The Bluebird Effect

by Julie Zickefoose

  Each evening after I remove the birds, I set up a flood lamp in the tent, opening the flaps wide. Dozens of moths cling to the screen walls the next morning. The phoebes must learn to catch natural food. On June 22, Luther’s twenty-fourth day, he launches himself from his perch, grabs a little white miller moth off the tent wall, returns to his perch, masticates it, and swallows it. I cheer and whoop, and kiss Luther atop his head. He nips my nose. I can taste freedom, theirs and mine. Still, it will be four more days before they are reliably feeding themselves.

  The young phoebes progress in stages. Moths are snapped up the minute they fly across the tent, but mealworms in a dish are of less interest to these birds, naturally hard-wired to take flying insects. On their twenty-sixth day, they fly down and take mealworms off our extended palms—a huge leap from having them stuffed in their bills with forceps. On their twenty-eighth day, I leave shallow dishes of mealworms all over the tent. The supplies dwindle, so I know they’re being consumed, but Phoebe is the first to see Avis fly to a dish and gobble down a mealworm. We jump and cheer and slap high-fives.

  Luther and Avis are learning, becoming independent, and undergoing an attitude change as well. They’re uppity, quick, and flighty. Avis flares her crest and pecks my camera lens and my fingers if I get too close. Her tyrannid flycatcher tendencies are blossoming. By June 25, their twenty-seventh day, I can see that the time of separation is here. The young phoebes don’t want anything to do with us. They bathe lustily in a shallow bowl, preen, and bathe again. The tent fills up with crane flies, moths, gnats, mosquitoes, and fireflies overnight. That’s what they want. I tickle their bills with mealworms in the forceps, and they seem taken aback. “Why would I want that?” they seem to ask, then flash away on agile wings. They land, tails bobbing, and glare at me. This is the thanks I get, and it’s exactly what I want. I’m a mother who can’t wait to send her kids off to college. I’m dying for an empty nest.

  And then the skies open, and it rains and rains. I can’t let them out when it’s pouring. Young birds, especially captive-raised ones, don’t have good rain-coping skills. They get themselves soaked and don’t know how to take shelter. It can be the death of them. I don’t want to have come this far and worked this hard only to lose them to the incessant rain. The days roll by, and the phoebes grow and whirl and hit the sides of the tent. It’s time. I have to let them go. I open the tent doors on the morning of June 27. The phoebes hang around the yard, basking in the unaccustomed sun, taking crickets from the forceps, mealworms from a Pyrex plate. They stay in the yard all day.

  The morning of June 28 brings a pair of young phoebes, chipping to us as we groggily emerge from the house just after dawn. They are as glad to see us as we are to see them. Luther lands on my hand and gobbles down a good breakfast. Avis is happy to fly close and chat but won’t eat. And therein begins a big problem.

  A newly released bird should be ravenous and screaming for food, as was Luther. Birds I’ve raised and released go through a period of regression when they figure out that they aren’t on Easy Street anymore. From being aloof and flighty in the tent, refusing to be hand-fed, they turn back into begging juveniles. Just the sound of my voice brings them swooping in. They shadow me around the yard, just as they would follow their parents. Needless to say, this is my favorite part of raising birds—having these free-living birds nearby playing, foraging, learning fancy flying techniques, yet still coming for regular visits with me. I watch for them to catch their own food. As they get better at it, I cut back on the mealworms, and there comes a day when the bird comes in to chat but won’t take any food. That’s a beautiful thing, and it’s what I work toward. But it should not happen the morning after release.

  I watch Avis closely that morning and am disturbed to see her looking increasingly lethargic. No amount of tickling her rictal bristles can induce her to snap at a mealworm. Along about noon, I find her back inside the tent, whose flaps I’d left open in case the phoebes felt a need to return. Smart move, Avis. Maybe you came in by accident, or maybe you knew you were in trouble. I zip the tent closed and sit back to observe her. Luther sits just outside in a birch, separated by thin netting, as close as he can get to Avis. They are both obviously upset to be separated, so I bring Luther in to keep Avis company.

