Fastest Things on Wings

by Terry Masear

  After his release in late July, Blacktop perched on the dowel jutting out the side of the aviary every morning at dawn and waited for me to pick up the Tupperware container inside. And every morning when I shook the container, the new recruits in the aviary would make their clumsy attempts to catch the lively prey. Because of the young birds’ amateur skills, most of the fruit flies escaped out the aviary bars, at which point Blacktop would snap them up with mechanical precision. By September, when it was time for him to migrate, Blacktop was the most corpulent black-chinned I had ever seen. Then one day in early September, when I came out to put feeders in the aviary, he was gone, and I had not seen him since.

  “Is this for real?” I wonder aloud, certain I am imagining his return. But the black-chinned continues gazing at me calmly as if waiting for something. “Oh, of course. Like old times.” I enter the aviary through the security doors, pick up the Tupperware container, and shake it in the air. Several young adults drop from their perches and start chasing fruit flies as they swarm toward the aviary bars. And the second the unsuspecting escapees make their exit, Blacktop lifts off his perch and begins snapping them up with practiced ease and efficiency.

  “So how was Mexico?” I ask Blacktop as I exit the aviary. But he is too busy preening his wing feathers to engage in small talk. “You sure turned into a handsome devil,” I observe as I approach more closely to examine his purple throat and bleached white neck ring. At which point Blacktop rises off his perch, makes the soft chup-chup sound characteristic of a black-chinned in flight, hovers directly in front of my face a few seconds, then vanishes over the tall ficus tree in the driveway. After reconnecting with Blacktop, who came back to his dowel perch every morning that week before heading for the hills, I never again questioned the power of a hummingbird’s memory.

  On June 12, I release fifteen young adults from the aviary and exhale at the substantial reduction in my numbers. But that afternoon while I am cleaning perches and scrubbing cages, five new rescues come in, with all of the attendant stress and emotionally charged conversation their arrivals imply. My phone rings without relief all day and late into the night. I move all of the caged birds up a level and get to bed sometime around eleven thirty. In a rare mid-June reprieve, only two injured birds arrive the next day.

  At five o’clock the following morning, curious about how far rehabbers walk each day during peak season, I strap on a pedometer while I’m mixing hummingbird formula in the kitchen. Before noon, I take in three female nestlings—an Allen’s, an Anna’s, and a black-chinned—that, thanks to one obstacle or another, cannot be returned to the wild any time soon. That same morning I get twenty calls about nest crises, downed fledglings, and an Allen’s male chasing a female inside the caller’s expansive living room in Bel Air. By mid-June, female hummingbirds are no longer interested in breeding because their babies won’t fledge until late July, when food sources become scarce as flowers disappear. But in their quest to disseminate their genes, some motivated males disregard the laws of nature and continue pursuing unreceptive females despite the indifference and hostility they invariably encounter.

  At two p.m. my friend Ashley, the wildlife specialist from the Pasadena Humane Society, shows up at my door with five young birds—two Allen’s, an Anna’s, a black-chinned, and a fuzzy male rufous half the size of my little finger and too adorable for description. Most of the new arrivals go into the ICU, but two are feeder-trained and fly straight from my hand into starter cages. Between noon and three o’clock, another ten calls have come in. At three thirty I get a call from the Santa Monica animal shelter informing me they have a healthy fledgling that needs to be picked up. Since it is rush hour and I try not to be away from the house longer than thirty minutes during the day, I ask the officer to feed her sugar water for the next four hours until I can get there. After getting the new arrivals situated and on track, and as I am eating lunch at four o’clock, Jean calls and asks how things are going, even though she knows all too well.

  “I’ve had thirty calls already today. I’m ready to blow my brains out.”

  “Well, here’s some ammunition,” she says, and then she gives me the number of an exasperating caller who insists she has an abandoned nest, although all indicators point to the contrary. “She’s called me at least five times and I can’t get anything done. Can you just have her send you a photo of the nest?” Jean pleads. “I’ve been arguing with her all day.”

