Fastest Things on Wings

by Terry Masear

  When Nicholas arrives, bleary-eyed and unshaven, half an hour after he called, he looks as if he has been up all night at the tables in Vegas. His nestling, unlike most young birds separated from their mothers for more than a dozen hours, refuses to eat and keeps nodding off. The minute we step into the garage, I lift the baby out of Nicholas’s Rolex watch case and place her in a faux nest constructed by placing tightly wound Kleenex inside a plastic salsa cup.

  “Is he okay?” Nicholas asks, nervously rubbing his unshaven chin as I set the nestling in a chorus line of orphaned chicks who begin peeping and swaying like bobble-heads the second I touch the sliding glass door to the ICU.

  “She.”

  “Oh, yeah? How can you tell?”

  “See how white her throat is? There’s no five o’clock shadow like the young males have.”

  “Is she okay?” His expression softens.

  “She’s not as lively as nestlings usually are, but time will tell.”

  “Well, she was pretty alert during the night,” Nicholas assures me.

  “During the night?”

  “Yeah, I slept in a chair with her on my chest and fed her every half hour, like you said.”

  “You fed her all night?” I turn and notice that, over his rumpled blue jeans, he is sporting a black silk pajama top streaked with a white residue that to law enforcement might mean a ride downtown for Nicholas but to a hummingbird rehabber looks suspiciously like dried sugar water.

  He nods, staring with a pained expression at the slumbering fledgling in the ICU.

  “Every half hour?”

  “Yeah, I set my alarm and fed her every thirty minutes, just like you said,” he asserts, crossing his arms defensively over his barrel chest.

  I study his face to see if he’s kidding, but Nicholas returns my gaze with a comical seriousness. “Well, that explains why she’s so exhausted. They don’t normally eat all night,” I say.

  “Oh, they don’t?”

  This assumption that hummingbirds stay up all night dining, carousing, and getting into trouble is a misconception I’ve encountered hundreds of times. I used to think it revealed an absurd lack of common sense. But then I thought about bats, which, though mammals, share some of the aerial skills and eating habits of hummingbirds and often appear in the same educational videos and nature programs.

  “No. They aren’t nocturnal, so they don’t hunt in the dark.”

  Nicholas gives me a long, expressionless look. “I’ve stayed up all night for worse reasons,” he finally says with a shrug, smiling at his folly.

  “I probably should have made her eating schedule clearer when we talked on the phone,” I say apologetically. “I just got so many calls yesterday.”

  “No, no.” He waves me off. “I’m the crazy one.”

  “Only a sane person can afford to admit he’s crazy,” I point out as we make our way out the garage door. “And as crazy as you may be, you’re also the hero. Your bird’s chances of survival just rocketed from zero to about a hundred percent. Because of you, she’ll be back out there in a couple of months, in fighting form and ready to take on the wild world.”

  “Oh, wait”—he reaches into his back pocket—“I wanted to give you something . . .” He trails off, fumbling around in his jeans. “I forgot. I don’t have my wallet. It got soaked when I jumped in the pool.”

  “You jumped in the pool?”

  Nicholas nods after some hesitation.

  “With your clothes on.”

  “Yeah, I kind of panicked when I saw her floating around out there. I figured she only had about a minute before she drowned.” Nicholas pauses, then narrows his eyes and throws me a sidelong glance as I suppress laughter. “That was crazy too, wasn’t it?”

  After Nicholas departs, I sink into a teak lounge chair on the patio next to half a dozen small flight cages humming with fledglings at various stages of development, from beginners who sit stone-still on their perches, warily observing the broad expanse around them, to the week-older pinballs bouncing confidently back and forth between perches in pursuit of greater opportunity. It’s just nine a.m. As I close my eyes and melt into the warm morning sunbeams breaking over the roof of the house, the phone rings, signaling more distress waiting in the wings.

