

  I nod. “Sure.” Apples grow on trees, at least. I’ll eat the apple while I try to gather as much information on Eleanor as I can. “Have you had foster kids before?” I ask.

  “No, you’re my first.” She sips some water. “I had a …” Eleanor takes her plate to the sink, grabs an apple from the refrigerator, and slices it up into pieces for me. “I met Adrian at the refuge, and he said he thought I would be a good foster mom. I’ve loved doing presentations at schools—interacting with the kids. I told myself, Why not? I hope you’ll be happy here, December.”

  “I had a …” What was Eleanor going to say?

  I get up from the table, dump my shells in the garbage, and wash my plate.

  “I can do that.” Eleanor shovels spaghetti into a glass bowl. “You can just leave it in the sink.”

  I leave the plate, but I’m used to cleaning up after myself. I don’t want to be a burden, and I’ve always wanted to show my foster parents I can take care of myself, that I don’t need them. They’re just here to give me shelter, and if I had to, I could give myself that, too.

  Eleanor starts singing. It’s the same song. Maybe she doesn’t know any other. The one she sings has worked in bringing birds to her, so why should she change it?

  As I leave the kitchen, Eleanor says, “After I’m finished cleaning up, I’d like to take you to the wildlife refuge. Some of the animals need to be fed, and I want to introduce you to Henrietta.”

  “What kind of animal is Henrietta?” I ask, but I already know Eleanor’s answer.

  “She’s a bird.”

  Of course.

  7

  The Wildlife Rehabilitation Center is farther out in the country than Eleanor’s house. We drive along the river, and the land opens till the only things to see are the shadow of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the distance and patchy specks of light.

  It doesn’t take too long to get there. When I step out of the truck I expect to hear injured birds squawking, but the only sound is the chirping of crickets.

  The building looks like a regular house where somebody used to live. There’s a yellow porch light shining above the front door, and there are tall, skinny trees surrounding the property. They look like guards, protecting the hurt animals.

  The center is locked, but Eleanor has a key. “Henrietta is a red-tailed hawk. She had an operation to fix her wing, but we’re having a hard time building trust with her. And we need to build trust so we can start the process of getting her to fly on her own.”

  Eleanor turns on a lamp, and inside a cage right by the door is Henrietta. Her feathers are deep brown, mixed with shades of bronze, and on her tail the feathers are a cinnamon color. She has a fierce-looking face, with her sharp beak and eyes set on the sides of her head. Her binocular vision helps her be an efficient predator. I’ve never been this close to a hawk.

  I lean closer to the cage. Henrietta is so still, she looks like she could be one of Eleanor’s stuffed birds. “I’ve seen birds like you flying in the air,” I whisper, “but you’re pretty amazing up close, too.”

  “Someone found her by the river, on the ground,” Eleanor says. “She’s lucky a coyote or raccoon didn’t get her. The person said she checked to see if there was a nest around, but couldn’t find one. That’s good. Means there weren’t any babies she had to take care of.”

  Eleanor slides her hand into a see-through glove, the kind doctors wear when they’re doing surgery. She opens a carton of chicken gizzards and uses tweezers to pick up a piece. She opens the cage and dangles the piece of gizzard in front of Henrietta. “She won’t take it, but watch.”

  Eleanor drops the piece of raw meat on the cage floor. Henrietta jerks her head and grabs the gizzard with her beak. “We’ve been trying to get her to take food from us since she got here. No one working here can establish a bond strong enough so that Henrietta will take food straight from their hand.”

  “Not even you?” Eleanor is supposed to be the Bird Whisperer.

  “Nope.”

  Eleanor goes back to where there’s a small refrigerator. I lean into the cage again and look Henrietta in the eyes. “What about me?” I ask Henrietta.

  I’m careful not to move too fast, and back away from the cage. “Eleanor, can I try to feed Henrietta?”

  “Okay,” she says, like she was waiting for me to ask. Eleanor gives me a glove of my own and hands me the container of gizzards and the tweezers.

  I open the cage door and grab one piece of meat. My hand floats toward Henrietta. She twitches a little. I hold the meat in front of her, and she seems like she wants to take it.

  “Henrietta,” I whisper, “you’re an amazing bird, and I know you
’d like a juicy mouse or some other rodent to eat, but this is what I have right now. If you fly again, then you’ll be able to hunt all the mice you can catch.”

