Mozart's Starling

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

  One

  THE STARLING OF SEATTLE

  The details of Carmen’s coming to live with me are admittedly a bit sketchy—part rescue, part theft. A friend turned informant (who prefers to remain anonymous—I’ll call him Phil) knew I was on the lookout for an orphaned starling chick. He worked for the parks department and let me know that the starling nests under the restroom roof at a park near my home were slated for removal (or “sweeping”). I was aware of these nests and had been checking on their occupants’ progress—the chirring sounds coming from beneath the eaves told me that the babies had already hatched. When I mentioned this to Phil, he said, “Yeah, well, you know they’re just starlings.” Park officials do attempt to remove the nests of unprotected pest species before chicks emerge from their eggs, but sometimes the timing doesn’t work out, and the nests are removed anyway. It is illegal under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to disturb, or even touch, the nests of most birds, but anyone—government official or private citizen—may with impunity destroy the nests and eggs of starlings and kill the nestlings and adult birds any way he or she likes. As nonnative invasive species, starlings, along with house sparrows and pigeons, have no legal standing or protection.*

  When federal or state fish and wildlife departments do work that involves the killing of animals (like the shooting of overpopulous Canada geese or white-tailed deer, or the trapping or shooting of urban coyotes), it is usually accomplished under cover of darkness to prevent protests by well-intentioned animal lovers. Starling nest removal is no different. “It’s going down tonight,” Phil reported on the starling nest sweep, and I giggled to myself, suddenly feeling like I was part of a bank heist. I thanked Phil and arranged to meet my husband, Tom, at the park after work—I would need his help. While it is legal to pluck a baby starling from its nest, it would likely be misunderstood by any observers, and I didn’t want to draw attention. The park was in high use that evening, with thirty little boys running around in soccer cleats as their coach yelled instructions in a lovely Welsh accent. We scoped out the nest that seemed easiest to access and nonchalantly dragged the giant plastic park garbage can into the men’s room. Tom climbed on top of it, slipped his long arm between the top of the wall and the eave of the roofline, and stretched toward the chirring sound. “Can’t reach,” he announced, withdrawing his arm, scraped from the effort. We switched places, thinking my smaller arm might slip through the wooden slats more easily, which it did. I stood on my toes, felt over the matted grassy nest stuffs, and stretched as far as I was able. I could actually feel the warmth radiating from the bodies of the nestlings, but while my arm was thinner than Tom’s (muscles, he likes to point out), it was also shorter. I couldn’t get any closer to the chicks, and I gained a deeper appreciation for the starling nesting strategy: they choose cavities that are set back far enough to be out of the reach of nest-thieving predators (more often a crow or a raccoon than a human).

  “So I guess that’s it.” Tom shrugged. “We can’t get one.”

  “Uh, you guess wrong,” I said, glowering. I took a break for reconnaissance and spotted a little soccer boy headed toward the men’s room, so I jumped out the door and leaned against the building, trying not to look suspicious. When the coast was clear, I slipped back inside. “Now get back up on that garbage can and get me a bird,” I bossed like a wife in a bad sitcom. Tom sighed and dutifully climbed back up on the can as I held it steady it with all my strength—I kept picturing the can skidding out from under him and Tom dangling from the smelly bathroom ceiling, broken-armed and clutching a starling chick. We had repositioned the can so the lower roof ledge was smooshed right into Tom’s armpit. “Hold out your hands,” he told me, and into them he dropped the tiniest, ugliest, most unpromising little creature the earth has ever brought forth.

  I’d raised dozens of chicks of many different species, from hummingbirds to red-tailed hawks, and of course the several starlings. But until now I’d never seen a baby bird that was actually wheezing. Like all songbird nestlings, this chick was mostly beak, with a big, fleshy orange gape designed to serve as a target for adult birds: Drop food here. When a chick is stimulated by movement and sound, the gaping response is induced. Wanting to make sure this bird possessed some tiny semblance of health, I tickled the bill and chirped like a starling; the little bundle threw back its head, and the bill popped open 180 degrees. Perfect.

  This chick was only five or six days old and would require constant care: a steady temperature of 85 degrees until its feathers grew, and feedings every twenty minutes, dawn to dark. I had hoped to rescue a bird that was a few days older, one that was still young enough to tame but already raised into a bit more size and strength by its real bird parents; I wished I could put this one back to cook a little longer. But the nest was doomed, and with the arousal of my maternal instincts inspired by the gaping experiment, I was already starting to bond with this sad little chick—I couldn’t bring myself to return it to the nest to be swept away with its illfated siblings. I knew I should get another chick to help keep this one the proper temperature and to increase my chances of ending up with one living, healthy starling for my research—baby birds, captive or wild, are unsettlingly ephemeral, subject to respiratory infections and weakened by ectoparasites of the sort I already saw crawling on this chick’s bare skin. At this new request, Tom said—firmly—“No fucking way.” He couldn’t and wouldn’t attempt to nab any more chicks. I opened my mouth, then wisely closed it again.

  So that was it. This was our starling. I could feel the naked, translucent-skinned belly hot in my palm as the bird slept with its head drooped on my thumb. I tucked the chick carefully into my handy baby-bird incubator—my cleavage—and the three of us went home.

