The Bluebird Effect

by Julie Zickefoose

  With almost three decades of vulture encounters behind me, I’ve recently sought out the teachings of an assortment of Native American sources, developing a picture of the vulture as a personal totem. When vultures began to appear to me, I knew nothing of totems; Native American mysticism wasn’t in fashion. It’s in retrospect that I’ve become intrigued.

  The process of discovering one’s spirit guide, apparently, has an element of Zen (to mix religious philosophies just a bit). You do not choose your spirit guide or totem; rather, when the time is right, it appears to you. Knowing little of totems, I’ve never gone out looking for vultures, but I’ve seen them when I’ve sought guidance, more times than I can recall. Can a vulture smell turmoil and anxiety? It can certainly smell a ripe opossum. Do I emanate an aroma of indecision from time to time?

  Reading further on totems, I learned that each animal possesses a number of characteristics that are open to interpretation. These seem fairly obvious overall, derived from the animal’s appearance and behavior as commonly experienced by human beings. Not surprisingly, the owl is usually touted as a symbol of wisdom (although, having raised an owl, I’d much rather look to a corvid like a crow or raven for intelligence). Vultures, with their ability to soar on motionless wings, are described as demonstrating the efficient use of energy. Just as literally, the vulture totem is said to guide us to the cleanup of psychic messes. “If a vulture has flown into your life, you are being asked to remedy a messy situation and turn it into something positive.” Well, all right. We tend to be in a bit of a mess at life’s crossroads. From there, vultures are said to symbolize rebirth and transformation, as they consume putrefying flesh and gain strength and life from it. I especially like this one: “For those with this totem, you will be noticed more for what you do than how you appear.” (A particularly comforting notion as I trudge past the half-century mark, undyed, unnipped, and untucked.)

  The totemic significance of the vulture goes on and on, in flights of verbal fancy. From Starstuffs.com:

  Vulture teaches the power of purification of the mind, body and spirit. Vulture aids accomplishing tasks through great patience and vision, using your sense of smell and discernment, and how to glide and soar with your own energy. He teaches efficiency in actions and promises that changes are imminent. He shows how to restore harmony of thoughts and feelings so one can reach new heights with little effort.

  It all has the smell of augury about it, the newspaper horoscope kind of insight, in which a universal truth acquires sudden and special significance when applied to your current situation. And yet . . . I can’t shake the conviction that vultures and I have a deep connection.

  Just as the online mystics suggest, I have been making offerings to vultures in thanks for their guidance. The freezer, for me, is a place where good food goes to die. It lies in state, with occasional viewings, until a major power outage thaws it and gives me permission to toss it out. I load up a muck bucket and haul it out to the middle of the field, where turkey vultures have a field day sampling sausage, steaks, roasts, chicken thighs, and breaded nuggets. For the record, even a turkey vulture won’t eat a processed chicken nugget. I stopped buying them for my son when I saw the vultures picking around them.

  So perhaps there’s more than a little chance involved when vultures drift over our land. They may be looking to give me spiritual guidance, but it’s more likely that they’re remembering the last freezer-burned pork roast they devoured here. And yet I don’t mean to make too much fun, because the turkey vulture has manifested itself to me in unusual ways. Native American spirituality, virtually across all groups, holds that albino animals have spirit connections and are not to be killed. Hunting or killing them can lead to loss of hunting skills. White is associated not with purity but with wisdom and a connection to higher powers. White animals and birds hold powerful totemic significance for Native Americans.

  We had lived in our Ohio home little more than a year when, on a gray, dreary day, turkey vultures came tilting over the snow-streaked hills. I was working in a small back bedroom studio, glancing out the window from time to time, enjoying the slow return of spring on their dark wings. My macaw, Charlie, was perched near the north window, watching the vultures, when suddenly he voiced a startled raaaaawk!—a low, guttural sound he makes when he spots soaring raptors. There was such emphasis in the call that I looked up from my work. There, over the gray-blue hills, was a snow-white turkey vulture, tilting and riding the March winds with the rest. It was a moment that, had it happened now, I’d have recorded forever with a telephoto lens. But I had no camera, so I grabbed a sketchbook and swiftly sketched the bird, with three black primaries on its right wing, a scattering of black secondaries, a few black tail feathers, smudges of black on its secondary coverts, and a charcoal gray head. I believed that I would never see such a thing again.