  CHAPTER 3

  I Can’t Get Over You

  WHEN IT COMES TO SAVING HUMMINGBIRDS, sometimes crazy isn’t enough. Some people, like Stan, break rank and elevate the perils of rescue to impossibly dangerous heights.

  Stan mistakenly locked the family cat out of the house when he got home late Friday night from his job as grill chef at Jerry’s Famous Deli. The next morning, his kids found a female hummingbird dead on the front porch. The same hummingbird that built a nest outside his daughters’ bedroom and that the entire family had been obsessing over for the past six weeks. Stan’s kids named the chicks Minnie and Mickey and have been documenting their progress with hours of film footage for a school science fair. Now the chicks’ mother is gone because the cat ambushed her as she was picking aphids off a hibiscus at dawn (the time of day when hummingbirds, like people, are most vulnerable), the nestlings are hysterical because they haven’t been fed since the night before, and the kids are inconsolable because the magic surrounding the nest has become the center of their imaginative universe.

  “The birds are screaming, my kids are crying, and my wife hates me,” Stan reports over the phone. “What do I do?”

  “You’ll have to cut the nest and bring it to me. The nestlings need to go into rehab. It’s the only way they’ll make it,” I explain as I rush a large flight cage from the patio to the garage to fill feeders sucked dry by three high-octane fledglings with bottomless appetites.

  Silence.

  “Stan?”

  “Yeah, I’m thinking.”

  “Look, it’s no big deal. I’ll tell you how to cut the nest and give you the location of the nearest rehab facility you can take them to. Of course you can bring them to me,” I say encouragingly, “or we have a network of drop-off points all over Los Angeles.”

  Stan breathes a heavy sigh. “I’m just not sure . . .” He trails off.

  “What’s the problem?” I press as my call-waiting beeps frenetically. “You just cut the nest and put it in a box. It’s simple.”

  “It would be simple if it weren’t for the Rottweiler in the yard. The nest is in the bougainvillea next to our house, but it’s in the neighbor’s yard, and he’s out of town for the week.”

  “So who’s taking care of the dog?”

  “He has a pet-sitter, but she comes by at a different time every day and I don’t have her number. The guy just moved in a couple of months ago. I haven’t actually met him. All I know about him is that he loves that dog.”

  “Does he seem like the violent type?”

  “No, he seems like a nice guy. I’ve never seen him angry.”

  “I mean the dog. What do you know about him?”

  “I know he barks like mad every time I walk by the fence between our houses.”

  I think for a few seconds. “Can you reach the nest from the window?”

  “No. It’s on an adjoining wall.”

  “Can you reach it from the roof?”

  “Yeah,” a tentative voice comes back. “I think I can.”

  I give Stan the same nest-cutting instructions I’d given Katie, taking into account that this time, the finder will be hanging above an angry Rottweiler rather than teetering on a tree branch a hundred feet over the ocean. “And Stan,” I add, “with hummingbirds, things don’t always go as planned, so take somebody with you in case you need help. Okay?”

  “Okay, I think my other neighbor is home.”

  “Perfect. Call me when you get the nest.”

  Stan, the reluctant hero, agrees. As soon as he hangs up, my phone signals two missed calls, and another one comes in just as I notice the hummingbirds in the aviary tussling over empty feeders I filled a few hours ago. As I rush through the security door, I tap t
he touchpad with my right hand while wresting two feeders from the springs that anchor them to the aviary bars with my left.

  “Terry?” a panicked voice pleads from the other end of the line when I pick up the call.

  “Yes,” I answer on my headset as I race out the security door and back to the house for more food.

  “Thank God. I have two baby hummingbirds in a bowl in my kitchen and I don’t want them to die. They’re so tiny and helpless and I don’t know what to do. I’ve got them on some paper towels under a lamp,” the caller sputters at breakneck speed, “but they’re breathing really hard and I’m getting so stressed out.” She begins hyperventilating.

  “Okay, try to relax and breathe slowly,” I advise as I feel my blood pressure spiking from the day’s events.

