Bob Tarte

by Enslaved by Ducks

  “Someday, maybe we’ll have a starling of our own,” I would dreamily tell Linda now and then when my blood sugar dipped dangerously low. Along with the house sparrow and the rock dove (better known as the city pigeon), the European starling is one of three wild American birds that can legally be kept as pets, because all three are introduced species. Never mind that all three species have lived in the country long enough to have earned residency status. Starlings were brought to America in 1850 by a man intent on populating New York City’s Central Park with every bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays. No one bothered to tell the birds they were to stay within the park, and they quickly fanned out across the country. Over 150 years later, starlings are still considered interlopers. “Conservation laws in the US do not protect nongame, non-native species,” sniffs the “Conservation” note on the page devoted to the European starling in the Smithsonian Institution’s Birds of North America handbook.

  Marge and George Chedrick apparently hadn’t read the Smithsonian guide, however. The European starling enjoyed strong conservation at the Chedrick house, as did the small but vocal goose that served as gatekeeper to their bustling backyard. Once we had stepped through, a quick glance in search of Marge located a flightless seagull named Hannibal, a noisy white peahen, chickens, swans, Canada geese, and assorted domestic waterfowl. Marge stood near the back porch sucking on a cigarette as she suspiciously eyed a squirrel.

  “Back here again?” she demanded, as the creature stood up on its hind legs. “It isn’t feeding time yet.” At the sound of her voice, a one-eared squirrel scampered down a tree and joined the first near Marge’s foot.

  “Watch out for Ginger,” Marge warned me. The beefy Rhode Island Red rooster circled behind me as he scratched at the ground ostensibly prowling for worms. I was his real prey. Ginger loved nothing better than launching a flying peck at the small of my back that felt as if my spine had been bonked with a hammer. I learned never to crouch down to talk to the tamer ducks and geese when Ginger patrolled the area.

  “Why’s he always in such a bad mood?” I asked her.

  “You’d be in a bad mood, too, if you saw both of your parents killed by hawks.”

  George breezed by, a strong wedge of a man carrying a fifty-pound bag of scratch feed under one arm and a sack of mesquite wood chips under the other. He wore on his shoulder a squat white bird that sported a swiveling periscope for a head and neck. A charcoal grill that had seen better days spewed happy clouds of black smoke toward the stockade fence that kept the foundlings in and the predators out. Beyond the fence, the weathered bricks and large rectangular windows of the Victorian-style house next door hinted at a quiet city neighborhood in another world. A pair of male Muscovy ducks paused to hiss menacingly at George when he whisked past them toward a metal barn containing triple-decker cages of recuperating critters. Last time we had visited, a muskrat and two foxes were among the patients.

  “Is that a—?” I gestured in befuddlement at the bird on George’s back, as he disappeared into the barn.

  “That’s Ricky,” Marge replied. “He’s a two-week-old baby turkey. George’s crazy about him. Get back, Muff.” A Labrador retriever/American bison hybrid accessorized with a red bandana tried to squeeze past us as we followed Marge up the porch steps and into the kitchen. The aluminum door squeaked shut behind us. A blue jay landed on the porch railing and begged raucously for the blueberries on the kitchen windowsill. Across the room—beyond a table piled with DNR paperwork and littered with plastic containers with holes punched in the lids—pork chops nestled in a bowl soaked up a watery marinade. Marge lifted the dish towel covering an opaque rectangular box and said in a quiet voice, “Come look at my babies.” We peeked in at four tiny squirrels sleeping on a bedding of napkins and paper towels.

  George came through the screen door with Ricky still perched on his shoulder.

  “I love that little turkey,” cooed Linda.

  “Isn’t he beautiful?” said George.

  Marge shoved a shoebox toward us. “Here are your babies,” she told us, as she popped the hinged lid. A cluster of brown, feathery lumps instantly transmogrified into bright yellow flowers of wide-open beaks accompanied by a chorus of demanding squeals. Half in jest and half in genuine shock, I backed away and turned to face the sink. Spotting me through the screen, the blue jay on the porch raised his head and squawked again.

