Enslaved by Ducks (36 page)

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.”

Weaver, as we came to name the miniature ostrich, would flap his wings like mad without gaining an inch in altitude. Even Ollie, the worst flier we had ever seen, could make it across the room on sheer gliding power. Weaver fell like a crumpled wad of paper whenever we urged him to give his innate abilities a fresh try. Fearing he had an insidious wasting disease, I took him to Dr. Fuller, who spread one of his wings and made the diagnosis, “Poor feather development.” And it was true. His flight feathers resembled porcupine quills dipped in fluff, and they leaked more air than a window screen.

“It was probably caused by a vitamin deficiency,” he said.

“But he ate the same food as everyone else.”

“The deficiency may have come at a crucial stage of his early development.”

I left before he started quoting Freud and resigned myself to the fact that we couldn’t release Weaver until he had gone through a molt. But by then, I knew, he would probably be too tame to ever adapt to life on his own outdoors. That meant I had moved from reading about
Arnie, the Darling Starling
to suddenly having an Arnie of our own, though the darling aspect was definitely up for grabs.

Although he couldn’t fly, Weaver still insisted on coming out of his cage to scamper around the top of the kitchen table in search of imagined caches of his beloved mealworms. If we didn’t accede to his demands for freedom, he would throw himself flapping against the bars until we feared he would injure his body or his excited heart would explode. Unlike most birds, whose beaks wield considerable clamping strength—especially when my finger is involved—a starling asserts its jaw muscles by opening its beak and prying things apart. It’s a handy skill for enlarging a hole in the soil to access hidden insects or for widening the spaces between stitches in a woven placemat. And while Weaver lacked a parrot’s talent for picking up small items and throwing them on the floor, he compensating by whacking them croquet-style with the same end result.

Even when standing in one spot, Weaver was constantly in motion, exercising a repertoire of tics and twitches that aided his deliberation over a tabletop project. Cocking his head and scissoring his beak, he would unhurriedly study a situation from every possible angle before getting down to the business of toppling a saltshaker or shredding a paper napkin. Whenever I felt especially generous, I would place a few curls of adding-machine tape beside
his cage, and he would arrange and rearrange them obsessively, lifting a loop and stepping through it, positioning it vertically into a wheel, or grabbing the tape by one end and tugging it behind him.

Even though I saw nothing of Stanley Sue’s white-hot intelligence in his actions, Weaver had the most soulful eyes I could ever imagine a bird possessing. Neither judgmental, like a parrot’s eyes, nor as innocent as a turkey’s, they spoke of emotions every bit as lively and deeply rooted as the fat, luscious grub of his dreams. Whenever I brought Weaver’s cage into the back room at night, just before covering him, I’d sit down for a moment in the chair at Linda’s desk and talk to him while I marveled at his eyes. “You’d better start flying soon,” I’d tell him. “You need to stop pooping on the kitchen table.” He’d hop to the perch closest to me to give my suggestions the deliberation they deserved.

A bird looks directly at you by looking at you sideways. It’s an odd thing to get used to, and I can never help but wonder how Stanley Sue, Howard, or Ollie’s brain simultaneously integrates an image of me with a completely different panorama on the other side of the bird’s head. But a starling’s eyes are positioned just above the base of its bill and shoved slightly forward toward the front of its head, the better to study the patch of ground that the bird is probing. Because of this, whether Weaver turned the side of his face toward me or squinted at me down the length of his beak with both eyes, I received the full weight of his attention. And I couldn’t shake the impression that his eyes held a nagging question. I seldom studied his face without encountering the query.

If only I could figure out what Weaver was asking me.

“Where’s my food?” was my best guess, based on his voracious appetite. Weaver’s lifeblood coursed with a current of sheer joy. When Linda or I would walk into the dining room, he was so pleased to see us, he would literally hop up and down with happiness. His exuberance was greatest when we came bearing food.
He ate each and every meal as if it were his one and only meal of the day. Never mind that we might have filled his dish three times in a single afternoon with a dollop of canned cat food sprinkled with avian vitamins, or with minced red grapes, or with several wriggling mealworms. He would still attack the treat with all the ferocity of a child tearing the wrapping paper from a birthday present. His passion for his food dish became the most effective means of engaging his interest. This soon became important. Two months of Weaver’s unflagging devotion to eating yielded a healthy set of flight feathers and the ability to elude us at will whenever we set him free in the dining room.

Weaver was smart enough to discriminate between our trips into the room on rabbit business and our ostensibly nonchalant visits aimed at surprising a roaming starling and returning him to his cage. If we were lucky, he might light on my hand at first sight of the purple plastic feed dish I was carrying and ride the dish to the kitchen sink for a brisk cleaning, to the refrigerator for replenishing, then back inside his barred enclosure. But if we needed to pen him up before his hunger got the better of his penchant for flying free, we were forced to chase him from the dining room table to the window sill, from the top of the refrigerator to the curtain rod over the sink, and from the antenna of our portable TV to the summit of another birdcage before he might finally decide to surrender by hopping onto one of our heads.

