The Bluebird Effect

by Julie Zickefoose

  For the next two days, Sunshine would follow me around the yard, singing from the closest perch he could find. I don’t know why he did it; whether, like a newly captured, hand-fed falcon, he’d imprinted on me in those three weeks of intensive feeding and therapy; whether he considered me a substitute mate, parent, or rival. I know far better than to make the anthropomorphic leap to say he was trying to thank me. What does a bird know of gratitude? Perhaps quite a lot more than we think. I can only say that he followed me, singing, and, in singing, touched an inarticulate place in my heart. By May 18, he was gone, headed north, I hoped, tracking his own course once again.

  Savannah Sparrow

  Forever Wild

  ANY AVIAN rehabilitator can tell you that, when catching a bird, housecats almost always bite down hard on the right wing where it joins the bird’s body, crushing the shoulder joint so that their prey is instantly and permanently disabled. Birds die by the hundreds of millions, and more than a billion small mammals die every year at the claws of some of our 90 million pet cats, tasty supplements to their bowls of dry cat chow, an anodyne for the boredom of house pets left to roam outdoors. An estimated 100 million additional stray cats add to the ranks of bird and small mammal predators. Some of these feral cats are romanticized by their admirers, housed and fed in colonies, left to range and hunt city parks and green spaces, clearing them of birds and small mammals. Whatever feral cat advocates and laissez-faire cat owners may rationalize about hunting as natural behavior for felines, this preventable carnage by an introduced predator is unnatural and unconscionable. Working in songbird rehabilitation gives me a close look at what cats do; talking to cat owners on the telephone helps me understand the denial and misplaced sentimentality that permit the killing to go on.

  What becomes of a wild bird with a crushed shoulder joint, should it manage to escape a cat? It makes its way into dense cover, looks for food and shelter as best it can, and dies within a few days from trauma and infection. Its fate may play out quite differently if it is one of the very few found and taken in by people.

  OCTOBER 9, 1989. The Hardings’ cat caught a small, streaky, brown sparrow under their bird feeder in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Their neighbor Doreen Lammer took the injured bird and kept it in a cage in her kitchen for five weeks. It grew fat on parakeet seed but never became tame. Doreen, referred by a mutual friend, brought the bird to me on November 13. It was a Savannah sparrow, waylaid on its autumn migration, a bird I’d be happy to see through binoculars, now lying quietly in my hand. By that point, its right wing had healed, partially extended, with a crushed shoulder joint. No amount of surgery could have made this bird releasable, whether I’d been able to take it to a veterinarian minutes or months after the event.

  What to do with this small, rather uncommon sparrow? I could euthanize it, knowing that it would never live like a Savannah sparrow again. I could look for a nature center that wanted an injured Savannah sparrow for display. Or I could keep it, cobble together a seminatural diet, use it as a model for sketches and paintings, and try to give it a decent life in my house. My foolish heart won out, and I entered unhesitatingly into another relationship with a sparrow. Little did I know that I’d be fixing this bird a hot breakfast, changing its cage papers, clipping its nails, and trimming the clumsy feathers on its injured wing for the next fourteen and a half years.

  I removed millet from its diet and switched the sparrow over to a commercial pelleted food meant for canaries. I supplemented with live mealworms in moderation. Whenever I caught a spider in the house, I tossed it into the cage, where the bird pounced on my offering, seeming to savor its leggy spiciness. Fresh fruits and vegetables, natural millet sprays, and occasional treats of pasta, Cheddar cheese, scrambled eggs, and mashed sweet potato rounded out its fare. Vanna began to sing the next spring, a sweet, thin trill that started and ended with a sneezy stutter. By then, his feminine name, a corruption of Savannah, had stuck fast.

  One might think that a bird kept in captivity for almost fifteen years would become tame, but Vanna never surrendered his wildness. When I approached the cage, as I did perhaps twenty-five thousand times over the years I kept and tended him, his reaction was always the same: drop to the floor and scuttle around like a mouse, looking for a corner where he could hide. I had no desire to tame him, but after a while I found his behavior a bit tiresome.