  George laughed at my reaction to the starlings. “When you’re done with them, Bob, come out behind the barn.” He walked into the living room to glance at a football game on TV. “I want to show you the pond I’m digging for our heron and swans.”

  “You feed them every two hours,” Marge instructed us. The hand wielding a syringe moved expertly from beak to beak, squirting yellow liquid down their throats.

  “Every two hours?” I whined.

  “From seven in the morning until nine at night. Just be glad you’re not doing the squirrels. They have to be fed all through the night.”

  “How do you ever manage to leave the house?”

  “The animals come to school with me,” Marge said, turning to Linda. “I’ve been there so many years, no one’s going to complain, and the kids love to see me feeding them. When your babies get a little older, you train them to eat worms, and you let them go. That’s all there is to it. Starlings are pretty easy.”

  A crow croaked from the dining room. George reluctantly abandoned his short-lived post at the television to feed it balls of cat food.

  “Does it go on like this all day?” I asked him. Though we had visited Marge and George a couple of times before the yearly baby-animal boom had started, we had never seen them in full caregiver mode.

  “We didn’t eat dinner until, what, midnight last night?” Marge asked.

  “We both still work,” George explained. “But when I retire in another year, this is what I’ll do all day.”

  “Is that something you’re looking forward to?” I asked in disbelief.

  “I love it,” George answered, with a wide grin and no trace of irony. “There’s nothing I’d rather be doing than this.”

  “Do you guys have syringes?” Marge asked us.

  “We might have a few at home,” said Linda.

  “Take some. I’ve got syringes up the ying-yang.” She grabbed a handful from a jar and presented us with a margarine tub of starling-food goop from her refrigerator. Linda copied down instructions for mixing up a batch of our own. Kitten chow, chicken entree for infants, liquid vitamins for children, plus water were mystically combined and mushed up in a blender to yield the hummus-colored concoction, which I hoped would never end up on my dinner plate by mistake. Just as we were about to leave, a woman met us at the door. She had talked to Marge on the phone earlier that day, and here were the eight baby starlings her husband had found in a nest on their trailer hitch. She had packed the nest and birds inside an inkjet-printer box.

  “Want some more starlings, guys?” Marge asked.

  Both of us vigorously shook our heads.

  After feeding blueberries to the blue jay on the porch, we returned home to our slightly more manageable menagerie and tried getting through our first day with the starling chicks. The process wasn’t as easy as Marge had made it look, and I was grateful to be relegated to understudy status. Linda wanted to care for the starlings on her own and, taking her cue from Marge, she even took them to work, carting the birds and food goop to her housecleaning customers’ homes via a miniature version of our faithful cat/duck carrier. She bravely resisted my assistance until the middle of day three, when the unruly tykes began to wear her down.

  “Two hours seems like a long time when you’re doing something you don’t like,” Linda lamented. “But the two hours between feedings seems like about five minutes.”

  I could see her point as I tried my hand at the job. The complicated process began with fetching the plastic carrier that contained the starlings, opening it, and standing back in disbelief at the shrill cries of the b
irds as they clamored for their meal. The noise was actually loud enough to cause my ears to ring, if I bent my head too close to them for more than a few seconds at a time. Our eight starlings were neatly arranged in three napkin-padded margarine tubs inside the carrier, but they didn’t stay in their bowls for long. Being unable to fly in no way impeded the hopping ability of these animals that seemed to consist of nothing but open beaks on legs, and if I were slow on the draw with the syringes, several chicks would inevitably pop out of their plastic nests.