  “Okay.” I sigh. “And thanks, Jean. It’s reassuring to know I can depend on you for that extra push just as I’m hitting the wall.”

  While rushing to finish my now-cold microwave quesadilla, I call Jean’s latest headache and ask her to send me a photo. Just as Jean surmised, the plump Allen’s twins in the photo look perfect. After reassuring the caller, who is also exhausted by now, I head out to the garage. I have fifteen nestlings in the ICU, most of which are fully feathered this time of year. As I am feeding the ravenous crew, I notice a mite on the bill of a young Allen’s I have had for over a week. When I lift the plastic cup nest he and his twin are resting in, an army of mites swarms out onto the paper towels in the bottom of the ICU. Keeping the ICU chicks mite-free is a high priority, since if one nestling has mites, they all do. I know the mites did not come from Ashley’s Pasadena rescues, which always arrive clean. It’s a point of pride for her. And I isolated a pair of new arrivals that came in caked with mites this morning, placing them in a clear plastic small-animal box with a tight lid after dusting them thoroughly. But when I pick up the box, the unfastened lid slides off, and hundreds of mites are crawling all over the outside, on my hands, and, as I look more closely with magnification, on every bird in the ICU.

  Pushed past my emotional limit by this setback, hot tears stream down my face even as I frantically brush mites off everything in sight. When I pull myself together a minute later, because even my meltdowns have to be brief this time of year, I take everything out of the ICU, replace every nest, dust each bird with insecticide, and wipe down every inch of the interior with a sterile cloth. After an hour of damage control, the ICU and its colorful residents appear mite-free. As I am scrubbing the wooden shelf the ICU sits on, because even it has mites, I get a call from José, who has a fledgling that rode on the windshield wiper of his truck while he was barreling down the freeway at seventy miles per hour during his ninety-minute commute from Riverside to Los Angeles.

  “I was driving into the sun and had to turn the windshield washer on and I could hear a squeak every time the wipers moved, so I figured there was something wrong with them,” José reports. “But when I got home and lifted the wiper to check it, he was hanging onto the bottom edge, crying.”

  “So he was actually going back and forth on the wiper blade while you were driving?”

  “Yeah,” José replies in amazement. “I could see a dark bump on the wiper blade, but I thought it was a leaf or something.” Anxious about his hummingbird’s traumatic experience, José insists on delivering him from East Los Angeles immediately, even though it is rush hour and he won’t make it to my house before seven.

  Rehabbers always encourage finders to bring birds during off-hours, when the trip does not take so long. This strategy has the dual purpose of sparing the hummingbird from going hungry for hours while riding in the car and preventing the rehabber from being tied up while waiting for a finder to arrive. Even though I’m home, I’m still held up, and there are a lot of things I cannot do when I’m expecting someone to walk in with a distressed bird any minute. Waiting for people to show up with birds is the main reason I abandon all efforts to cook during the breeding season. Receiving a bird takes at least ten minutes, and—after I talk to the finder, get his contact information, clean up the new arrival, check for damage, and get her fed and situated in the ICU or a starter cage with the appropriate nest and syringes—most intakes require an hour. And without fail, every time I cautiously pull a few pans out of the cupboard and turn on the stove, the phone rings.

  Sho
rtly after talking to José, I get a call from a woman in Brentwood who had cut a nest with a pair of two-week-old chicks in it from a rosebush in her yard earlier that day and then carelessly set the babies on a covered porch on the other side of the house for a couple of hours. I explain to her that she needs to return the nest to its original location immediately and watch for the mother for half an hour. Thirty minutes later she calls and informs me the mother has not come back to feed the babies. I ask her to send me a photo but she insists there is no point and refuses to cooperate. When I ask her to bring me the nest she claims she is too busy and that I need to come and pick them up. I have fifteen screaming nestlings in the ICU and a baby on the way, so I explain to her why I can’t leave home. The conversation deteriorates so quickly that I lose my temper for the first time this year. After the caller hangs up on me, I sink onto the patio beside the starter cages in the late-afternoon sun and call Jean for one of our famous therapy calls because that’s what we do and, well, she owes me one. The second Jean answers I start the debriefing.