  Henrietta is being cautious. “I understand,” I tell her. She snaps her head forward and snatches the meat.

  “Oh, my.” Eleanor watches Henrietta swallow the gizzard. “This is very good. Let’s try something else.”

  I give the tweezers back to Eleanor and this time hold a piece of meat.

  “Now”—Eleanor holds a piece of meat, too—“pinch it with the tips of your fingers. Be careful. Soon as Henrietta pecks at it, let go of the gizzard, letting it drop or letting her take it.”

  I dangle the food in front of Henrietta. She shuffles her claws backward.

  “You’re an amazing bird,” I say again, and Henrietta grabs the chicken.

  Behind me, Eleanor claps one time and raises her arms. “Woo-hoo!” She holds out her hand for me to shake. “Congratulations, December, you’re officially Henrietta’s trainer. You’re going to get her to fly. Are you up for the challenge?”

  Before I can think about what it really means to be in charge of training a bird how to fly, I take off my glove, shake Eleanor’s hand, and say, “Yes.”

  Tonight, I carry Teresa to my bed and lean her against the wall. I get a little scared thinking about being Henrietta’s teacher, but as I stare into Teresa’s eyes, I think maybe Henrietta and I could learn to fly together.

  But what if getting me to train Henrietta is part of a trap, an elaborate plan by the Bird Whisperer to capture me? We’ll be out in a field releasing Henrietta, and the second she flies away, I’ll be entangled in a net.

  I tap Teresa on the beak. Maybe tonight while I sleep she’ll coo advice about how not to get caught by Eleanor. It’s really not that hard, she’ll say. You already know she’s the Bird Whisperer, so now you just need to be aware of anything she’s doing or saying that could be used in preparation for your capture.

  You’ll eventually have to escape. If you have nowhere to go, there is a group of owls. They used to be my family. They don’t live too far from here. They will be suspicious of you at first, but then once they see you won’t hurt them—you won’t, will you?—they’ll let you live with them. You’ll have to learn to hunt in the dark, you’ll have to learn to live off mice—or, on a good day, a rabbit or a squirrel—and you’ll have to learn to sleep in trees. But you will eat, and you’ll be safe. That’s all that matters, right?

  I close my eyes. For the most part, Teresa is right—having food and a place to sleep are things that matter. But the thing that matters most is not that I feel safe in a foster home, it’s knowing, if I have to, I can survive anything.

  8

  Owls’ wings were designed for quiet flight, so this morning I’m like Teresa. I glide through the house, to the open window. If Eleanor caught me sneaking out, she’d have every reason to keep me inside. She’d only let me out to go to school, to fill birdbaths, or to train Henrietta. I take a chance, though.

  I breathe in cold air, then breathe some more, and hold my arms out to the side, just in case I’m lucky enough to catch a current of wind.

  Soon as I get to the river, I start digging. I find angleworms first. A little deeper into the ground are night crawlers. I’ve never seen them so big.

  On the way back to the house, I don’t run. I hold the worms, one hand cupped over the other. They are precious creatures I will try to eat later. The thing about becoming a bird is I have to adapt myself slowly. There are other things that birds eat, depending on where they live: fish, shellfish, crickets, mosquitoes, and seeds. But I figure if I can eat worms, I can get used to eating anything, if I need to.

  There’s light coming from one of the windows. Eleanor is awake.

  “December?” Her voice is coming from the back of the house. “Oh, I’ve lost her already,” I hear her say.

  I know it’s mean, but I don’t answer. Part of me kind of likes the sound of Eleanor calling my name. She says, “December?” in her singsong cadence, and I have to remind myself her voice is dangerous. What’s worse is, if I had to give her voice a color, the color would still be a shade of blue.

  I listen to her blue voice call me. There’s a pause between her “Decembers.” Eleanor’s waiting for me to call back. She says my name four times, and all I can do is act like a stuffed version of December Lee Morgan, aka Bird Girl. After the fourth time calling my name, she starts whistling, trying another type of call to get me to come to her.

  I pull myself through the window.

  Usually people keep ziplock bags in a drawer by the kitchen sink or by the stove. I start with the drawers by the stove. The third one has what I need. I slide the worms into a bag and close it halfway. They need to breathe. Dead worms probably don’t taste as good as live ones.