  Our sleepy starling chick on the day we brought it home. (Photograph by Tom Furtwangler)

  It was at this point that I morphed from “Lyanda the Innocent Citizen Removing a Nonnative Bird from a Public Space” to “Lyanda the Starling Outlaw.” As it turns out, you may torture, maim, or murder a starling, but in Washington State, as in many states, you may not lovingly raise a starling as a pet. One of the ostensible reasons given by wildlife officials I spoke with was the prevention of propagation. There are already too many starlings, and people raising them as pets might eventually release the captive birds, making things worse. Something like this happened in the case of the house finch, a native bird with a geographic range that was once limited to the west side of the Rockies. The males have bright red breasts, sing all year, and are easy to keep, which made them marketable pets. In the 1940s, finches were illegally netted along the West Coast and transported east, where they were considered exotic and became popular. When there was an official crackdown on the wild-bird-pet trade, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of finches were released in New York by dealers seeking to avoid charges. The birds quickly acclimatized and eventually spread across the east side of the continent.

  In the case of the starling, though, that rationale doesn’t hold up. For one thing, the species has already overrun the country; it would take a huge number of released or escaped starlings to effect a noticeable increase in their population. On the contrary, it is far more likely that the removal of just one chick from the outside world could decrease the future starling population by scores, possibly even hundreds, of birds. (Starlings are able to reproduce at nine months old and often raise two broods a year. Say our bird fledged just three young its first breeding season, then those young, and all their future young, fledged three young each year… the numbers scale up quickly.) I’m not suggesting that starlings are a good pet choice for most people, but I do think the current standard makes little sense. In my opinion, if starlings remain legally unprotected, then we ought to be permitted to raise orphaned starlings in our living rooms.

  It took just a few minutes to get our new chick from the park bathroom to its new home. I’d already prepared a mix of crushed dry cat food, hard-boiled egg, applesauce, calcium, and avian vitamins, with just the
right balance of fat and protein for a baby starling. This I proffered in tiny bites at the end of a wooden stirring stick pilfered from Starbucks. (Baby bird, stirring sticks… my petty-theft rap sheet was growing by the hour.)

  Though the bird was a decent eater, it remained sneezy and parasite-ridden. We hesitated to give it a name, not wanting to personalize our relationship and become more attached than necessary to what might be a transitory little life. Besides, we didn’t know if it was a male or a female, so picking a name would be tricky.* Tom sometimes called the chick “little buddy,” but overall we stuck with “it.”

  For its first several weeks with us, the chick lived on the desk in my writing studio. Its nest was a plastic cottage-cheese tub lined with paper towels—I kept a roll handy so I could change them often. The tiny black ectoparasites that jumped off its thin skin were easy to spot against the white paper towels. I picked the nits up with tweezers and squished them. Keeping the makeshift nest clean wasn’t difficult; most songbird-nestling poo is encased in shiny, strong fecal sacs that the parent birds remove with their bills and drop over the edge of the nest, so there is not much mess. I just plucked these poo sacs out with my fingers. And like other nestlings with an unconscious evolutionary imperative to keep a clean and disease-free bed, our chick, when it got a bit older, hung its rear over the edge of the nest and let its poo drop outside—theatrically heaving its tiny bum to the plastic rim, wiggling its still-featherless tail back and forth, and letting loose its impressive dropping with seeming satisfaction before falling into one of its deep baby-bird slumbers.

  Eat, poop, sleep. It reminded me of having a newborn human baby, and in some respects it was even more restricting. The metabolic needs of an unfeathered chick are high and constant. Watching backyard nests, we can observe how frequently the parent birds come and go, bearing wriggly gifts of protein-rich insects and larvae for their young. As the standin parent bird, I had to feed my chick several times an hour. When my daughter, Claire, now a teenager, was a baby, I could at least wrap her in a blanket and take her out with me—with this bird, I could barely leave the house. One day I decided to try packing its nest and food and bringing it along on my errands, planning to feed it as I went, but the chick quickly got too cold away from its heat lamp, so I ended up having to shop for groceries that day with a baby bird nestled, once again, between my breasts for warmth. For the most part, I was stuck at home. If I happened to be away overlong, the Feed me! baby-starling chirring sounds that poured forth from the tiny chick filled the entire house.

  Always hungry. (Photograph by Tom Furtwangler)

  At a couple weeks old, the chick started getting more mobile, and though it stayed on my desk, I put its nest inside a ten-gallon glass aquarium. It would jump out of the plastic tub and slump around the floor of the aquarium, its cartilaginous legs not yet able to hold it up, but it still preferred to sleep in its nest. This it accomplished extravagantly, with its head hanging over the rim and breathing with that hot, baby-bird heaviness (the cottage-cheese tub really was getting too small, but the chick seemed attached to it and chose it over the larger Tupperware nest I offered). When the little bird’s legs began to ossify and get stronger, I added a low perch to one end of the tank, and it loved to jump on and off the stick and practice balancing there. But right from the start, its favorite place to play, sit, and sleep was on me. Tucked in my hands or on my lap, under my shirt.

