Birds of a Feather

Photo by Zhipeng Ya on Unsplash

The following story (flash narrative now being a thing) is about a pathetic if earnest effort at salvation.

My neighbor was backing her car out of her driveway as Layla and I were returning down the hill from our morning walk. My neighbor seemed to have her eyes on something ahead in the driveway other than us, so we stopped and waited. Then, catching sight of us, she stopped and sent a window down to exclaim, “There’s a bird stuck on this mouse trap paper! She must have flown into the garage.”

True enough, I expected. My neighbor is all about speaking truth.

I picked up the paper attached to a small flurry of wings batting the air—thoroughly adhered. The bird was trying to fly with a weight she couldn’t detach herself from. She was helplessly caught, this handful of feathers glued to adhesive that would have saved the Titanic from that large chunk of Greenland ice. Impressive, that mouse-catching stuff.

My neighbor had left the garage door open long enough for the bird to fly in, and now this bit of feathers and fragile legs was trying to get free. She didn’t mean to bother anyone. The little creature struggled, pecked her small beak on my hand, but nearly her whole body was stuck to the paper.

“I can’t leave it there. I feel terrible!”

We won’t talk about the outcome had the bird been a mammal of about the same size with downy fur instead of feathers.

“You’ll have to take Layla, or she’ll go after the bird.”

So my neighbor took Layla the husky, and I took up the bird. Equal trade. We became this two person rescue unit.

As I brought one hand to cup her wings, she stopped struggling.

Gently as I could, I pulled her quarter inch wide chest free of the adhesive, leaving half her chest feathers still adhered. No sound came, but one eye stayed staring at me. Now I was committed–that little, unblinking eye and her acceptance of being in my hands.

But both her claws were firmly attached. In fact one leg was glued fast. I didn’t have a good feeling about the outcome.

“Do you have scissors?”

Using the scissors, pulling at the paper gently as I could, I cut the stretched strands of adhesive from her captured claws, one then the other.

I held her wrapped her in my palm, feathers and all.

“Shit!” now realizing the paper had the side of my palm. Saving the bird was ridiculous. Ridiculous to think I could save myself.

So as I held the bird, my neighbor slowly peeled the paper off, and it felt like she was ripping skin from the side of my hand. Did I mention this stuff was industrial strength?

Humans are clever with all the ways we deal with creatures viewed as undesirables–and it’s a long list–vermin we call them. We’re better at eliminating than saving them.

In a previous house, I’d also had a mouse problem, but the thought of trapping them with adhesive didn’t sit well–what do you do once you’ve stuck them? Was poison any improvement? The traditional mouse trap seemed the swiftest extermination. Once I secured bird screen over the oven exhaust vent they’d been using, no more mice, though two met their end in the traps.

I’d like to think I saved the bird’s tiny life, after letting me hold her as I worked the scissors to cut the adhesive from the paper. Sadly, I let her escape before I could finish the ‘surgery’ to get her claws totally free of the adhesive. Wings good, claws not so much. I tried not visualizing if she’d survive.

A broken creature can touch us, yet we destroy others seeming without compunction; we humans are a contradictory lot. Supremely adapted to a contradictory world.

In Love in Winter, the poem, Tropical Depression closes with the memory of Ryan calling me out for boiling crabs one night at the beach: “why are you killing them?” and how, to satisfy his sense of right and wrong, we returned the survivors to Albemarle Sound. It didn’t seem the time to engage my two-year old in a discussion of diet and ethics. Even at that age, I expected he’d win the debate.

Though beyond describing Ryan’s or my own sensibilities, these verses were about how many ways my memories of him kept returning. In his teen years, he was learning to become a surfer dude, so when we returned in October, the year after his death, I could barely make the week without crying.

Ryan, two, quite voluble
a boy of stout opinions
his first summer cottage time,
Kill Devil was much cheaper then.

The crabs were fresh and free and
I’d set about with pots to steam them
when he heard the frantic scratching
at his brother’s explanation

asked why I was killing them?
Following a flashlight road
walking toward the evening Sound
we two released survivors there.

Another line of pelicans
is pacing south, the waves are slow
and lazing and the sun is fled
and I still have the week to go.

October, ’03

From Tropical Depression