Fastest Things on Wings

by Terry Masear

  “Well, just in reference to the baby, my name is gender-neutral,” I joke.

  “I’m gonna think about that.” He laughs.

  “No, you couldn’t do it to him, or her. You need something trendy like Kai or Quinn if your kid’s gonna make it in preschool in LA.”

  “Well,” he responds playfully, “we are planning to adopt a dog too.”

  “There you go. And it will always be a story, because who would give their dog a name like that?”

  “Exactly,” he laughingly agrees.

  The first week in June, I take in a dozen fledglings and a concussed young adult who flew through the open window of the finder’s car, hit the inside of her windshield, and dropped onto the dashboard while she was sitting at a stoplight in Beverly Hills. The following week, on June 9, I get seven young birds in one day. By five p.m., the ICU is jammed with hummingbird victims of all ages and species, more than fifty fledglings are advancing through cages on my patio, and I have answered thirty phone calls, including a request for an interview from a Los Angeles Times reporter.

  Around five o’clock, as I am racing around, madly filling feeders, my cell phone rings again. When I answer, a well-spoken gentleman informs me he has rescued a fledgling from his tennis court and has her in his house in Holmby Hills. Anticipating a vigorous debate, I sink into my chair on the patio. I know when I get a call from one of the guard-gated streets in the Platinum Triangle—Holmby Hills, Bel Air, Beverly Hills—that persuading anyone to make an effort is going to be a challenge. Callers from the Beverly Hills flats south of Sunset are not so resistant. These struggling millionaires will usually work with me. It’s the bottomlessly deep pockets of Holmby Hills that drive me over the priceless canyon edge. Never mind that I am working day and night, taking thousands of calls, and caring for hundreds of rescued hummingbirds all for the love of wildlife and without getting a penny for it. High-net-worth residents calling from the upper echelons expect quick service, and a lot of it.

  “Can you bring her to me?” I gently coax the articulate gentleman.

  “No, I can’t, really,” he replies. “I have to prepare dinner.”

  “Prepare dinner?”

  “Yes,” he replies in a British accent. “I’m the butler.”

  “The butler,” I repeat in the same accent.

  “Yes, and I can’t go off right now because I have to prepare dinner.”

  “Well. That’s funny, because I was just doing the same thing myself,” I remark as I grab a carrot that is the only food I will see until sometime after nine and that’s if I’m lucky. But I know this is not my world and I cannot possibly convey that a young hummingbird’s life is of greater importance than one of thousands of dinners that will be served during the next who-knows-how-many years in the butler’s precious world.

  “Is there anyone else on the staff who can bring her? It’s only ten minutes away,” I cajole.

  “I’m afraid not,” he answers unapologetically. “The chefs, servers, and everyone else are busy preparing for a rather large dinner party as well.”

  I wonder how many bustling minions “everyone else” entails, but I’m too spent to ask or argue, and I know that if I don’t give in and go, the hummingbird will likely take a back seat to the splendid festivities occurring at Gatsby’s house that evening.

  “Okay.” I surrender. “I’ll come and get her. What’s your address?” I ask with exaggerated patience, trying not to let my annoyance about his lack of effort break the deal. Before leaving the house, I feed the ocean of gaping mouths in the ICU and fill every feeder on the patio, and fifteen minutes later, after announcing “Hummingbird rescue” to the intercom at the end of a leafy, tree-lined driveway, I’m admitted through the automated wrought-iron gates.

  “I love your car,” the butler gushes, running his hand seductively over the flank of my silver Audi TT as I get out. I bought the car seven years ago, and although it still looks immaculate and drives even better, the lavish amenities of my immediate surroundings, which include an army of house staff, an opulent mansion, and fleets of luxury European cars parked in the driveway, make my modest little sports car appear singularly unimpressive.

  “Yes, it so cute,” a young au pair agrees as the housekeeper looks on from the doorway before ushering me into a cherry-paneled library slightly larger than my house. As I step inside the high-beamed library boasting floor-to-ceiling windows along the south wall, I notice a flawless Anna’s fledgling perched on the edge of a pair of designer sunglasses that are balanced atop a life-size marble bust of Venus de Milo on the desk.