  When the bird had passed by, headed north, I began a quest for information. Had anyone ever recorded a white turkey vulture before? I painted a small study from my detailed sketches and sent it off to Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Kempton, Pennsylvania, hoping that the bird’s pattern of black feathers would prove distinctive enough that someone else might have reported it. And that fall, a turkey vulture matching its description was spotted by Hawk Mountain observers as it migrated through Veracruz, Mexico!

  I savored that contact with the white bird, caught up in the magic of having seen a vulture that was perhaps one in several million. In the early summer of 1994, I drove to Pittsburgh to give a talk. I’d traveled less than an hour north when I spotted a turkey vulture, white, with precisely the same black feathering on its right wing and tail as the bird I’d seen over my house. I can’t begin to estimate the odds against seeing a white vulture in the first place, much less encountering what was undoubtedly the same bird a year later. Word of my initial sighting had spread, and a fellow member of the Wheeling-based Brooks Bird Club called that summer to say that he had repeatedly seen the white vulture at a roost near my second sighting in Woodsfield, Ohio. Signs, signs, everywhere are signs, and this one, perhaps the most powerful spirit totem one could imagine, had appeared to me unbidden not once but twice.

  But I have sought them out, too, the turkey vultures, hiking through the Connecticut woods to a well-hidden rock outcropping where I’d heard they were nesting. The climb to the cavelet wasn’t bad, but, as my head topped the ledge, I heard a deep and guttural hissing sound—as if Darth Vader himself was lurking in its farthest recesses. It went on and on without a break for breath, making me wonder if vulture chicks were capable of circular breathing, like some saxophone players I’ve heard. A low, resonant exhalation that one might expect from a huge anaconda or Komodo dragon, the sound scared me in a primal way, the way my first bear sighting did. I suddenly wanted to get out of there. Peering back into the cave, I found two almost spherical chicks covered with filmy gray down, hunkered back on their heels and hissing for all they were worth. I knew enough not to press it and took a quick look at them with my binoculars, lest I be covered in a projectile presentation of their last meal. Jitters and all, it was a never-to-be-repeated thrill to visit a vulture nursery.

  Years later, I was driving the familiar path to home over the low-lying area in southern Ohio that we call Whipple Flats. There, near the banks of Duck Creek, I saw a turkey vulture standing on the gravel shoulder with no explanatory carcass nearby. Its head was hanging down; it was a picture of dejection. I pulled over and went to its side. The vulture’s eye rolled, but it moved not a centimeter when I knelt beside it. “What’s wrong, hon?” I asked. The vulture sighed a tiny, low sigh and looked at me, making no effort to walk or fly away. “I’ll take you home and we’ll figure it out, okay?” I tucked the unresisting bird under my arm and rode the rest of the way with it lying on my lap like a tame hen.

  When we got home, I stood the vulture on our picnic table and stretched first one wing, then the other. I felt all the long bones of the wings. There were no breaks, no bruises. The legs chec
ked out, too. But the vulture’s keel stood out on its breast like a blade, the muscles on either side wasted. This bird was starving.

  I took it out to the vegetable garden, which is protected by an eight-foot fence, and spread a blanket of clean straw. I built a shelter with lawn chairs and a tarpaulin and placed a dog dish of clean water inside. I cut up some raw chicken, bone and all, and knelt by the vulture’s side. Its eyes brightened when it saw the food, and it gently took several pieces from my fingers. I laid the rest of the chicken down and left it alone. When I returned an hour later, the food was untouched. I offered more from my hand, and the vulture eagerly ate. It was to accept food only from my hand for the rest of its ten days of recuperation.

