Flyaway (17 page)

“Why don't you take her to Anna's?” said Diana. “She could join the turkey parade.”

Anna Schindler lives in a house overlooking the Hudson River and has a soft spot for wild turkeys. They disappear during the spring and summer, then appear faithfully at her door throughout the fall and winter. Anna feeds them generous helpings of corn, and in return they accompany her on her daily trek to the mailbox. She walks down her dirt driveway, followed by fifteen to twenty turkeys; when she reaches her mailbox, she turns and orders them to stay away from the road. They stop where they are and mill about while Anna looks over her mail, then they step aside for her and follow her back to the house. I called Anna and introduced myself. Would it be all right if I released a wild turkey at your place? I asked her.

“Oh, sure,” she said in her broad German accent. “What's one more turkey?”

Anna called me the next morning at 8:00. “They're here,” she said.

There were fifteen wild turkeys on Anna's front lawn when I arrived. Our turkey hopped out of her crate sporting one bright orange leg, colored that morning with livestock crayon for temporary identification. Just as she was getting her bearings, another female barreled out of the group and launched herself at the intruder. It was here that Wavy Gravy the turkey parted philosophical company with her namesake; this turkey was no pacifist. She lit into her attacker, furiously pecking her, biting the back of her neck and whacking her with her wings; when a big male strode over to join the fight, she clob
bered him, too. Finally she chased them both away, left the group, and walked around in large exploratory circles. Anna called me that afternoon to report that the turkey with the bright orange leg was peacefully scratching at the ground with the flock. By the second day there was barely a trace of orange left, and by the third it had disappeared all together, along with my only way of staying in contact with her. For the next few weeks I felt a stab of fear each time I heard the echo of a shotgun. I'll never know if she stayed with her new flock or eventually left in search of her family, but at least I know she did it with a clean pair of lungs.

The snow arrived in time for Winter Solstice. It was a classic New England snowfall, too peaceful to be called a storm, falling in big, heavy flakes and blanketing the woods with six inches of powder. The kids raced outside, pelting each other with snowballs and rolling down the hills. A few days before I had tarped the roof of the flight cage, balancing precariously on the narrow beams as I unfolded the heavy blue plastic and used short nails to secure it. I covered the loft under the roof of the second flight with hay, giving the two pigeons a snug spot in which to ride out the winter.

I had no other wild birds and was grateful for the break. During Christmas vacation we went sledding and skating, took moonwalks, and played Monopoly in front of the fireplace. We spent hours working on old Springbok circular puzzles, unable to pull away until the final butterfly or garden flower was complete. John and I caught up with friends, few of whom I'd seen over the summer.

“Alan thinks you're ignoring him,” said Jan, Alan's veterinarian wife, when they were over for dinner one night.

“Alan,” I said. “You have to do me a favor—move your office down here. It's a ninety-minute round trip to see you, and there just aren't enough hours in the day.”

“No problem,” said Alan. “I'll get right on it.”

When the kids went back to school I filled out my nonprofit application, e-mailing the saintly Bob Bickford with so many questions that I was sure he had to regret his offer to help me. But he never failed to provide quick and sure answers, and the recurring spasms of terror I felt about inadvertently crossing the Internal Revenue Service were always allayed by his knowledge and confidence. Finally all my paperwork was finished, mailed, and on file. Flyaway, Inc. would receive its nonprofit status by fall, and I could start soliciting donations.

Randi Schlesinger took the text of my newsletter and, through her graphic designer wizardry, created a work of art. She trudged through the snow into the woods, pointed her digital camera straight up, and took a photograph of the latticework of winter branches silhouetted against the sky. Manipulating it until it was faded and dreamlike, she extended the image into an elongated rectangle, then, using an airy, graceful font, dropped
flyaway
on top of it. The result was an eye-catching, memorable masthead, and an image—of branches just waiting for a bird to land on them—that could be used as the background for headlines throughout the publication.

The four-page foldable newsletter had a section for basic information, one for thank-yous, a panel for donations, and a large middle area for bird stories. By the end of the year I had taken in eighty-two injured or orphaned birds, so I had quite a few from which to choose. I selected four feel-good stories and wrote them up. “I love these stories!” said Randi, her infectious enthusiasm making me giddy with anticipation. “Do you have pictures? I'll put a photo of the bird by each story, and then two or three more right next to the donation panel. This is great! I
know
people will send you money!”