  To be fair to Vanna, I was the perpetrator of indignities, such as the twice-monthly toenail clip and the doubtless uncomfortable wing trim that kept the skewed feathers on his injured wing from impeding locomotion. But as the chef of what amounted to a gourmet bird restaurant, I felt I was owed something more than dread.

  I felt sorry for Vanna, and I wished I could keep him outdoors in a grassy place. But a bird robbed of all powers of flight is immensely vulnerable to raccoons, weasels, chipmunks, opossums, even mice; it would be almost impossible to create a safe outdoor cage for him. As an imperfect solution, I would occasionally let Vanna explore the studio while I cleaned his cage. Ironic as it seems, a cage represents security to a captive bird, and visitors were amazed when I’d return with Vanna’s freshly scrubbed cage, tip it up, and say, “Back to your cage. Chop, chop, Vanna!” This timid, wild bird would run directly toward me and scuttle back under the sheltering bars.

  I had had Vanna for only ten days when my veterinarian gave me a dark-eyed junco to tend. Nothing was broken and his wings were fine, but he could get no lift when he tried to fly. Dr. Giddings suspected punctured air sacs, probably from a housecat’s claws, and wanted to see if two weeks of rest and supportive care could restore his flight. Because both juncos and Savannah sparrows travel in flocks, I released the junco into Vanna’s cage. At nightfall, the two birds were huddled into a single ball of soft feathers. My heart melted, and I wondered what would happen if and when the junco was ready for release.

  After twelve days, the junco was healed and frantic for release. I curtained off the windows, closed the living room doors, and opened the cage door. Vanna hopped out and began inspecting the corners for spiders. The junco burst out and flew to the highest shelf in the room. Oh, sweet victory—he’d fly free again! I opened a window and wished him well as he arrowed out into a pearly December sky.

  Vanna had been watching, too. He scuttled back into his cage, chipping frantically. He chipped all afternoon, calling to the junco, and became deeply depressed, refusing food and water. As a palliative, I put him in with two other long-term captives, a house finch and an orchard oriole. The oriole avoided Vanna; the finch pecked him whenever he drew near. For the next fourteen years, Vanna would be caged alone but for a mirror. He roosted next to it and pecked it gently, sang to it, and waited patiently while I washed it of the myriad small spots of his attempts to feed it.

  What would Vanna have chosen, given a choice of dying quickly or living out his life in captivity? I try to divine this for each bird in my care. If it is frantic and miserable, dashing itself against the cage bars until it bleeds; if it panics and can’t settle down in my presence; if it seems unhappy even after a few weeks of acclimation, I choose euthanasia. If it eats well, seems reasonably calm, sings, preens, and enjoys the company of other birds, I can’t bring myself to end its life. It’s clear to me that some birds are better suited to captivity than others, both on a species and on an individual level. One cardinal might calm down nicely, while another may remain insanely wild, ricocheting off the bars of its cage. In this, as in every other avenue, birds demonstrate their individuality. Vanna seemed reasonably content to stay with me, and so he stayed.

  I never knew how old Vanna was when he was brought to me. He was in adult basic (winter) plumage. He could have been a few months or several years old. By the fourteenth winter of our lives together, Vanna had visibly aged. His eyes were a little sunken; the scutes on his legs and feet were thick and raised, like an old man’s toenails. He fell from his perch with increasing regularity, lying on his back on the cage bottom, scrabbling feebly. I removed the high perch
es, laid soft paper towels down on the cage floor, and checked on him many times daily. On February 3, 2004, I found the small, still form in the cage corner, as I’d anticipated for several years. He’d lived longer than any Savannah sparrow known to man or science. Doreen, who’d brought him to me, had sent me a box of fruit in gratitude every Christmas for more than a decade, but Vanna outlasted even her considerable generosity.