  The bird continued to eat and gain a little weight and strength, but it never lost its docility. I became concerned that it did not attempt to fly, and a summer trip was approaching, so I decided to take it to the Ohio Wildlife Center in Columbus on our way to the airport. As we were loading the car, my husband, Bill, asked, “Hey, what are you going to do with that vulture while we’re gone?” I hesitated before answering. “Well, I was hoping to drop it off at the bird hospital on our way to the airport.” Bill blanched visibly, knowing what might await us.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, I’m not. It’ll be okay. It’s really tame.”

  And it was okay for the first ten miles, riding quietly in a dog carrier in the back of our van. I started to relax. Maybe this was going to work. I had called ahead; the veterinarian was waiting to give the bird a thorough exam and place it with a raptor rehabilitator who had experience with vultures. And then it became apparent that the bird was not okay, and neither were we. Although I pride myself on coming up with evocative prose, the awesome stench of vulture vomit defies description, especially when confined to a closed vehicle and recirculated in its air-conditioning system. Gagging, we pulled over, and I set about removing the noisome bolus from the pet carrier without further upsetting our passenger. I have blocked the memory of what Bill said about the advisability of transporting a vulture in the Bird Watcher’s Digest company van, but the smell lingers in my brain’s most primitive centers, doubtless an adaptive trait, to prevent my ever trying to transport a well-fed vulture by auto again.

  We made it to the hospital and gladly turned our cargo over to people more used to vulture vomit than were we. It recovered uneventfully; the only thing the veterinarian found was a heavy parasite load, which could conceivably have sapped its strength enough to render it flightless. Deloused and built up, it was released, I hope never to find its way to a roadside, hanging its head, again.

  I always wondered if that bird consciously sought help by standing by the roadside when it lost the strength to fly. I told its story to my friend Charles Kennedy, then president of the Louisiana Ornithological Society, and Charlie told me a story of his own.

  While out gardening in his yard one spring day, Charlie heard screeching brakes and the thump of a collision on the road. He paused, then resumed his labors, figuring a car had hit a rabbit or woodchuck. Some time later, a turkey vulture came walking through the trees into Charlie’s yard, dragging one wing. “Looks like you’ve got yourself in a fix, old son,” Charlie said. “Go on back into the woods. There’s nothing I can do for you.” The vulture stood looking at Charlie as he turned the soil. Needing to fetch a tool, Charlie headed for the garage, and when he turned around to come back out, the vulture was standing right behind him, having followed him from the garden.

  Charlie considered the bird. “Well, all right, I’ll make some calls and see if we can find somebody to fix you up.” He headed for the house, vulture hobbling right behind.

  I wish the story had a happy ending, but despite the efforts of a veterinarian and rehabilitator, the vulture didn’t make it. Still, it left Charlie and me with the slightly spooky conviction that these two vultures had deliberately sought our help when they were in greatest need. Tables turned on the totem.

  I watch the sky as I walk these Appalachian foothills, and I still lift my eyes to the heavens when I’m wondering and worrying. But I don’t wonder anymore if the vultures come to me for a reason. I know there’s no answer, and it doesn’t really matter why they come; it’s enough that they do. Vultures make me smile, like sun sparkling on water.

  Chestnut-fronted Macaw

  First Comes Love . . .

  AS I WRITE, the emerald green head of a macaw emerges from under my desk. He has crawled up my leg from a favorite perch on my foot. He’s been doing this for nineteen years, and I expect him to be sitting on me, giving creaky calls and showering me with feather dandruff, for at least the next twenty-five. He’s the relationship I can’t get out of.

  I bought this parrot in 1989, the first time my biological clock rang. I needed something young and helpless to care for, but since I was living hand-to-mouth as a field biologist, a baby wasn’t in the cards. It was one of the moments in my life when a crystal ball might have been helpful: to look forward nineteen years and see myself still fixing a hot breakfast every morning for a bird; to see that sweet, cooing baby parrot morph into a crotchety tyrant, not averse to sinking his powerful beak into flesh to make a point.