  Baby songbirds are not downy like baby pheasants or chickens or shorebirds or any of the other so-called precocial chicks that are born ready to run about. They are naked at hatching. Horny, sheath-covered pinfeathers emerge during the first week and take shape over the course of several weeks—the birds “feather out,” as the ornithologists say. With its prickly pins, our chick felt a bit like a hedgehog. But soon the little starling’s pinfeathers unfurled. It became as soft as a bunny and could stay warm more easily; now it liked to snuggle into the crook of my elbow and—especially—on my neck, under my hair.

  Our tuxedo cat, Delilah, was only too happy to help oversee the care of the baby bird. She affected a great nonchalance, which fooled no one, and sat on my desk along with the chick, my laptop and me between them. Occasionally Delilah would lift her paw ever so slowly, and when I glared at her she’d pretend she was just about to lick her toes and do some face-cleaning. I never left Delilah alone with the chick, and because she is good at opening doors, I had to pound a nail into the molding by the doorknob so when I left the room, I could pull a thick rubber band around the knob and over the nail to keep her out. Once I forgot and when I came back to the study, there was Delilah sitting right over the chick, their faces just inches apart. Delilah was purring.

  Meanwhile, my constant care and parasite-picking seemed to be paying off; the bird was flourishing. After four weeks, the shape of the iris provided the first indicator of the chick’s sex, and we gladly replaced the neutral pronoun it with she. We named the starling Carmen, which in Latin means “song.”

  Two

  MOZART AND THE MUSICAL THIEF

  Raising a baby bird is harrowing. It’s difficult to duplicate the perfect conditions of a nest, and at any moment, something can go wrong—a slight variance in temperature one way or the other can cause a naked nestling to freeze or die of heat exhaustion; the lack of an essential ingredient in the diet can cause a failure to thrive and seemingly sudden death; or a bird might just be sickly, as Carmen appeared to be, and not survive chickhood. The night after we stole-rescued our baby starling, I had a nightmare. In it, I walked up a dream-twisted staircase, through a doorway, and into my own house. The bleeding bodies of almost-dead starlings covered the floor. I woke up shivering and shook Tom. “Oh God, oh God, oh God. Tom. This was a horrible mistake.” Tom rolled over without breaking his snore. I threw on a robe, ran barefoot to my study, and shone my iPhone flashlight on the chick. I watched her breathe heavily. I checked the thermometer—a perfect 85 degrees beneath the warm red-light lamp. I reached in and felt the chick’s body, picked an errant nit. Then I pulled up a chair and watched the baby bird breathe until morning.

  More bright-eyed by the day, but still vulnerable in the early weeks. (Photograph by Tom Furtwangler)

  Hovering constantly over Carmen in her early weeks, I envied Mozart, who’d had a pet starling but had skipped the angst of raising a chick. The bird vendors of Vienna did not sell their birds until they were sturdy and grown, and because it appears that Mozart’s starling was singing a solid song on the day he bought it, we know that the bird had to be a full adult, probably at least a year old. Younger birds practice songs and mimicry, but few are accomplished enough to sing a line from a Mozart concerto. And though it is impossible to be sure of the minutiae involved in the procuring of Mozart’s starling, we do know many essentials, including the lively time line.

  April 12, 1784, Innere Stadt, Vienna. Mozart sat at the small desk in his apartment, dipped his quill pen, and entered the lovely Piano Concerto No. 17 in G in his log of completed work. This was Mozart’s 453rd finished composition; he was twenty-nine years old.

  May 26. Mozart received confirmation from his father, Leopold, that the fair copy of the concerto he had sent by postal carriage had arrived safely in Salzburg. Wolfgang wrote back that he was eager to hear his father’s opinion of this work and of the other pieces he had sent; he was in no rush to have them back “so long as no one else gets hold of them.” Mozart was always a little paranoid that his music might fall into the wrong hands and be imitated or outright stolen by a lesser composer.*

  As for what happened next, there are many possibilities. But it might have gone something like this:

  May 27, Graben Street. Mozart’s stockings pooled in wrinkles around his ankles, and he paused on the bustling roadside to pull them up. As he tucked the thin silk under his buttoned cuffs, he was startled by a whistled tune. It was a bright-sweet melody, a fragment beautiful and familiar. It took Mozart a wondering moment to recover from the shock of hearing the refrain,
but when he did, he followed the song. The whistles repeated, leading him down the block and through a bird vendor’s open shop door. There, just inside, Mozart was greeted by a caged starling who jumped to the edge of his perch, cocked his head, and stared intently into the maestro’s eyes, chirping warmly. This bird was flirting! If there was one thing Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart responded to, it was flirting. Then the starling did it again; he turned away from the composer, pointed his bill skyward, fluffed his shimmering throat feathers, and sang the theme from the allegretto in Mozart’s new concerto, completed just one month earlier and never yet performed in public. Well, he almost sang the tune. The starling made a minor rhythmic modification (a dramatic fermata at the top of the phrase) and raised the last two Gs in the fragment to G-sharps, but the basic motif was unmistakable.