  I’ll squish the worms if I put them in my pocket, so I go to my room and set them behind my backpack.

  I return to the kitchen and through the back door, I see Eleanor, carrying a bag of birdseed. “December?”

  This time I answer. “I’m here.”

  “Feel like I keep losing you.” She unhooks a bird feeder and fills it with some birdseed.

  “I’m not lost. I’m right here.”

  “So you are,” Eleanor’s brown hair is pulled back in a ponytail this morning. Her eyes are close to the same shade of brown as mine, her skin the same light shade. “You want to help me fill the rest? Weather’s starting to change, so filling the bird feeders is a tradition for me.”

  So is stuffing great horned owls. I think of Henrietta. If she doesn’t learn to fly, Eleanor might stuff her, too. She’ll display us in the living room, side by side. We’ll be special. We’ll have labels on our pedestals, like they have in museums, with the Latin form of our names. I don’t know what Henrietta’s would be, but mine would be avis puella, “bird girl.” Eleanor will choose brown for our glass eyes, as close to our original shade as possible, and clean our feathers, making them shine so that all the different shades of blue, for mine, and browns and reds, for Henrietta’s, can be seen.

  “I have some birdhouses that are broken,” Eleanor says as she hands me the birdseed bag. “I’d like to fix them up in the next couple days, and hang them up. Maybe you’d want to help me do that, too?”

  “You should get some feeders for hummingbirds. Did you know they eat one hundred percent of their body weight every day?” I take the bag.

  “Yes, and right now they’re eating twice that much, fueling up for their migration. That’s a good idea.”

  Eleanor probably has to pay lots of attention to migration routes. It gives her an idea of what kinds of birds might be flying over her property this time of year.

  I set the bag of seeds on the ground. While Eleanor is examining two broken birdhouses, I peek through a hole in the fence.

  And then I see a tree in the middle of a field, a live oak, the one I’ve been looking for. From here, it’s perfect, and I have to take a couple deep breaths because it’s so beautiful. The branches are curved and thick, creating twisting and meandering paths to where the sky begins. I was starting to believe I would never find it, but here it is, growing for who knows how long, a hundred years maybe, behind the Bird Whisperer’s house. It is the perfect tree for climbing, too. The first tier of branches is within arm’s reach, easy for pulling my whole body up and over. It will be like climbing a ladder.

  “Eleanor, can I go out there for a little bit?” I point toward the fence.

  “But you have to get ready for school.”

  “I won’t go far.”

  “Just for a few minutes, then. If you’re gone for too long, I’ll call you.”

  I’m sure she will.

  This morning the clouds in the sky look like wings, but they always look like wings to me. I look back at Eleanor’s house and wonder if she’s watching me through a hole in the fence.

  I don’t throw birdseed on the ground until I’m halfway between the fence and my
tree. It’s far enough away so birds have a chance to eat, then fly away before Eleanor can catch them.

  In the distance is a line of cottonwood trees, growing by the river. Above the trees, starlings take flight against the sky and form a sphere, a flying bird ball that stretches into a tube, moving like a wave.

  I throw more birdseed over my shoulder and stand at attention when I’m close to my tree. Grass and weeds have stopped growing two feet from the trunk, and in the space between is dirt, as though the tree is royalty and the other plants have made room to display its beauty. I set the bag of birdseed on the ground and look up through the tree.

  I want to feel its branches, so I pull myself up to the lowest tier, letting my feet dangle in the air. In the field where I first threw the seeds, a bluebird is pecking at the ground. Another bluebird joins it, but they don’t have a chance to feast for long. A crow lands, fluffing its feathers, trying to intimidate the others, telling them all the seeds belong to him. They fly away, but they’ll find food somewhere else. They’ll go on surviving.

  I pull my feet up and balance myself on the branch. Like it always does, the skin under my scar starts to tingle. Holding my arms out to the side, I shape them like wings as best I can. Birds’ wings are all different, depending how they use flight to survive. Seabirds’ wings are long, narrow, and flat, and are built for long journeys across the ocean. Birds that need to take off fast, like pheasants that spend most of their time on the ground, have short, broad wings. My wings will have to fly long distances and be built to make quick takeoffs.

  “One,” I count, “two …”