  And yet, Charlie speaks a few words; he has a flair for slapstick. In the company of people, he listens to the conversation and laughs loudly at precisely the right moment. He waddles around the house, toenails clicking on linoleum, looking for a nice closet where he can hole up. The bare skin on his cheeks is soft and warm. He likes to be hugged.

  A captive parrot selects the only mate it can find (in this case, Charlie’s picked me), but I just refuse to follow the plan he’s laid out for me. I share my affections with another of my species, even when Charles punctures my skin to prevent this perceived infidelity. I won’t eat the breakfast he regurgitates for me, no matter how tenderly proffered. Occasional furtive copulations with my sock-clad foot net him nothing but a temporary release. He points out and protects his chosen nest site, a grotto under the sink, with cracked squawks and sudden rushes at passersby. But I can’t succumb to his will, crawl under the sink, and lay the two round white eggs that Charlie believes I must have in me, which he so longs to incubate and protect. He crouches in the half darkness, looking up at me with a Don King wig of feathers over crazed golden eyes. Come on in, baby. You know you’re ovulating.

  Every once in a while, I look down on myself, a middle-aged woman with a middle-aged parrot dropping dandruff and worse on her shoulder. Sometimes, after he has perforated my finger or lip in a fit of pique, it occurs to me that I might just surrender Charlie to a parrot rescue group. Just as quickly, I discard the idea. Who am I to dump this slightly mad bundle of idiosyncrasies and multicolored feathers on anyone else? We have a history together, forged in stone on that fateful December day in 1989 when I gathered a baby macaw in my arms and said, “I do.”

  Parrots can be delightful. But they are raunchy, awful pets. I’ll probably be an old, old lady before I figure out what has kept Charlie and me together all these years. And I’m sure Charlie, that tatty old rotter, will be sitting on my shoulder when I do. Maybe it’s love. But it feels a little more like marriage.

  The essay printed above aired on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered on Friday, March 14, 2008. Three days later, it was still the number one most e-mailed story on NPR’s website. Only a speech on race relations by the presidential candidate Barack Obama finally displaced Charlie from his virtual throne. Do millions of listeners keep aging parrots in a corner of their living rooms, or did the commentary strike a chord with anyone who has entered into the human-animal bond of love, tolerance, and codependency?

  It’s possible to grow old along with one’s parrot, and that makes parrots unique in the pet world, with the possible exception of tortoises. I am growing old with Charlie, in sickness and in health, for richer and poorer, for better or worse. He is perched on my foot as I write, singing a low song of contentment to it, to me. He preens,
rouses, feather dandruff flying and settling on the newspapers below. I have tailored my life and home, my travel schedule, my grocery list, and my daily routine to the needs of this tame but wild, familiar but alien green being.

  If I am sure of anything after twenty-three years of living with a macaw, it’s that parrots are wild birds, that they show no signs of becoming domesticated, no matter how many generations have been raised in captivity, and that this simple truth makes them singularly lousy pets. Parrots and people can bring out the worst in each other. None of this is the parrot’s fault. The blame’s on us for so admiring their colorful plumage, ardent sociability, and lively intellect that we feel the need to cage, possess, and even collect them.

  I came of age in the 1970s, when pet shops were filled with wild-caught, imported parrots, young and old, healthy and ill, common and endangered. The trade in wild birds was uncontrolled; nesting trees were felled, the nestlings stolen; baby parrots were drugged and smuggled in suitcases, blouses, car trunks, even the hubcaps of cars. Survivors of such insults showed up worldwide in pet shops and at bird fairs, huddled on perch stands. Fed monkey biscuits and sunflower seeds, they were the pitiful wrecks of what had once been free-living members of social flocks. And these refugees were to become the cheaply acquired foundation stock for a booming captive parrot breeding industry.