Flyaway (25 page)

He was in the back, investigating a knothole in a pine tree. He looked up, flew toward us, and landed on a tree in the very front of the exhibit, perhaps five inches from where I stood. He peered up at me. “Honey!” I said. “How are you?”

He crept up and down the tree, chattering, and when we walked to the other side of the exhibit he followed us, landing on a nearby limb. As a small crowd of people entered the room, he flew to a far corner and watched them from the safety of the pine tree. As soon as they left he returned, hiking jauntily across the rough bark, having picked four familiar faces out of the river of humanity constantly flowing by.

“
Henk, henk
,” he said.

“
Henk, henk
,” we all replied.

Hawks and owls (as well as most other kinds of birds) are frequently hit by cars. Waiting in a tree, raptors will spot their quarry and immediately swoop across a road to catch it, having never been told by their parents to look both ways before crossing. This beautiful young redtail had been lucky; he had received a glancing blow instead of the full impact. His left wing drooped but was not broken. A bad bruise often takes longer to heal than a fracture, and since I wasn't going to release a juvenile redtail in the middle of winter, I decided to let him ride it out with me.

It was late November, I had few birds, and the redtail turned out to be a mellow and easy patient. During the ten days he spent resting in the shed I followed the advice of the pros on Raptorcare and turned my songbird flight cage into a raptor overwintering enclosure. Cutting a huge, dark brown oilcloth into strips three inches wide and ten feet long, I hammered them around the sides of the flight in three-inch intervals, hoping they would look solid enough to prevent the hawk from trying to fly through the mesh-covered hardware cloth. I covered the big permanent perches with new Astroturf, carried in a horse-size rubber water dish, dragged in several large cut logs, and tarped part of the roof. Luckily all the work paid off; when the redtail finally moved out to the flight cage, still favoring the wing but much improved, he settled in with no problem. I called Paul Kupchok.

“Paul!” I said. “Do you have a redtail I could borrow? I have a hit by car in my flight and I don't want him to spend the winter alone.”

“Sure,” said Paul. “You want some kestrels, while you're at it?”

A slight problem arose: freezer space. I had been using the bottom drawer in our upright garage freezer for raptor food, as it was fairly hidden. But when I added bags of frozen fish, plastic containers of emaciation mix, and the occasional carefully wrapped songbird who hadn't made it but who could be used to feed an ailing accipiter, things started to get tight. Tight as well as awkward.

“No way!” Skye would shout. “I'm not opening that freezer! If you want a loaf of bread you have to get it yourself!”

Realizing that keeping two large redtails through the winter would entail stocking up on an even greater number of dicey items, I went through the Flyaway bank account and found that I had enough to buy a small chest freezer. If I rearranged the garage I could nestle it in right next to our upright, and the food items of birds and humans could exist in separate-but-equal harmony. As I wandered through the freezer section of a local appliance store, a man swaggered up to me.

“So!” he said, wearing the expression of a guy used to charming the ladies. “Pizza or venison?”

“Rats,” I said. Like the Cheshire Cat in reverse, his smile vanished first.

I called Rodney Dow. Rodney is a model of self-sufficiency; if hostile forces took over our town, Rodney's family could hunker down for years while Rodney kept the enemy at bay. He grows vegetables, keeps bees, stocks his pond with fish, built his own smokehouse, and in the fall, hunts deer, stocking his freezer and eventually using every part of the animal. Although I am firmly anti-hunting, I make a grudging exception for deer, as thanks to humans there are far too many for the land to support and starving to death is a bad way to go. Last fall Rodney had called and offered various cuts of venison for my raptors, but I hadn't the room to take him up on it.

“You bet,” said Rodney. “I'll bring you as much as you need. And I have some mice for you, too, that I trapped in the smokehouse.”