  “All right.” She takes a deep breath.

  “Now, how did they get in your kitchen?”

  “My son brought them home from soccer practice. He and another boy took them out of a nest.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. He won’t tell me.” The caller begins choking up. “I scolded him when he told me what he did and now he’s crying and won’t talk to me.”

  “When did all of this happen?”

  “He got home about twenty minutes ago.”

  “What about the other kid?”

  “He’s got a lot of issues,” she says, exhaling with disdain. “He can’t think about anything but himself and he’s—”

  “Did you—”

  “I don’t like my son hanging out with him because he’s so self-centered and dysfunctional, always in trouble—”

  “Okay, I get it,” I interject. “Have you tried to reach the little sociopath?”

  “I left a message at his house but nobody called me back. The poor little things. They hardly have any feathers. I don’t know what to do . . .” She trails off tearfully.

  “Try asking your son one more time. It’s not too late to get them back to their mother.”

  “Okay, hold on.” She sniffles and I hear quick heels tap down a tile hallway and then a door squeaking open. “Noah, honey, the hummingbird person is on the phone—” A muffled conversation followed by the child’s tearful protests erupts in the background. “He just cries every time I ask him,” she says, her voice coming back. “Noah, look, we can—” She fades away again. “He just keeps crying.” She sighs with resignation. “My husband and I separated recently so there are a lot of other things going on right now.”

  There are always a lot of other things going on. Hummingbird rescue is rarely simple and straightforward. Young hummingbirds’ helpless vulnerability draws out raw emotions that unleash our deepest insecurities about our humanity, mortality, and place in the natural world. And those uncertainties threaten to blow the lid off any other unresolved anxieties that might be boiling just below the surface.

  Still, I recognize that some parents would drag the information out of a defiant youngster in a crisis like this. Some mothers would drop the hammer on the resistant kidnapper and get the nestlings back where they came from despite his tearful protests. But the human element is the biggest wildcard in hummingbird rescue. And personalities, life dramas, family relationships, and parenting styles are quantities I have to factor into the equation with every call I get.

  “I feel so terrible about this. It would just kill me if they died.”

  “Don’t worry, I can save them,” I assure her and then give her my address and hang up to take another urgent call. It’s Stan.

  “Terry.” I hear Stan shout as if from a great distance. “When I cut the nest the chicks flew off.”

  “Did you see where they went?”

  “My neighbor says he can see them hanging on some lattice across the yard.”

  “The same yard the Rottweiler is in?”

  “Yeah, the same one.” Stan’s voice suddenly pulls in closer. “And I’m not Rambo,” he concedes before lapsing into silence.

  I pause to reflect on the hazards of life in Los Angeles. Never mind out-of-control wildfires, nerve-jangling earthquakes, stray bullets from shooting rampages, road rage–induced street brawls, and high-speed paparazzi chases down Sunset Boulevard. With hummingbirds in the mix, Katie almost splattered herself across the cliffs of Malibu, and Stan is about to be dismembered by an irate Rottweiler in the San Fernando Valley.

  “Will they be okay now that they’re out?” Stan asks in a resigned tone that tells me he already knows the answer.

  “No, they won’t survive. They’re like one-year-old children at this point. They’re completely helpless without their mother. But I’m not sure—”

  “We’re going in after them, then.” Stan cuts me off with the determination of a commando on a deadly mission.

  “Wait, I’m not telling you to do that,” I protest.

  “I know, but this is my fault. And my family is so freaked out. If I don’t fix this, it’s the kind of thing my kids will never forget, you know?”

  And Stan is right; they never will. Childhood crises that trigger such powerful emotions become defining moments that stick, remaining forever embedded in family narratives. Not to mention that the loss of the birds will dead-end the science project. How will the story find closure? I envision Stan presiding over the hibachi grill on his fortieth wedding anniversary, with the kids and grandkids gathered all around, laughing, applauding, and enjoying near-perfect familial harmony and happiness, except for “that thing with the hummingbirds” that still lurks in the background three agonizing decades later. And no matter how much Stan tries to erase the dark memory, the dead babies will live on, a bloody stain on his résumé and a lasting testament to his shortcomings as a caring father. So on this otherwise fine spring morning, everything is suddenly on the line for Stan.