  I mix up some fresh kitten chow formula and begin to force-feed Avis. It is no fun having to capture this dear little bird, pry her bill open, and feed her the messy, loose formula, but I feel I have no choice. She continues to weaken, trembling as she tries to perch. How can we have come this far—thirty days old, apparently in the pink of health when she was released—only to fail?

  All I know is that I am not going to let her die without a fight. In midafternoon, I catch her for the last time and put her in a pet carrier. I’ll feed her formula every hour and see if I can turn her decline around. Poor Avis. She hates being force-fed (who wouldn’t?); I hate having to do it. I e-mail the avian rehabilitator Astrid MacLeod, who has raised just about everything and is my first resort when I’m stumped. Astrid suggests that Avis might have eaten a lightning bug, which could have made her sick. I had seen her catch one in the tent a couple of days before her release, but she took it back to the perch and released it, doubtless because it tasted bad. It’s a hypothesis. As she continues to decline, I decide to start Avis on an antibiotic, just in case she has something infectious that might be addressed. I figure it’s better than wringing my hands and watching her go downhill.

  Meanwhile, Luther is blazing new trails outside. The morning of June 29, I awaken to the sound of a phoebe singing in the lilac just outside our bedroom window. Three times Luther sings, a hurried, high-pitched, imperfect baby song. I don’t want to wake Bill, who is breathing deeply beside me, but I lie there listening, grinning from ear to ear. Phoebe had guessed Luther’s sex right!

  In the next three days, Luther does all the things a phoebe should do. He investigates the eaves and awnings, instinctively drawn to their cavelike structures. Perhaps most intriguingly, he figures out how to come back into the open tent for food and water. Tufted titmice have been raiding the dish I left outside for him, but they are leery of entering the fledging tent. He’s hit on an ideal solution to the problem.

  By Saturday, July 1, Avis is feeling well enough to be released from confinement in the pet carrier back out to the fledging tent. She is self-feeding again and looking brighter every day. I am happy and so relieved. I take her carrier out to the tent. Luther watches closely from a nearby birch. He chips excitedly, flies over to it, and hovers in front of its wire door, chittering and scolding. I take the carrier inside and zip the tent closed. When I open the carrier, Avis shoots out to the relative freedom of the tent. Luther throws himself against the mesh walls, trying to get back in. I open one tent flap just enough to let him dart inside. I am deeply moved by the strength of the phoebes’ bond. They sit together all day, glued into one dusky lump of feathers on the same perch.

  By the next morning, Luther is bored and hovering to get outside. I open the flap just a bit, and he zooms out. Avis stays put, not ready for the demands of the wild. Over the next few days, I leave the tent flaps open, and Avis takes longer and longer forays away from food and shelter. By the evening of July 4, both Avis and Luther are coming and going freely, taking mealworms, bathing and drinking inside the tent, then flying back outside. I see Luther attack a house sparrow that had sneaked in to steal some mealworms, giving it a wild, looping chase all around the yard. I begin to relax. It looks as though I’ve managed to pull Avis back from the brink yet again.

  That evening, it rains, and the rain comes harder and harder. The fledging tent billows and bucks in the gale. Why now, on Avis’s first night outside the tent? Luther tucks himself into his favorite lilac outside the bedroom window, where he is warm and dry despite the storm. Avis is wet, flying nervously from tree to tree. She is out of my hands now; I can’t catch her, and I know I shouldn’t. There will be storms in Avis’s life, and I won’t be there t
o shelter her. She sits low on a birch twig, wet, just out of reach as night falls. It pours all night and most of the next morning. I will never see her again.

  Luther comes in at first light, dry and warm despite the downpour. Avis never appears. I search under all the trees she liked to perch in but find no trace. Well, one out of two isn’t bad, I guess. I had to let Avis go, let go of the idea that I could save her no matter what. It hits me hard that, to survive, a wild bird has to be operating at 100 percent capacity. A rainy summer night shouldn’t kill a healthy bird. She was doing so much better, but in the end doing better wasn’t good enough. Not all of the lessons that songbird rehabilitation teaches are happy ones.