And she was right. I sent out about fifty newsletters and friends, relatives, and members of our tight-knit little community responded quickly and with generosity. Touched and gratified, I wrote thank-you notes and deposited the checks into my official Flyaway bank account. I felt dangerously on top of things. Eighty-two birds between May and December made for a hectic summer, but it was certainly doable and didn't seem to be causing my family
any distress, apart from the occasional disgruntlement of a missed movie. I had a nice break during the winter, when I could relax with my family, write my newsletter, and coordinate the growing treasure trove of avian information stored in my rainbow-colored library of three-ring binders.

I had no idea what was to come.

By mid-March there was a flurry of pigeon activity. “It's Joanne again,” she said. “Say, can I unload two more pigeons on you?”

“I don't mind,” I replied. “I'll put them in with the Deadheads.”

“The dead what?” said Joanne, with alarm.

There is something inherently comical about pigeons. Maybe it's the way they bob their necks back and forth as they walk briskly about, as if they're on a very tight schedule and should really be somewhere else. Maybe it's that Three Stooges
whoo-whoo-whoo
sound they make when they take off. Maybe it's the fact that once they're comfortable around you, they don't seem to care what you see them doing. On a few occasions I've even suspected them of overacting for their audience, like reality show contestants, although this is not something I could convince any self-respecting biologist to believe.

Joanne arrived with the pigeons: Sly (charcoal gray, broken wing healed but slightly stiff) and Sasha (light gray, hit a window but recovered). I don't name all the birds who end up here. Some don't stay long enough, and for some no name seems appropriate. Some are so wild and resentful of their confinement that to name them would feel like harnessing them with another symbol of captivity. But this eventual gang of pigeons were ripe for naming, especially when the group dynamic emerged. Sly was named for action hero Sylvester Stallone, and Sasha for his first wife. The reason will become clear in a minute.

Sly and Sasha, a comfortably bonded pair, spent a few days settling into the flight cage. Initially the Deadheads watched them from a high perch, as they had done with Jerry Garcia. Within a few days all was amicable, although the Deadheads seemed to prefer to observe the newcomers rather than to interact with them. Then came the phone call.

“Aha!” caroled another rehabber friend in an I've-got-you-where-I-want-you tone. “I hear you have pigeons in your flight cage!”

In two days I had three more pigeons. There was BP (Brown Pigeon, healed broken wing, one foot slightly turned inward) and Who Me (young and light gray, caught by a cat and waiting for tail feathers to grow back). And finally there was the avian version of plutonium: Anna Nicole Smith (found emaciated and unable to fly).

Anna Nicole was so huge and blindingly white that she seemed like a different species, and when I released her into the flight cage the other pigeons stared at her with what must have been astonishment. Named for the voluptuous blonde one-time Playmate who “fell in love” with a wheelchair-bound eighty-nine-year-old Texan (who happened to have a few hundred million in the bank), the avian Anna Nicole flew up to a hanging perch and waited for the action to come to her. Which it did, almost immediately.

My celebrity frames of reference tend to date back one or two decades, which was when I began replacing gossip magazines with parasitology textbooks, something of a lateral move. But as I recall, Sylvester Stallone was married to a perfectly nice, normal woman, then he moved to Hollywood and took off like a shot with various gargantuan blondes. Anna Nicole Smith wasn't one of them, but had she been there at the time she probably would have been, so I feel justified in making up this union. Anna Nicole eventually met her untimely end in a Florida hotel room, but at this particular point she was very much alive and busily trying to wrestle her recently deceased husband's estate away from his only child.

It didn't take long for the avian Sly to abandon his devoted Sasha and fly over to Anna Nicole's branch, where he perched in what appeared to be dumb-founded dazzlement. Half the size of the towering Anna Nicole, he looked like an extra from
Zorba the Greek
who'd mistakenly wandered onto the set of
Das Rheingold
. BP and Who Me flew to the ground and started busily looking for seeds, while the Deadheads watched the newcomers intently and Sasha stayed alone on her perch.

“Hound dog!" I hissed at Sly. “Get back where you belong!”

As would become a pattern with the pigeons, he didn't follow my direction.

Luckily for my bleeding heart, Sasha was not the kind to dwell on the past. She spent a day wandering the flight by herself, then the following day I found her cozied up to BP. I was glad that I no longer had to worry about Sasha's mental health until I saw BP chasing Who Me around the flight, pecking his former buddy and pulling feathers out of his neck in a frenzy of newfound machismo. I closed the door between the two flights, separating Sasha, BP, and the Deadheads from Anna Nicole, Sly, and Who Me. Anna Nicole and Sly quickly moved up into the loft and started carrying on like weasels, leaving the young and frightened Who Me ignored and alone. Cursing under my breath, I headed off to the phone.