  “Yeah, I get it,” I assure him. “It’s not a great situation, but a provoked Rottweiler can change your life pretty fast.”

  This is greeted with a tense silence. And I know he’s going in. No matter what I say. There’s too much riding on it.

  “Stan?”

  “Yeah, I’m still here.”

  “This might seem kind of crazy—”

  “I’ll try crazy at this point. Crazy’s better than nothing.”

  “Okay, when was the last time you saw the pet-sitter?”

  “Yesterday morning. She always puts a ton of food out for him when she comes by, but we haven’t seen her yet today.”

  “So your hungry Rottweiler might appreciate something fresh off the grill, you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, he’s an eating machine, I can tell you that. I’m gonna try something,” Stan says nervously. “I’ll call you back.”

  I hang up and rush into the aviary with a fistful of dripping feeders. Several birds buzz me in a blur of spinning wings as I step inside the security door, and then my phone rings. A well-spoken young salesclerk named Madison is calling from Fred Segal in Santa Monica. It’s the third time this month someone there has called me about a hummingbird trapped in the store.

  “We have a hummingbird flying around our salon and the customers are going crazy,” she reports flatly.

  “Where exactly is the bird?”

  “He’s up in the skylight. We tried putting a hummingbird feeder in the doorway, but he won’t come down.”

  Hummingbirds don’t come down. They are programmed to fly toward the light in the sky, no matter what, and they won’t come down until exhaustion forces them to descend to lower altitudes.

  “Okay, this is a challenging situation,” I caution her before launching into the lengthy and complex logistics of retrieving a hummingbird from a skylight. I dispatch Madison with instructions on how to manufacture an arsenal of improvised rescue equipment and supplies, and as soon as I hang up, my phone rings again. It’s Stan.

  “Terry? I got ’em!” he announces proudly and breathlessly.

  “Both of them?”

  “Yeah, both. It was edgy for a minute there, but my signature baco
n-cheddar cheeseburger worked like a dream. He downed four in under a minute. That dog’s gonna be my friend forever.”

  “Well done, Stan,” I congratulate him, applauding his new heroic status within the family. “Or maybe I should call you Rambo now.”

  “Maybe you should call me lucky,” he countered flatly.

  “Can you bring them to me?”

  “We’re on our way,” Stan announces after taking down my address.

  I hang up just in time to break up a wrestling match between a pair of male Anna’s twins who aren’t wasting any sentiment on brotherly love. The phone rings. Madison from Fred Segal is on the line again.

  “We got the hummingbird down but he’s breathing really hard and his eyes are closed,” she reports uneasily above a cacophony of agitated voices in the background.

  “Give him sugar water from the feeder and set him in a shallow box on some tissue in a safe place outside, off the ground, in the sun, and near a tree. He should fly off within half an hour or so. If he doesn’t, call me.”

  “Got it.”

  “And, Madison, one more thing. Do you have any plants or brightly colored curtains hanging by the door of your salon?”

  Madison pauses. “Yeah, we have some. Hey, what are those plants called?” she shouts to someone across the room. “Coral what? Yeah,” she says, back to me again, “some coral honeysuckle hanging on the veranda outside the front doors.”

  Honeysuckle. Irresistible to hummingbirds since the beginning of time. The two are so intimately linked that over millions of years, in an evolutionary process known as coadaptation, the hummingbird’s bill has been shaped to match the morphology of the plant’s vibrant, tubular flower, which in turn has evolved a funnel-like design to retain abundant nectar for the little high-maintenance fliers. Unfortunately, this epic history of coevolution has led to a minor crisis at Fred Segal on a Saturday morning in early twenty-first-century Santa Monica.