The day after we celebrated Winter Solstice a car pulled into the driveway, and a man emerged dressed in a festive Mexican vest and a fuzzy Santa hat. It was Frank Olivetto, a former IBM exec who, for a period during his semi-retirement, worked at the small local country club nearby. He fed the ducks that took up summer residence on the club pond, gave holy hell to any golfers who aimed at the visiting Canada geese, and gave me detailed reports on the comings and goings of whatever birds happen to be passing by.

“Merry Christmas!” he announced. “I have a present for your hawks!”

He pulled out a cooler filled with venison. “There's meat, organs, bones, there's everything they'd want,” he said. “Just tell them it's from Uncle Frank.”

The stress of the summer began to dissipate. I had the two redtails and a couple of songbirds, and things were manageable. By the end of a hectic summer season most rehabbers have little goodwill toward men; we have little goodwill toward anything human, the source of most of the damage we're trying to undo. But I was touched and inspired by people like Rodney and Frank; and as I looked back over the summer I remembered Ed's words and thought of the people who had spent a great deal of time and effort to find help for an injured bird.

I saw the crows every morning, but as the weather grew colder I saw them less often. Nacho, who had always flown down to greet me when I appeared with his breakfast, would no longer let me touch him; he flew along with me to where I placed the food, but then stayed in the trees with Lo and Behold until I left. He still chattered to me, sometimes fluffing out his neck feathers, bobbing his head up and down and purring “
ooh, ooh, ooh
,” which I would happily mimic back to him. Sometimes I would see the three of them fly by with two other crows, then all five would disappear. But for the small plastic container of crow food I left for them each morning they were wild crows, and although I missed my interactions with Nacho, I rejoiced in their freedom.

As Christmas approached there was a faint background sound to Skye's beloved Christmas carols: chord progressions, rolling off Mac's guitar from
behind his closed door. Practicing for hours on end, his unruly blond hair reaching halfway down his back, he seemed every inch the budding rock star. He had found his passion, something that could help him weather the highs and lows of his childhood and early adolescence. I wanted the same thing for his sister. But what would work for Skye, who was visual, tactile, yet unable to sit still unless she was in front of a computer screen?

On Christmas Day she opened one of her boxes and stopped dead. “A digital camera,” she whispered.

By that night she had figured out all the camera's tricks and was downloading her first batch of photos onto the computer, feats that would have taken me months to duplicate. Before long she found her signature subject: the slightly odd still life. Arranging a flower or a series of beads, or peering down the neck of a plastic soda bottle, she would illuminate her subject with a lamp or flashlight and shoot it from a strange angle, making it recognizable only after a second glance. Eventually she started shooting moody outdoor pictures: a ghostly moving swing, the hurried swirl of a flock of sheep, a bridge through a rain-drenched car window. Snow fell and the temperature plummeted, but John and I were filled with a sense of well-being: the kids were happy and occupied, and all was right with the world.

By the end of January, however, there was a thick cover of snow and for weeks the temperature hovered between ten and twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The crows arrived each morning and had their breakfast, the resident songbirds stayed by our well-stocked feeders, and the two redtails remained warm with generous helpings of rodents and venison, but I knew that most of the wild creatures were hungry. One morning I glanced out at the blue jay feeding platform I'd built next to the house and sitting there, fluffed and still, was a black vulture. I had never released a rehabbed black vulture here, nor had I ever seen a wild one nearby. The vulture sat quietly, no more than twenty feet away, watching the house.

“He's not one of ours,” said Mac. “I wonder why he's alone?”

“Quick,” said Skye. “We have to get him something to eat!”

Luckily I hadn't yet fed the two redtails, so I hurried outside with one of their rats. After slicing it lengthwise (the vulture would have had a hard time getting through the thick skin), I left it on the driveway just outside the garage, and before I'd even made it back to the door he was eating.

The vulture set up camp in a huge old tulip tree. The tree's lowest limb, a massive arm twenty feet up, hung over the driveway; in the morning he'd sit on the limb, waiting for his breakfast, and if we went out at night our headlights would briefly illuminate his solitary silhouette. I left his food not far from the tree, near the short trail that led to the wide, barberry-choked field. I could watch the area from my kitchen window and always kept the binoculars handy for a closer look. One day as I was delivering the morning meal I heard a familiar voice.