  “When I explain to her why I can’t come and pick up the nestlings she says, ‘I thought this is what you do, save hummingbirds.’”

  “Oh, please,” Jean scoffs.

  “Exactly, like she’s not trying to push any buttons. So I point out that I save thousands of hummingbirds every year, which is precisely why I can’t take an hour to drive out to her house. I tell her I have sixty birds in rehab right now and another one on the way and all of the other volunteers are working day and night. So then she gets ugly and says, ‘Well, I suppose you’d come out if I paid you.’”

  “Ugh,” Jean groans in disgust. “Don’t you hate it when some people do that? They think everything is about money.”

  “It’s so pathetic. So I tell her this isn’t about money, which really pisses her off because clearly everything is for her. So she says, ‘Well, I guess we’ll just have to let nature take its course, then.’”

  “What nature?” Jean exclaims incredulously. “She cut the nest!”

  “That’s what I said. ‘This is not nature. You created this problem by cutting the nest and now it’s your responsibility to correct that. These are living creatures that are going to die if you don’t do something.’ And in this irritating, blasé tone she’s like, ‘Yeah, well, I have a lot of other things to do today.’”

  “Oh, shit. Like her hair, probably.”

  “That’s what I figured. So I give her three options for where she can take the nest, and she’s like, ‘Those are all a long way to drive.’”

  “What a piece of work.”

  “So I ask her if she will feed the chicks sugar water until tonight, when I can come and get them, but no, she’s too busy, can’t be bothered. So finally I ask her if she feels tired and she says, ‘What do you mean?’ And I point out that it must take a lot of energy to remain that indifferent. But then she has to get in the last word about how I obviously don’t care that much about hummingbirds or I’d come and get them. By then I’m pushed so far past my limit all I can say is ‘Find something to love.’”

  “Besides herself.”

  “Exactly. So then of course she hangs up.”

  “How can anybody be that self-centered? It’s criminal.”

  “No shit. I’ll bet if it were some new eclectic cuisine hotspot that was the latest ‘it’ place on the west side, she wouldn’t hesitate to hop in her Escalade and drive way more than an hour to drop two hundred bucks so she could stuff her face.”

  “Wouldn’t think a thing about it,” Jean adds.

  “Her apathy was so bottomless. She was like a caricature of the idle princess, with such misplaced priorities. And the whole time I’m on the phone with her I want to explain how she needs to take time off from her busy nail-polishing, hairstyling, boutique-browsing schedule to attend to these fragile lives that she so thoroughly screwed up and that are so much more real than anything on her salon-hopping agenda. I mean, get over yourself.”

  “For starters. And grow a conscience.”

  “Right? Better to be broke and compassionate than rich and heartless. It’s time to turn the page.”

  “Long time ago.”

  “But then I think, what’s the point?”

  “No, there’s no use.” Jean sighs disparagingly. “It’s all about her.”

  I hang up, but my phone rings before I can set it down. A free-spirited young finder named Sophie is calling from the Hollywood Hills to report a grounded fledgling with a damaged wing.

  Still wound up from my conversation with the rich and aimless, I begin cautiously, “I have a couple of places you can take him if you don’t mind driving—”

  “Oh, I’ll drive him anywhere,” she says, cutting me off enthusiastically. “I just love him and he has so much personality. I’d do anything to save him.”

  God bless you, Sophie, I think, and I give her directions to my house and hang up. This bright light not only saved a helpless hummingbird but also restored my trembling faith in humanity.

  At 8:15, after taking in Sophie’s fledgling and José’s surprisingly unscathed male Anna’s who braved the freeway from Riverside, I put the caged birds in the garage for the night, feed the ICU nestlings one last time, and wash sixty feeders before slumping into a chair in the kitchen and checking my pedometer. I have walked eight miles today.