  “She’s perfect,” I observe as I gather the fledgling up and place her into the portable cage I use to retrieve birds from shelters.

  “We named her Ava.” The butler tilts his head pensively as he sets a lead-crystal champagne glass filled with bubbly gold liquid on the desk in front of me. “In honor of her exotic beauty. And a former acquaintance.” He smirks as the au pair and the housekeeper laugh knowingly.

  “Fitting.” I nod as I eye the glass curiously.

  “That’s for you, not the hummingbird,” the butler announces as everyone laughs again.

  Glancing around the ornate room, I have no idea how I wandered into this gilded world where such magnificent lives are being carried on less than five miles from my humble little stucco cottage in West Hollywood. After drinking a glass of the finest champagne I have ever tasted in my not-untraveled life, I discover as we stroll down a wide hallway lined with personal photos of everyone who has ever been anyone in Hollywood that the estate belongs to a famous producer whose name, the butler says with a wink before sending me out the front door with a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill tucked into the top of the birdcage, is best unmentioned in any future exchanges.

  “Paparazzi; you understand.” He narrows his eyes.

  “Uh-huh. I have the same problem.” I wink as everyone jovially waves goodbye from the veranda.

  The following afternoon I get a call at five o’clock again, this time from the shelter in West Los Angeles reporting that a man just phoned about an injured hummingbird in Hollywood and wants someone to come and pick it up.

  “I’m too busy to be doing pickups all of the time,” I protest with impatience.

  “Well, he says he has a hummingbird but no car and no money to take the bus,” the animal-control officer from the shelter informs me.

  “Did you get his number?”

  “No, he barely speaks English. All I could catch was that he has a hummingbird and will be waiting on the corner of Sunset and Western.”

  “So he’s sitting there waiting for me now?” I ask incredulously.

  “That’s what he said.”

  After taking over a hundred calls already this week, I’m exhausted and furious about the shelter’s presumption. Everyone knows how impossible it is for overworked rehabbers to do pickups from individuals on top of retrieving rescues from shelters. But city shelters are understaffed and overwhelmed too. And when I look at the dazzling collection of hummingbirds buzzing in the cages around me, I can’t quit thinking about this poor fledgling that will slowly starve to death from sugar water if I don’t show up. So I recruit Frank to feed the ICU babies, get in my car, and go.

  It’s a scorching, smoggy day, and rush-hour traffic is deadly all the way. When I arrive at the designated corner nearly an hour later after what is normally a twenty-minute drive, a throng of weary commuters is lingering at the bus stop. I turn onto a side street and park but see no one among the crowd who might be in possession of a hummingbird. I step out of the car and begin wandering idly around the congested street corner when a harried, middle-aged man approaches me carrying a cardboard moving box big enough to hold a washing machine.

  “Did you call about a hummingbird?” I ask.

  “¿Como?”

  “¿Tiene una chuparrosa?”

  “¿Chuparrosa?” He looks at me in confusion.

  “¿Tiene un pajáro?”

  “¡Sí!�
� he replies excitedly. “Ella no puede volar,” he announces as he opens the giant box.

  I peer cautiously inside and see a petrified adult mourning dove crouched in the corner of the box.

  “She is a harm-ed bird,” he says slowly in broken English.

  As an ESL instructor who spent three years teaching pronunciation, I immediately grasp the lost-in-translation gaffe that brought us both to this busy Hollywood street corner on this sweltering afternoon. English verbs have three possible pronunciations for past-tense endings: the t-sound ending, as in looked; the d sound, as in moved; and the ed syllable, as in wanted. Even though the ed syllable is the least commonly used in everyday English, beginning English-as-a-second-language speakers use the ed pronunciation (what ESL instructors fondly refer to as Mr. Ed) for all past-tense verbs. So when my Latino rescuer called the shelter and reported he had a harm-ed bird, the American on the other end of the line heard hummingbird and called me right away.

  “Gracias.” I laugh in resignation as he squeezes my hand while thanking me effusively in Spanish.