  Those with no concept of the extended juvenile dependency period of songbirds might find all this feeding, intervention, and training incomprehensible. Why didn’t I just kick them out the door and tell them farewell? Most people, even birders who should know better, seem to believe that, once a bird leaves the nest, it’s on its own. On the contrary, most songbirds feed their young until their neural connections are all complete, until they are able to catch sufficient food on their own. The more complex the bird’s foraging strategy, the longer the juvenile dependency period. American oystercatchers, which must learn to chisel shellfish off rocks and open bivalves by inserting their bills and cutting the adductor muscles, are dependent on their parents for at least sixty days! The adults open shellfish, feeding the edible parts to their young, as the juveniles watch and learn techniques.

  I don’t know how old phoebes are when their parents no longer subsidize them. I doubt anyone does. I could only try to judge their competence in foraging and make sure that they knew where they could always find food. I’ve seen adult tree swallows still feeding juveniles in mass migration flocks in September. Having hand-fed these birds since June 8, I was not about to take the risk of starving them with a too-precipitous release. My last intention was to make pets of these birds. On the contrary, I wanted them out of my hair—badly.

  Luther hung around another five days, suddenly disappearing on the afternoon of July 9. He was gone until the morning of July 11, Phoebe Linnea’s tenth birthday. She walked out on the porch in her short pajamas and fed him from her palm. He perched lightly on her hand, grabbed a mealworm, dropped it, and caught it before it hit the ground, barely three feet below. Phoebe looked at me, her eyes aglow with wonder and pride. We both knew there could be no finer gift than a wild phoebe, 100 percent beautiful, healthy, and strong, perched on her hand. Happy birthday, little Phoebe. There’s your phoebe. Not long after that, Luther was gone for good, but it felt right and natural, a good gone. Fall and winter 2006 came and went, and I thought about our phoebe summer and wondered how Luther was faring, wherever he was.

  On March 13, 2007, a male phoebe showed up in the yard, singing and chipping. He sat on an ash branch that hangs low over our driveway, the same branch Luther fetched up on when he was hungry and wanted to attract our attention. I walked toward the bird, and he flew a short distance, not farther away but a little closer to me. He chipped and wagged his tail. From there, he lit in the birch tree next to the birdbath, the same spot where Luther liked to rest. All phoebes look alike, and I could never prove that this bird was really Luther. But my heart filled up, like a mother’s does as she welcomes her child back from his first day at school, and I smiled like that, too.

  Piping Plover and Least Tern

  You Do What You Must

  I WENT TO FIND THEM in March, as the first warm front was sweeping in, the small pale plovers with the plaintive whistle. I never managed to dress warmly enough for the wind along the shore, and I marveled at their hardiness as the wind would lift and turn the snowy feathers of the piping plovers’ flanks. Peep-lo! The plover would stand erect, its button eye focused on me. Then it would duck its head and run ahead of me, orange legs a twinkling blur. Thus escorted, I’d walk the whole beach, noting the erosion after the overwashing waves of winter. I counted plovers, making notes on each one’s distinctive black breast and brow bands, hoping to be able to identify them through the season.

  For piping plovers, the more barren the beach, the better. Winter storms are their friends, but the same overwash that sweeps their nesting areas so alluringly clean is devastating in spring and summer, when eggs can be washed away. It would be enough to battle the elements in their habitat, but piping plovers and their frequent companions, least terns, have so much more with which to contend. They lay their eggs—four to a clutch for plovers, two or three for terns—in shallow, shell-lined scrapes right on the sand. Right underfoot.