  Getting the food into the birds presented little problem, since few easier and willing targets exist in nature than the mouths of hungry starlings. Keeping the food in their mouths was another matter. No sooner did I feed a chick than the bird would shake its head and spatter itself, its neighbors, and our kitchen wall with unswallowed food. Once the birds had eaten, they would raise themselves up and hoist their posteriors over the rim of their bowls to release an impressive amount of poop. The trick was waiting until all birds had relieved themselves before removing the soiled napkins from the carrier and tubs, cleaning the plastic surfaces with a washcloth, and replacing the napkins. Miscalculating the timing of two chicks forced me to have to scrub one of the bowls three times. When I had finally finished, closing the carrier lid on the birds and returning them to the back room where Ollie slept at night was one of the most satisfying deeds of my entire life.

  “This will drive you nuts,” I told Linda with frazzled awe, as she wiped droplets of thrown food off the wall and countertop. “I don’t know how you stand it.”

  Later that week, I feared that caring for the starlings had sent her over the edge when I strolled into the kitchen to find her waving a hair dryer over the birds.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her in a reasonable imitation of a calm and soothing voice. “If you wanted to lie down for a while, I could finish, um, styling and setting the birds.”

  “Their heads were caked with dried food,” she said.

  “That would explain the hair dryer,” I suggested gently. “I’ll bet the dried food comes right off if you get it warm enough.”

  She shot me an unhappy look. “I’ve already washed them off. But their feathers weren’t drying, and I don’t want them to catch cold, so I’m using a blow-dryer.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “That makes perfect sense.” But just to be on the safe side, I sneaked into the bathroom and hid the curling iron.

  I didn’t remember seeing a blow-dryer in Marge Chedrick’s kitchen. Clearly she hadn’t told us everything that we needed to know about our task. Unfortunately, she was so busy coping with the endless stream of baby birds and injured animals people brought to her door at all hours of the day that returning phone calls from harried starling stepparents understandably occupied a low priority. With time, we figured out a few essentials on our own, such as feeding each bird only a small amount of the yellow goop per syringe shot, which greatly reduced the incidence of food flung around the room. Simple common sense—and the displeasure of retrieving flapping birds from the crack between the wall and microwave or the narrow space beside the refrigerator, where the vacuum cleaner just about fit—told us when it was time to transfer the birds from their plastic bowls to a cage.

  HAVING TAUGHT OURSELVES to feed the starlings, it was time to teach the starlings to feed themselves. Marge had told us to simply scatter a few live crickets on the bottom of the cage. “They’re attracted by the motion, and it just comes naturally that they start pecking at them.” Following avian instincts hadn’t ever seemed to occur to our birds before. They didn’t even comprehend the principle of perching without extensive coaching. Grasping a wooden cage perch with their feet was as alien to them as learning to strum the strings of a lute. Linda managed to get one of the older starlings to wrap its toes around the perch, but that merely necessitated a separate set of lessons on posture, balance, and gracefully recovering from a fall. This didn’t bode well for their hunter-gatherer skills.

  The crickets supplied by Marge came in a mesh container with, of all things, an open top. Crickets, unlike starlings, are incapable of jumping straight up, and so the insects were trapped in the tube as if sealed inside a tin can. True to Marge’s word, the starlings were indeed fascinated by the movement of the crickets. I placed their cage upon a porch shelf that a few years earlier had borne the burden of holding homemade ceramic mugs, vases, plates, and other unsaleable items from our basement pottery studio. Then I shook a few crickets into my hand and dropped them through the top grate of the cage. The starlings stopped all other activity, trained their eyes on the insects, and watched with deep interest as the crickets by trial and error wriggled through the bars to populate remote regions of our porch. I tried blocking the insects’ egress by threading adding-machine tape in and out of the bars, forming a two-inch-high stockade fence around the bottom of the cage. This did in fact slow the crickets down, but given an infinite amount of time by the uncomprehending starlings, the bugs parlayed their random jumping and crawling into other means of successful escape.