  Shaking my head, I jam the box into my hatchback and make the slow crawl back to my house. As soon as I get home, I climb a ladder onto my neighbor’s roof, where I feed wild birds every morning, and open the box. The dove shoots out and flies into a towering elm tree in an adjacent yard. Ninety minutes of driving. To rescue a bird that needed no help.

  I hurry into the garage and open the sliding glass door to the ICU as twenty bills pop open and begin peeping. While I am going down the assembly line, the phone rings.

  “Terry?” a voice asks nervously.

  “Yes.”

  Mindy has come across an adult male hummingbird sprawled on the sidewalk in Hancock Park and asks me what she should do. In the spring and early summer, people often stumble upon grounded adults that have just been engaged in a breeding episode and are taking a few minutes to regroup after their exhausting encounter. In this particular instance, Mindy wants to know whether the bird will attack her if she picks him up. I have to contain my laughter when I get questions like this and I remind myself that growing up in the city, for all of its cultural advantages, has its limitations too.

  “Well, hummingbirds can be pretty brutal if you come in under four grams. But in this case, you weigh about twelve thousand times more than he does, so I think you’re safe to pick him up.”

  Five seconds later I hear her shriek before coming back on the phone. “He just flew off!”

  “See? You saved him.”

  “Yeah, I did.” She laughs. “It was effortless.”

  Later that week, I get a call from an anxious young woman worried about a hummingbird walking around her front yard. Unlike other birds, hummingbirds are physically incapable of walking and spend their entire lives either perched or flying.

  “He’s been walking around and crying for hours. I don’t know what to do.”

  As difficult as it is for me to imagine, no small number of callers mistake other kinds of birds for hummingbirds. Some Angelenos are so thoroughly urban they don’t even know what a hummingbird looks like. Misguided calls to hummingbird rescue include a number of impossible scenarios, such as a hummingbird walking down the sidewalk, two hummingbirds “attacking us every time we step out our front door” (always nesting mockingbirds, bless their fearless souls), a nest with four hummingbird babies (usually black phoebes), and “a huge hummingbird sitting on a nest in our tree” (also usually a black phoebe, or sometimes a bushtit).

  Since I answer my phone at odd hours, I have also gotten calls about baby raccoons, squirrels, rabbits, all types of birds (ravens, crows, hawks, owls, swifts, doves, ducks, gulls, pigeons, finches), and, late one night when nobody else could be reached, a bobcat cub, which I was dying to take but responsibly referred on. When Jean first started doing rescue, a nervous young man who spoke little English called her about a snake he found in his garage. Assuming it was some type of garden snake and too busy to draw out the details, Jean told the caller to bring the reptile to her house. An hour later, two guys arrived at her door with a fifty-pound boa constrictor, which, after some hesitation, Jean accepted.

  Fortunately, Los Angeles is home to a dedicated contingent of compassionate souls who rescue every form of wildlife under the Southern California sun and moon. Opossum rescuers are the most zealous of the bunch. Their passion for their chosen species runs so deep that they pull over when they see a dead opossum on the highway and race through traffic to check the pouch of North America’s only marsupial for babies.

  “What color is it?” I ask the caller with the perambulating bird.

  “Kind of a light grayish brown,” she answers vaguely.

  I give her the number of a rehabber who rescues songbirds and go back to filling empty feeders. I love mockingbirds, but I cannot rehab them because they imprint, or bond, or whatever you choose to call it. Young ravens and crows are worse. In their quest for attention and affection, they are akin to domestic dogs. And when you placate young wild animals with a tender human touch, it changes them forever. So rehabbers have to reject the overtures of creatures who attempt to bond, to ensure they retain their wild nature. Some people are good at this. I am not. I have too much of what John Keats called negative capability as well as a close corollary, empathy. When birds arrive at my door lost, broken, and terrified, the distinctions between us fall away, and they are no longer wild animals separate from my humanity. Instead, I am right there with them, sharing their troubles, fear, and pain. I see myself in them and want to protect, love, and reassure them.