“What are you doing?” said John, puzzled, when he heard me asking various people if they had a single pigeon. “I thought you didn't want the ones you have.”

“I don't,” I said darkly. “I realize I'm acting like an idiot, but it's out of my control.”

Stripes (light gray with black stripes on lower back, clipped by a car but broken wing healed) arrived two days later. Stripes was a mellow bird who, against all odds, actually did what he was supposed to do: he provided Who Me with badly needed companionship and the Deadheads with new entertainment. Things settled down in the flight cage, just in time for Gladys to bring me another pigeon.

Gladys Rosa lives in a neighboring town and is the wildlife guardian of her small backyard. Resting on her second-floor deck are long trays containing a smorgasbord of seeds and peanuts, frequented by a large population of very happy birds and squirrels. During the previous summer Gladys had somehow spotted a young female house sparrow with her head stuck in a lawn chair; she raced out into a thunderstorm, rescued the sparrow, warmed her up, fed her, then took her to a veterinarian when she couldn't fly. The vet sent the bird to
me, and after three days in the flight cage she was good as new. When Gladys appeared she gave me a bright smile and a donation, then returned the sparrow to her rightful place.

“I know you're going to be mad at me,” said Gladys sorrowfully, getting out of her car and handing me a cardboard box. “I know the hawks have to eat, and I shouldn't have chased him away. But the pigeon was struggling and the hawk was pulling out all his feathers, and I couldn't help it! I'm sorry!”

I opened the box. Nestled inside a thick towel was a big dark gray pigeon who had obviously neglected to look up when the hawk arrived for lunch. He had a large wound on his back, one under his wing, and one on his head; one eye was closed.

“I'll try to fix him up,” I said to Gladys. “But you have to promise me that the next time you see a hawk you'll look the other way. He's just hungry, and if he didn't get this pigeon it means he has to go get another one.” I tried to be stern, but the truth is that there's absolutely nothing that Gladys could do to make me really mad at her. Who but Gladys would even notice a sparrow with its head stuck in a lawn chair?

Gladys's pigeon, christened Hawk Food, not only made it through the night but also recovered remarkably quickly. Each day he'd growl and slap me with a wing as I reached in to pick him up, then he'd sit stoically as I gave him his dose of antibiotics, cleaned and treated his wounds, and medicated his eye. His wounds closed, his eye healed, his feathers grew back, and soon he was once again a glossy, healthy pigeon. “Let that be a lesson to you,” I told him. “Watch your back.”

Winter was over and the flight was like a boardinghouse during Spring Break. I'd walk in to find Sly and BP raucously cooing and spinning, Sasha and Anna Nicole working feverishly on their makeshift nests, and the Deadheads loitering about like determined little Peeping Toms. “Stop that!” I'd say, like a peevish old landlady. I imagined them all snorting and rolling their eyes in response except for Who Me and Stripes, who both seemed to be trying to maintain their dignity in the midst of an unacceptable situation. When I added
Hawk Food to the mix he joined Who Me and Stripes, and for a brief moment I thought we could all hang on until everyone was released. But then: eggs.

After watching Sasha and Anna Nicole sitting solemnly on their nests for days, I climbed up to the loft and found two eggs in Sasha's nest and one in Anna Nicole's. This was not good. Release Day was approaching, and you can't toss a nestful of babies into the air and expect them to fly away. “I'm sorry,” I said, reaching under the outraged mothers and taking their eggs. “I hate to do this to you, but you're a wild bird, and as soon as I let you go you can have all the babies you want.” Three days later there were more eggs, and the release date was moved up.

Gladys appeared and took Hawk Food, Who Me, and Stripes. She was delighted with her pigeon's recovery, said she hadn't seen his assailant in two weeks, and was happy to release all three in her backyard and provide food for them. I took the rest of the crew to a park on the river, where people feed the pigeons and geese and where I hoped they'd join the existing flock. When I opened their carriers they all sailed off into the springtime air; Anna Nicole landed on top of a gazebo; Sly, Sasha, and BP were in an oak tree; one Deadhead was in a maple and the other right in the middle of a pigeon flock on the beach. I scattered birdseed and watched them for a while, then as I readied myself to go, I glanced up just in time to see a wild pigeon land next to the Deadhead in the maple. Before I had the chance to wonder how they would interact, the two of them were having a hearty party. For this is the way of the wild bird: life is meant to be lived, not just observed.