  I’ve never been a recreational beach goer. I like beaches best when there’s no one around. The scent of cocoa butter, the sight of acres of prone bodies, and the noise of radios fighting with the lap of waves make me get up and walk into the clean offshore wind until the crowds fall away and my mind starts to work again. When I moved to Connecticut to work for The Nature Conservancy, in 1981, I was aghast to find the state’s small and struggling populations of least terns and piping plovers nesting, unprotected and often unnoticed, on the beach sand right amid the throngs. Off-road vehicle tracks crisscrossed some nesting flats. Tern chicks crouched to hide in the depressions made by the tires and were crushed. Dogs ran freely, raising the terns in an angry cloud; people dragged coolers and beach chairs through the colonies. I couldn’t know that and let it happen anymore. But I couldn’t think of anyone else who would be willing to take on the problem. For four full-time summer seasons, I worked to protect these birds all along Connecticut’s eighty-mile shoreline, doing whatever it took. For that, The Nature Conservancy allotted me mileage and a twelve-hundred-dollar stipend. I didn’t need benefits. I was young and healthy, running on outrage and passion.

  First, I’d have to tell people what the birds were and why they were there. I drew pictures of nesting terns and plovers, had them printed on heavy plastic, bought spruce firring in six-foot lengths, and nailed the signs together. I hadn’t quite figured out how to get the signs out to the nesting areas, so I lashed together bundles of eight, threw them on my shoulder, and trudged miles through loose sand. I hammered the signs into the sand around the colonies, marking off areas that stretched well beyond the nearest nests to give them a wide berth from crowds. I strung twine between the signs, a technique referred to as “psychological fencing.” Given a choice to comply with the signs’ request that they keep clear of the nesting colonies, most people would. But there were those who wouldn’t.

  I realized that simply posting the areas and leaving it at that would be inadequate to protect the birds. I’d have to provide a consistent presence that reinforced the barriers. I’d also have to come equipped to replace signs torn down by vandals, to talk to surly fishermen intent on driving their trucks through tern colonies at high tide, to explain to dog owners why they must leash their pets, to deal with nudists who sought out the privacy of bird-nesting areas for sunbathing. I discovered that the people who sunbathe nude in tern colonies are not the ones you’d necessarily want to see in dishabille.

  I found out things about Connecticut residents that I hadn’t known. There is a persistent tradition in urban Italian and Hispanic populations of gathering and eating birds’ eggs. How convenient, that I’d marked the colonies and roped them off, letting the hunter-gatherers know just where to look. I found a family in New Haven sitting near a tern colony with a picnic basket and smiles on their faces. A cloud of least terns hovered overhead, screaming and diving. I asked to see what was in the picnic basket, and its dark interior hid three fluffy, frightened least tern chicks. “We found these and we’re going to take them home and raise them. What do you feed them?” When I explained that the birds’ parents were right overhead, diving and defecating on us, and that the chicks belonged here on the beach and not on their screened porch, the woman exclaimed, “How can there be birds nesting here? There aren’t any trees!” Piping plover eggs kept disappearing from one small beach in Bridgeport, so I reluctantly to
ok down the signs and string that marked the area. I gathered broken glass off the beach and scattered it near the nests, and the predation stopped. You do whatever works.

  On Long Island, while training volunteer colony monitors, I found a private beach club that was unwilling host to a colony of least terns. The manager announced his intention to place scarecrows in the colony so their beach volleyball games could resume. Over and over, I was struck by beach goers’ attitudes: that these beautiful and imperiled birds were nothing more than a nuisance to be shooed off. I heard enough references to the Hitchcock film The Birds to make me never want to see it again. People couldn’t seem to connect that these birds had a good reason to be diving and screaming at them: their vulnerable eggs and chicks lay right underfoot. I developed a leaflet that I could hand out to anyone who’d take it, explaining the birds’ predicament: that they were declining in numbers, highly vulnerable to disturbance and predation, and couldn’t simply go somewhere else to nest. On the mainland beaches of Connecticut, there is precious little “somewhere else.” In the modern world, where beaches are the most hotly contested real estate on the planet, a beach is a crazy place to try to lay one’s eggs and raise young.