Everything wants to live. My sweetie was walking the dog by the empty dumpster the gentrifiers parked across from our house. An old punk can't resist a dumpster and it's a good thing too. Someone had tossed a birdhouse into it. Seven new-hatched chicks, ugly, bald and flailing were struggling on the hot metal. He put the dog back in the house and used a clean bag to scoop up the little things.
The dog had her own scare last week. She went from being old and shaky to listless and howling. I made an appointment with her vet fearing it would be that appointment. The night before, I woke up every couple hours to hear her snorting beside me. It seemed unimaginable that I'd sleep without her the next night. By morning, her eyes were brighter. She ate some peanut butter oatmeal. As I'm writing she's absolutely housing the bone broth our radical witch mama friend made her. We think she had a bad reaction to some meds. She looks better than she has in weeks.
She sat on the porch with me as I kept vigil on our porch across the street from the chicks. The wildlife center told us to set the birdhouse near the dumpster to see if the parents came back. There was no way to know where the birdhouse had been before the dumpster so it struck me as a longshot but we did as we were told.
I called my own mom while I waited. We grumbled about difficult weeks in meetings and the difference between activist culture and nonprofits. I watched the birdhouse. Every bird in the valley was singing but the parents didn't return. At the appointed hour, my sweetie swung the birdhouse down from its temporary tree and I drove to the wildlife center with seven strong little voices protesting at every stop. I don't speak hatchling but I have a fairly clear idea of what they were saying and they weren't complimenting my driving.
“I'm sorry, y'all.” I told them. “I know it seems like I'm a kidnapper but I promise, you'll be okay.” I wondered what they were making of the drive. Did their vastly superior sense of direction operate from within the little birdhouse on my floorboard? I played them “Flightless Bird” by Iron and Wine. The chicks were unimpressed.
The wildlife center is a one story building nestled in the woods half way up Afton Mountain. It feels like a treehouse rather than an SPCA. When I pulled up, someone collected the birdhouse. Someone else paused in answering phones to take down the details of the hatching’s adventures. A stained glass window hung on one side of the desk with a fox and black bear, a deer and frog. A row of cardboard boxes, empty aside from towels at their bottoms, had clearly been improvised transport for many species of patients. A garland of paper bats flew overhead. It was the first time in months I'd been around people who were full of purpose but whose eyes weren't turned to static by despair. If they had offered me a big enough box and a comfy towel, I might have curled up and stayed to see what was for dinner. Grubs, probably. I went home with the birds’ collective patient number on a card and fed my little pekie, who isn't dying after all.
The wildlife center sent me an email. Six out of seven lived. I'm going to call that a win. They’re Carolina wrens, as it happens. We're such a clumsy species, humans. We can be thoughtless. We can be just plain mean. I hope whoever threw those birds in the dumpster didn't hear them chirping. I can't know one way or the other, which may be for the best. I have a surfeit of helpless rage these days. Helping something as fragile as a baby bird, it's impossible not to feel like a well-intentioned Godzilla. Even at our best, our instincts are dull. We give the dog the wrong meds and she's sick for days. It isn't inconceivable that two little bird parents are searching my neighbor's property line, not knowing I drove their babies halfway up the mountain. We sit in meetings with our good intentions and prickly selves and say the wrong things over and over with feeling. When the most powerful species ever gets it wrong, it's a nightmare. Through ignorance and malice, we have gotten a lot wrong and the whole planet ends up on the bottom of a gentrifier’s dumpster, cooking in the May sun. Still, along comes an old punk with a one-eyed pekingese and he jumps in to do his best.
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Awww...love love love