  Mealworms proved easier to deal with than the crickets. Although the birds were just as clueless about their ability to eat these visitors, the worms weren’t jumping anywhere. The best they could do was crawl to the edges of the cage and slip beneath a folded sheet of newspaper, where we could retrieve them and try again. To kickstart their gourmet instincts, Linda picked up a mealworm with a tweezers and thrust it into the open mouth of a pleading starling. The eager youngster instantly clamped shut his beak, opened it again in bewilderment, and allowed the worm to fall out and crawl.

  Despite these setbacks, after just under one debilitating month with the birds, the day finally arrived when they were dining on worms from the bottom of the cage and we could set them—and ourselves—free. Marge suggested that we move their cage out to the barn and let them leave at their own pace and return to the cage if they couldn’t find food on their own. All of the birds elected to leave at once, though it took them a bit of flapping and cricket-style hopping to locate the yawning barn door. With syringe in hand, Linda checked the premises a couple of hours later to fortify any recidivist with goop, but the barn was empty except for yipping turkey Hazel and her sequestered sister, Lizzie.

  I was pleased that the starlings had gone. Their departure was not only proof that we had nurtured them correctly, but it also considerably lightened our load, since feeding them every two hours had bent our regular animal-chore schedule to the breaking point. After dinner, buoyed by a mood of blissful release, I volunteered to go out to the barn and treat Hazel and Lizzie to their evening apple while Linda relaxed by washing the kitchen floor for the fourth time that day. I fed both turkeys by hand without losing a finger. On the way back to the house, I took a detour around the huge pine tree out back to check on the progress of Linda’s vegetable garden. Although I carefully avoided the sprinkler, two of our released starlings had been less savvy. I found them fluttering in a patch of weeds soaked to the hollow bone, unable to fly, and potentially easy catches for our outdoor cat, Agnes. Popping them back in the birdcage that I retrieved from the barn, I placed them on their familiar porch shelf overnight for release in the morning after their feathers had dried.

  When Linda opened the cage the following day for a test flight on the porch, both birds propelled themselves into the air, but only one of them managed to stay aloft. The aerodynamically challenged starling skittered across the floor like a spring-loaded mouse, while his brother flew in frantic circles against the nearest window. Linda snagged the floor flapper and confined him to his cage, then flung open the porch door and allowed the airborne bird the opportunity to soar into the wild blue yonder. He soared only as far as the front yard hackberry tree, joining three of his siblings, who apparently defined freedom primarily in terms of boundless dining privileges.

  “It was a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds,” Linda said, shuddering, when I returned home from work that afternoon. “Here I thought we were finally rid of
the babies, then I went outside to work in the garden, and two birds suddenly landed on my head and started pecking me. Then two more landed on my shoulders. I had to run inside and get the syringe to feed them.”

  “I don’t suppose they left after that.”

  “Didn’t you hear them out there?” she asked incredulously. “They’ve been hanging around all day. I’m surprised you made it from your car to the house without getting dive-bombed. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve had to feed them. Oh, no,” she groaned. Her expression darkened as she glanced out the kitchen window. “They’re on the gate again, begging.”

  “I’ll feed them,” I volunteered, recalling the noisy but otherwise well-mannered blue jay that haunted the Chedricks’ porch. I didn’t see the problem. A few hungry birds on our property couldn’t possibly be as difficult to deal with as a cage full of clamoring starlings in the kitchen. My thinking changed as soon as I stepped outside the kitchen door holding the tub of yellow goop. Starlings hovered around my head, hammering their needle-sharp beaks into my scalp. When I tried to brush them away, they clung to my hand with their toenails, pecking my knuckles as I pumped food into the bird that had settled on the gatepost. One by one, as I filled the bottomless mouths with the syringe, the birds returned to their tree almost too heavy to fly.

  “At least they’re out of the house,” I gasped from the safety of the kitchen.

  “No they’re not. Didn’t you notice the one on the porch?”

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  “He still can’t fly, and I don’t think he sees very well. Every time I try to feed him, he bobs and weaves his head around, and I keep missing him with the syringe.”