  I felt a curious detachment, born, perhaps, of Vanna’s resolute wildness, his refusal to cozy up to his keeper. I dug a small hole beneath some emerging daffodils and placed his tiny body, wrapped in tissues, in the cold earth. My eyes blurred over, and I knew I’d miss his wheezy song, the patter of his feet on newspaper, the bright, mouselike gaze of his eyes. I still don’t know if I did right by that sparrow, keeping him all those years. In living as long and as well as he did, he gave me a gift, a glimpse of what I may be getting into with each bird I take in. Remembering Vanna and knowing what lies ahead informs my decisions for the next time I’m presented with a shoe box, holes punched in the lid, a small, frantic scrabbling inside.

  Orchard Oriole

  I Know Why the Caged Bird Flutters

  IN THE COUNTRY, when you leave the garage door open overnight, there’s always hell to pay in the morning. Raccoons mine the garbage cans and sort through the recycling; they get into what ever might be gotten into. A lactating female raccoon is little more than a mini-bear. Recently, one tore a forty-pound sack of cracked corn into small shreds, and I was greeted with a golden pile to salvage and clean up. I straightened up from the task, and there in the rafters was an old cage, memories sifting through its brass bars. An orchard oriole had lived there for seventeen years, hopping with a pronking sound from branch to branch. That and her garbled, chattering song had been the soundtrack to my work, since her cage stood near at hand in my studio.

  She had come to me as a juvenile, the victim of a free-roaming cat with a taste for exotica. The same cat owner—she had seven to clean up after—had also brought me a gray catbird and a wood thrush. The catbird was a lightly injured nestling; I raised and released it. I could see that the wood thrush was dying when the cat’s owner brought it to me. Only a juvenile, it had a bad compound fracture of the left shoulder, the same injury suffered by the oriole. As many times as I’ve seen the injury, I get angrier every time at good birds gone to waste for a housecat’s play.

  I looked at the woman as she cradled the little thrush, tears coursing down her cheeks. Having devoted weeks of care to the birds she’d already brought, I’d implored her to keep her bloodthirsty pets indoors. The thrush’s shoulder break was inoperable, and sepsis from the teeming bacteria on the cat’s teeth and claws had set in. There was nothing I could do to help now. Even if massive antibiotics could halt the infection, this thrush would never fly again. I had lost any desire to make it easy for the cat lover to relieve her conscience.

  “Tell you what. Instead of giving this bird to me, you take it home, and you can make it comfortable while it dies, and maybe the consequences of letting your cats hunt will sink in on you. All this because you don’t want to disappoint your pets by keeping them inside.” She drove away with the dying thrush, and she never brought me another injured bird. I doubt that there was an epiphany or a reformation involved. If I owned seven cats, I’d probably want them outside, too.

  In the meantime, I still had a gravely injured oriole to nurse. I had thought at first that she would die, too, lying in the bottom of a shoe box, pinkish orange lung tissue exposed by a long gash on her side. Her right wing was hanging, the humerus broken just below the joint. I thought perhaps to have her euthanized, but in the car on the way to the veterinarian’s office, she crawled her food dish and helped herself to some strawberries. I watched the little bird masticating the fruit, her and her eyes bright, and decided to have her br wing pinned instead. It didn’t seem to be my place to deny this bird a chance to live.

  Dr. Giddings asked me to hold her still while he pinned Ora Lee’s humerus; it was that or amputate the wing. As I held the oriole, watching in mingled fascination and revulsion, the room began to swim. The next thing I remember is Giddings’s voice. “Get her out of here.” As I toppled sideways, a helpful vet tech caught me and stretched me out on the operating room floor. I came to in time to take my bandaged oriole home. This—and a vast ineptitude in the harder sciences—is why I am a writer and not a veterinarian.

  That was 1989. I moved several times, married Bill, bought land and a house, bore two children; the millennium turned, and still the little green oriole with the immobile wing hopped and sang in the cage in my studio, outliving every other orchard oriole known to science. Seventeen years—who’d have thought I’d still be whipping up sweet potato and butternut squash, three-cheese ravioli, and fresh fruit for her every blessed morning? Granted, the longevity of captive birds in protected environs may be biologically irrelevant, but the wild bird closest in age was recaptured in South Dakota, where it had been banded as an adult nine years and seven months earlier.