  “That’s some serious legwork,” I say to our cat Gyppy, who hops off the kitchen table and begins rolling around on my lap, oblivious to the hard-hitting day that is not yet behind me. Marathon walking is the reason for the physical exhaustion hummingbird rescuers begin straining under by the middle of the summer. Despite my rigorous karate conditioning, I am struggling to put one foot in front of the other. And Jean, who is seventy-two years old, is a force of nature.

  In a phone conversation at the end of my first grueling summer of rehab, I praised Jean for sailing through six months of stress and fatigue that I, twenty-four years her junior, nearly buckled under on more than one occasion. “Let’s face it, Jean,” I told her, “you’re Wonder Woman.”

  “Yeah, I wonder why I’m doing all this,” she responded dryly.

  As demanding as the physical component of rescue is, it pales in comparison to the emotional toll callers and birds exact on the lifesaver’s weary psyche. In reflecting on my contentious conversation with the indifferent nest cutter in Brentwood, I realize that Lao Tzu, who advises against arguing and fighting, would not be proud. Because people like her are exactly what he has been trying to warn me about and prepare me for. No fight. No blame, Lao Tzu counsels. Or as my karate sensei likes to say, “The best fight is no fight.” But in my frayed mental and emotional condition, I had failed utterly and given in to my anger. There may not have been anything I could do to save the two young hummingbirds, which is enough to kill me, because in dedicating my existence to this project every summer, I have so much invested. But in letting the coldhearted caller get to me, I allowed her to drag me down to her miserable level, and I ended up the loser. I resolve to spend more time consulting Lao Tzu as soon as I get enough sleep to focus my eyes on the written word.

  Sitting at the kitchen table that night, I begin scrolling through the fifty received calls on my cell phone when I come across the Santa Monica animal shelter. Under the pressures of the day, I had forgotten about the fledgling there whose life depends on me. I check the time on my phone. It’s eight thirty, and the shelter closes at nine. Without a minute to spare, I rush out to the garage, grab a small cage, fill a syringe with formula, give a baffled Frank, who is exercising in the back room, a kiss goodbye, and find myself in the car speeding west on Olympic Boulevard less than five minutes later. I arrive at the shelter just as it is closing and pick up a young female Anna’s who is encrusted with dried sugar water and whose chest feathers have been stripped off. When sugar water is spilled on a hummingbird, it desiccates the feathers, causing them to peel off in clumps. Because we get a lot of young birds with bare chests during the summer
, we are constantly alerting callers to this danger. But fledglings dropped off at animal shelters usually have been through it all.

  Despite her sorry condition, the sturdily built Anna’s is fundamentally sound and has sustained no damage that a warm bath and six weeks in rehab won’t cure. But she is cold and starting to lapse into torpor, so the second I get back to the car, I administer my magical breathing remedy and within five minutes have her gulping formula from a handheld syringe. After she has eaten nearly all of the formula I brought along, I get out of the car and go around to the passenger’s side. As I am buckling her cage into the passenger’s seat, two middle-aged men in expensive dark suits approach my car with a medium-size moving box.

  “Excuse us,” they interrupt from behind me. “Do you know what time they close?” the one holding the box asks as he cocks his head toward the shelter door.

  “At nine,” I reply, turning. “Why?”

  “Nobody answered the door when we rang the bell.” He shrugs.

  “Yeah, they’re closed now, but they’ll be open tomorrow morning at eight.”

  The two men look at each other blankly. “Well, we need to give them this box.”

  “What’s in it?” I ask warily.

  The guy holding the box opens the top and a mass of fuzz rushes into the corner. In the darkness, I can’t make out any distinct form.

  “What is it?”

  “Ducks,” they answer in unison.

  “Ducks?”

  “Yeah, nine baby ducks,” the one cradling the box explains. “They were following their mother through a busy intersection on Montana and a car almost hit them. When the car braked and honked its horn, the mother flew off and the babies started running around in circles in the middle of the intersection. So we jumped out and grabbed them because cars were squealing their tires all over the place trying to avoid hitting them.”