  Apparently, I am not alone in this impulse. Recent studies indicate that people exhibit more compassion toward injured young animals than toward suffering adult humans, because empathy increases with the perception of a creature’s helplessness. And while young hummingbirds do helpless as convincingly as anything, all babies have evolved to activate the nurturing instinct. I could probably rehab red-tailed hawks, because they don’t hesitate to drive a talon into your face if you get too close. But there are so many wild animals I cannot rehabilitate. I couldn’t do baby bears or foxes. I would have them sleeping in the bed, listening to poetry, and eating homemade treats at the kitchen table. On top of fighting against the brutality of nature and human interference, I would be at war with myself all the time. And in the wildlife-saving business, there is no room for that level of internal conflict. It requires too much psychic energy, which is a rehabber’s most precious resource.

  That’s one reason I chose hummingbirds. They don’t want to get too close. They never imprint or bond. And once you let them go, they don’t come back. Or so I had always been told.

  CHAPTER 20

  Under Pressure

  WHEN YOU ARE JUGGLING sixty hummingbirds in rescue, you walk a lot. I walk to the ICU in the garage forty times a day, to the aviary every thirty minutes, in and out of the garage a hundred times carrying cages, up and down the patio for twenty minutes every hour, and in circles around the kitchen when I cannot remember what I am looking for—a phenomenon known to rehabbers as Kitchenheimer’s disease. Nearly every day of the summer brings in new birds with special needs. A trip to the kitchen can involve retrieving freeze-dried fruit flies for undernourished chicks kept too long on sugar water, nystatin for adult birds with fungal infections contracted from dirty sugar feeders, canola oil for all forms of sticky substances inhibiting flight, and extra sugar for injured adults who object to the comparatively bland flavor of formula.

  In the normal course of events I have an extremely sharp memory. Too sharp, in fact, as there are a lot of things I would prefer to forget and cannot. But at the height of hummingbird season, as the circuits get overloaded, the soft machine struggles to keep track of the endless details of individual birds, the demanding feeding schedule, the supplies that are always running short, the parade of finders appearing at my doorstep, and the daily barrage of phone calls, voicemails, and text messages coming in every five minutes. So gradually, over the course of th
e summer, as each damaged hummingbird’s troubles become mine, I shift into survival mode.

  Since March I have been getting up before dawn every morning so I can mix formula, fill syringes and feeders, change bathtub water, and put twenty cages outside before sunrise. Hummingbirds in the wild arrive at the sugar feeders at first light, so we mimic their habits to acclimate young birds to the same natural rhythm. Counting up the sixty-five birds on the patio and in the crowded ICU the second week in June, I can’t imagine taking in another hummingbird. But the fledgling season is gaining momentum and the wave is cresting.

  At six o’clock one morning, as I am removing sugar feeders I hang in the aviary before dark every night so the young adults can learn how to use them before their release, I notice a hummingbird sitting quietly on the end of a dowel perch that extends about six inches outside the aviary. I approach slowly until I am within a few feet of the slender, cigar-shaped black-chinned perched on the dowel watching me carefully.

  “Blacktop?” I ask in astonishment. As I inch closer, he doesn’t flinch. “I can’t believe it.”

  Blacktop came into rehab the summer before after being knocked out of his nest by a city gravel truck and tumbling into wet asphalt. When I got him, the immobilized nestling had dried asphalt caked all over his feathers and was nearly dead. For the next three days, every morning and afternoon I washed him with warm canola oil and then bathed him in soap and water. After his brilliant recovery, Blacktop became unusually interactive, like the brown-sugar twins. Perhaps Blacktop understood that I had saved his life, because he remained exceedingly friendly throughout rehab. Once inside the aviary, Blacktop became a lean hunting machine who could snap up fruit flies with effortless accuracy. But Blacktop never hunted randomly like the other young hummingbirds still in training. Instead, he displayed an intense focus and laserlike sense of purpose in his quest for protein. Blacktop’s preference for fruit flies was so overpowering that he would perch on the side of the Tupperware tray containing the rotten bananas for hours every day and nab newly hatched insects before they could get fully airborne.