  Living with a bird close at hand, one can learn things about birds that elude the casual bird watcher, and even the researcher. I named the juvenile oriole Ora Lee, after one of my mother’s bridge partners. Despite all she’d been through, Ora Lee was unfazed by surgery and captivity. She moved with quick assertiveness, bouncing from perch to perch, banging on her mirror, chasing and pestering her cagemate, a male house finch who had to be removed after two batterings. She was dexterous and inventive, holding food in her toes, titmouse style, for processing. Given a mealworm, she’d behead it, then gingerly remove the coffee brown intestinal tract, flinging the nasty bit with a quick flick of her bill, painting the walls around her cage with impromptu oriole art. She liked to mess with thread and grasses, pulling and weaving them in a pantomime of nesting behavior. In spring, when the windows were open, a single chuck call from a wild orchard oriole outside sent her into a frenzy of calling and fluttering. It was painful to watch her strive to catch a glimpse of another oriole in the trees outside. I wished that she had even limited flight capacity, that she might be placed in an outdoor cage, but the cat had seen to that.

  Wherever I’ve lived, from Connecticut to Ohio, there comes a time in late August when the haze blows away and the nights are clear and starry, with a chill that portends autumn. On such a night—August 24, 1989—Ora Lee began hopping and fluttering around her cage, looking for a way out, a way to anywhere. The next night was a repeat—as soon as darkness fell, she began to flutter. She was migrating, as much as a caged bird could migrate.

  Unwilling to face another night diced to sleepless bits by her racket, I put her cage in the kitchen. After a few nights, her tail was battered and worn from contact with its bars, so I lined the bathtub with newspapers and released her to flutter harmlessly in its larger confines. I marveled at the pointless but powerful imperative that sent her to bash herself against the bars each night in a mock flight to Guatemala. She was still at it at Thanksgiving, flying for part of the night and sleeping much of the day. Living in a tiny cottage with a migratory oriole was asking more of me than I’d have foreseen.

  Gradually, the Zugunruhe (migratory restlessness) died down, until spring—March 22. Her nocturnal madness started afresh; Ora Lee was on her imaginary way back for the spring. I sighed and reinstated our nightly bathtub routine, wondering if all the orchard orioles had awoken at precisely the same moment across Central America, hearing the call to fly north. It was a compelling thought, that this captive bird might be answering so ancient an imperative. I had no choice but to accommodate her as best I could.

  I wasn’t the only one having trouble adjusting to her captivity. Fall and winter and spring came, and Ora Lee never molted. She kept the same coat of feathers—her first basic plumage—for two and a half years. She still hadn’t molted by the first of November, 1992. We moved from Maryland to Ohio, Bill driving a big rental van, I driving my old station wagon, remade into an ark of sorts, bursting with cages
and houseplants.

  In the fuss and furor of relocating, I ran out of the mealworms that had been Ora Lee’s staple. The sudden loss of this protein-rich item seemed to trigger a catastrophic molt, and she dropped both fat and feathers. New pinfeathers burst through, and by the end of November 1992 she was reborn, a sleek, shiny yellow-green. From then on, I strictly limited her mealworm intake to six per day, saving them as treats, and kept her on a lean diet of commercial bird chow with mixed fresh fruits and vegetables. Scrambled eggs, Cheddar cheese, lasagna, cake, cinnamon toast, and bits of cookie were only a few of the infrequent snacks that delighted her. For the rest of her years, Ora Lee molted regularly in late summer, and she was as beautiful at seventeen as she had been at three. She started each morning with a bath in the fresh water of her drinking cup, soaking herself and then preening vigorously until she was dry. She bathed so regularly and enthusiastically that I was forced to cut Plexiglas sheets to fit her cage sides, lest everything within ten feet of the cage be sprinkled into ruin.