Bird and Water —or — I don’t tweet I rescue baby birds
For about five weeks a few springs ago, my mornings began with a tweet.
Nonfiction
The moment dawn tinged my bedroom window, Bird’s eardrum piercing avian shriek catapulted me out of dreamland.I’d jump up, open the pet carrier set on a bureau, and gently lift the pin-feathered tweeter from her makeshift nest — a towel on a heating pad. Then I’d rush to the kitchen, where I’d mash up a little tinned dog food with some cooked vegetables and a few drops of warm water. Holding the hatchling against my bathrobe I’d use an eye makeup applicator to spoon sustenance into the gaping yellow beak. Within a minute or two, Bird — that was her name — settled into quiet contentment. Until she got hungry again twenty minutes later.
I had my daylight hours cut out for me. I couldn’t tell yet what kind of bird she was — that took a few weeks, until her feathers grew out. She turned out to be a eurasian blackbird (Turdus merula) which are gender dimorphic. Females are brown, males are black. Bird was a female.
I found her a few springs ago on the ground outside my cave house flailing and cheeping. The local cuckoos (Cuculus canorus) had been singing overhead in the early mornings for days. They herald longer days and warmer weather. And broken eggs and stranded baby birds.
Cuckoos are brood parasites. Their reproductive strategy consists of chucking hatchlings and eggs from other birds’ nests and replacing them with their own. The hapless nesting parents of whatever species incubate the cuckoo’s egg, and raise the surrogate chick. They are cuckolds. Brood parasites like the cuckoo aren’t unique to Europe. In North America, the cowbird (genus Molothrus) has a similar strategy.
Bird was the second hatchling I’d found. I’d accidentally drowned her nest mate the day before out of ignorance: I gave it water through an eye dropper. Determined not to make the same mistake, I checked Google. The instructions were straightforward: never give the baby bird water.
I’ve always loved birds, but I am not a twitcher — birders who obsessively catalog rare bird sightings without paying any heed to the miracle of the bird itself. I also do not ‘Twitter.’
A long time ago, in the olden days, I worked in Silicon Valley. It was kind of interesting if you liked hanging around with a bunch of souless males who spent eighty hours a week inveigling a computer to render a three-dimensional image of a tea pot lit from the upper left. Other guys wrote programs to measure how fast data moved through the machine.
Apple was in the put-a-computer-in-every-classroom business and the how-text-looks-on-the-page business. The Internet was not a thing. I attended a conference where Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web to the world. Technology hadn’t yet become synonymous with pocket gadgets or digital espionage.
I had an uninvited knack for stumbling upon software bugs and crashing computer systems. An engineer I worked with for a while nicknamed me The Incredible Hulk. I’m no technology Luddite, but to this day I prefer tethered phones. I also prefer the natural world.
Long walks beside the South Bay shoreline provided much-needed solace from the nullity of the computing world.
I discovered a brood of burrowing owls (Athene cunicularia) beside an asphalt running path. Burrowing owls don’t actually burrow. They nest in dens abandoned by ground squirrels. I’d visit the owls several times a day. Six baby owls peering cautiously at me from their den, waiting for a parent to bring food.
I was astonished that passing joggers didn’t notice them. Back then, joggers wore noise-cancelling headphones and listened to Discmans hitched to their belts. IPhones and Twitter didn’t exist, but technology had already hijacked human attention. Thirty years later this has become a problem. Social network designers build behavioral stimulants into the software, giving users just enough of a gratification kick to keep them coming back for more. The same algorithms are used to hook players on computer games. Ditto slot machines.
Technology does have its uses. I couldn’t have found the instructions about baby birds and water instantaneously without Google. Google’s recent achievements haven’t included instilling reverence for the natural world into its Mountain View employees, however, who have taken to feeding feral cats. Cats have decimated the burrowing owl from the South Bay. Cats kill whether they’re hungry or not. Because feral cats are so destructive to native wildlife species, in Australia, the government has instituted a program to cull at least two million of them.
Using social media technology constantly does a number on our brains. The barrage of information raises our levels of cortisol, the fight-or-flight hormone. Chronically elevated cortisol levels are associated with all kinds of diseases, including anxiety and depression.
Rescuing Bird took most of my concentration for over a month. Focusing on a task like nurturing a bird has the opposite effect on the brain from social media; and a similar effect to meditation which also decreases cortisol levels.
For her first few weeks, I could only leave Bird alone for an hour at a time. Her second week, she began experimenting with flight. By the end of the week, she’d winged from the back of the couch to the top of the computer monitor, where she liked to perch in the evening.
The conundrum of water remained unsolved, however. How would I get her hydrated without drowning her? Field birds don’t need much water, but they do need it. For the moment, Bird was getting liquid with her food. She’d made it clear she wasn’t going to become a pet. She loved being outside, flying onto the tree branches around the house where sometimes she’d have trouble getting down again and I’d have to climb up and get her.
I’d leave shallow water dishes on the steps to the top of the house and around the courtyard for all the visiting field birds: two varieties of woodpeckers, tits, sparrows, finches, the local wrens called mignons de troglodyte. They splashed and drank happily. Bird would have to be able to recognize water and learn to find it once she was living on her own. I set her on the edge of a dish one day. She ignored it. I sprinkled a little water on her back. She fluttered her feathers and shook it off
One morning Bird sat on my shoulder while I worked at my desk. I got up and went to the kitchen. I turned on the faucet and began washing a cup. Suddenly Bird hopped from my shoulder onto the drain board next to the sink. She paused. She cocked her head. I closed the tap. Bird looked around, perplexed. I opened the tap to a trickle, and splashed my fingers in the running water. Bird hopped from the drain board onto the rim of a Melitta cone in the sink. She perched there for a moment. Then she hopped down, and gave herself a bird bath in the remaining water, splashing and slopping water over her back and tail with her wings as if she had been doing it for years.
The sound of trickling water was hard wired into her brain. It took my happening across the right cue for everything to grok.
When I told my friend, the writer Susan McCarthy about Bird and water she said:
‘That was her Helen Keller moment.’
In fact, it was mine. I hope I have a few more of them before I’m through.
Moments like these will never come about as a result of human interaction with pocket electronics and their soul-hoovering software. Is this a bold statement? I’d challenge anyone to describe a transcendent experience that occurred because of his or her relationship to Twitter. Or Facebook. Or Instagram.
I will never be an Influencer. I’ve done something way better: I raised Bird, and Bird raised me.