“What’s that little sound you’re making?” Linda asked one evening during dinner.

“I don’t know, I guess I’m chewing too loud.”

“Not you. Weaver. It sounds like he’s trying to talk.”

“He’s saying ‘buzzy buzzy.’”

“‘Busy busy.’”

“Whatever it is, it isn’t talking,” I insisted. “He’s just making
buzzing noises. We might as well be keeping a bumblebee.”

But a few days later I walked into the dining room while Weaver was in his cage indulging in his favorite noneating pastime of splashing around in his water dish. He took more baths than any bird I had ever seen and would probably have loved living outdoors with the ducks and geese, though he wouldn’t have given them a chance to use the pool. I was toweling up the floodplain at the far end of the table when I distinctly heard him interrupt his happy twittering to greet himself with a hearty, “Hi, Weaver.” Unlike shy performers Stanley Sue and Ollie, who refused to vocalize if we were in their field of view (and that applied to Stanley Sue’s whistles), Weaver flaunted a bold stage presence. He excelled at ventriloquism by keeping his beak neatly closed as he repeated the phrase for me again, “Hi, Weaver. Buzzy buzzy, hi, Weaver.”

Linda shared my elation at having a readily talking bird in the family. “Maybe he’ll tell us what he wants, like Arnie.” Occasionally, Margarete’s starling would pipe up with a prescient comment in an appropriate context, but Weaver’s commentary was a far cry from including pithy observations. Within another few days, he had picked up, “Whatcha say, Weaver?” from me, raising doubts as to which I should improve first, my grammar or my diction.

“You hear that?” I asked my parrot Stanley Sue accusingly, as Weaver practiced his repertoire. “Are you going to let a starling show you up? You could talk better than that if you wanted to. I’ve heard you do it.”

I should have known better than to even jokingly pit Stanley Sue against another bird, especially when the other bird’s affectionate hitchhikes on my head, hands, and other body parts had begun kindling the parrot’s jealous side. If I walked around the dining room with Weaver clinging to my shirt, Stanley Sue would race behind
me on the floor biting my shoes as an attention getter. Why she never exercised her own talent for flying was a riddle, since she could easily have flapped up to my shoulder and shoved him off. The closest she came to taking to the air was launching a snapping leap in Weaver’s direction whenever he foolishly decided to share the top of her cage. Such aggressiveness raised our fears of another Stanley Sue–Howard-type rivalry and resulted in our decision not to let the parrot and starling out together.

One afternoon, while slowly emerging from an extended winter afternoon nap, I heard an unfamiliar trilling from the dining room. Weaver was flying free, and Stanley Sue was shut in her cage where she shouldn’t have been able to cause him any harm. But the shrill cry alarmed me, and I hurried into the kitchen and dining room area only to find blood spattered across the top of the refrigerator and puddled on the table next to where Weaver stood forlornly on one leg. One toe on his right foot had been neatly amputated just above the toenail, and the presence of said joint with toenail in front of Stanley Sue’s cage implicated the parrot, who must have been hanging upside down from the top bars just waiting for Weaver to land within reach of her beak. The incident also solved the mystery of how Elliot, our canary, and Howard, our dove, had managed to sustain foot injuries from time to time. Within an hour of losing his toe, Weaver was briskly chatting away in his cage, but three full days passed before he resumed using his right foot. From then on, we always draped a towel across the top of Stanley Sue’s cage when the other birds were loose.

Weaver’s escalating friendliness toward us was matched by his increasing restlessness. If I were working upstairs on a writing project and needed a cup of coffee in hope of jogging a few brain cells into action, I was forced to weigh my craving against undergoing a pestering blitz from the starling. When I walked into the
kitchen, Weaver would land upon my head and gleefully begin drilling for dander and sebum. Brushing him off only glued him to my arm, and from there he would migrate to my hand and peck at whatever task my fingers attempted to accomplish, knocking coffee out of the measuring spoon or dipping his beak into the stream of water from the faucet. Meanwhile, the confined Stanley Sue protested every moment that Weaver flew free, with squawks that reached upstairs and defeated whatever concentration benefits my dosage of caffeine had conferred. As soon as I returned home from work, Stanley Sue insisted on prancing around the dining room climbing the drawer pulls or bothering the rabbits. She loathed the briefest imprisonment in the afternoon, especially if it was for the sake of the starling. For his part, Weaver thrashed around and squealed inside his cage whenever Stanley was at large. Two incompatible birds clamoring for simultaneous freedom presented us with a problem.