“There's a goshawk out there!” I told John later. “It's a young one. I can hear him calling!”

“Oh, great,” said John. “Is he calling my name?”

Two days later I looked out the kitchen window and the large bird in the middle of a morning feast was not the vulture. I grabbed the binoculars and focused on a young goshawk, its brown and white juvenile plumage so streaked and speckled that it looked almost checkerboard. It ate hungrily, constantly surveying its surroundings with fierce yellow eyes, eyes which would eventually turn orange and finally red at maturity. From then on each morning I put out food for two, silently thanking Frank and Rodney. Occasionally I would see the hawk and the vulture eating at the same time, eight or ten feet apart.

They stayed until the temperature rose and the snow began to melt. One day the vulture showed up with four others, and after a few hours spent perching around the house, they all left together. The goshawk stayed a week or two longer, coming to eat every few days instead of every day, then he too disappeared. The first year of a young raptor's life is hard, and 80 percent do not survive. I hope the extra food helped him make it into that lucky 20 percent. For days after he stopped coming I could hear his voice in the woods, an echo of summers past.

“I know your parents,” I wish I could have told him. “Would you send them my regards?"

 

We were bumped from puppy list after puppy list. We were at the tail end of each one, as we weren't going to show our dog and didn't want him for hunting. But then in February we heard from Kathy and Scott Shifflett in Maryland, who said that one of the prospective puppy owners had dropped from the list and we were in. Soon we received a photo of the proud mom snuggled next to a group of small fuzzy shapes, a carefully drawn arrow pointing to the one that was ours. I could drive down to pick him up in mid-March.

By the time we received the phone call the excitement had reached a crescendo. “I'm really sorry,” said Kathy. “But he's lame. He's growing so fast his joints can't keep up with him. I know you were looking forward to getting him next week, but I don't want him to leave here until he's perfectly sound. The vet said he should be fine in another month.”

“All right,” I said. “Thank you. I appreciate your concern for him. But how big do you think he's going to get?”

“Big,” she said. “They're usually about eighty pounds, but this one is going to be big. He could reach ninety.”

“Ninety!” I said, my heart sinking. Little did either of us suspect that ninety pounds would be but a brief pause on his way to maturity.

On a chilly April morning I loaded a puppy crate into the back of my car and headed south to meet Scott Schifflet. I pulled into a highway rest stop in Delaware, searching for a man in a blue jacket walking a small black puppy on a leash. What I found was a man in a blue jacket walking a black puppy the size of a full-grown cocker spaniel. I parked and approached the duo hesitantly. The puppy had a curly coat.

“Suzie?” called Scott.

Scott and I shook hands while the oversized creature danced awkwardly
around us, exuding forthright puppy goodwill. When I knelt down the puppy furiously wagged his tail—which was as long as the rest of him—and gazed up at me with gentle, slightly hooded brown eyes. In an instant I decided that for all I cared, he could be the size of a camel. I tucked him carefully into the crate, and he slept almost the whole way home.

The winner of our Name the Puppy Contest was Merlin, straight from the world of magic, fairies, and dragon-riding heroes, and coincidently, also a kind of falcon. For the kids it was love at first sight, and John quickly fell under his spell. The only holdouts were the parrots. Mario glared at him from various high perches and refused to go near him; Zack, naturally, preferred the hands-on approach. Sitting quietly on a chair arm, he waited until Merlin ambled over; when the puppy stuck out a friendly nose, Zack sank his beak into it. Merlin howled and stumbled backward, and the kids rushed to his rescue. Zack spent the next half hour laughing uncontrollably from his cage, where he was given a time-out. As it turned out, curlies
are
intelligent: from then on Merlin made a wide circle around any and all birds, and never gave them a moment's trouble.

As spring arrived I took stock. Things could be a lot worse, I concluded. And if I can just stop taking nestling songbirds, things could be a lot better.