Where are the robins?

This morning's hour of birds on the back porch left me wondering about the robins.  I didn't see any.  Normally I see several in a given hour, especially in the morning.  As I sat with my camera, snapping shots of a very vocal female cardinal, I started thinking more about migration, this behavior that is becoming increasingly interesting to me as summer begins to fade into fall.

Soon, the Ithaca Osprey adults will depart for their journey south, and I will watch them (or their counterparts from other areas) pass through at Blue Marsh Lake or over Hawk Mountain.  A month later, they will be joined by their fledglings, who will inexplicably head south, follow an unfamiliar path, and somehow wind up somewhere in South America, with only their inner compass to tell them when to stop.  This I learned from David Gessner's Return of the Osprey, which I recently finished.

But do robins migrate?  Do they, too, head south, following the same sky highways, until some instinct tells them to stop....and stay for the winter?  Some do, birders say.  But not all of them.  In fact, many of our Berks County robins will stay with us for the winter, resorting to fruit and seeds for food after the worms do their own sort of migration, tunneling deeper into the earth.

Have the worms headed south already, in the beginning of August?  If not, where are my robins?  Are my backyard robins among the migratory percentage?  Has some clock inside them awakened an instinct to fly south for the warmth, or more importantly, for the food?

Animal Rescuers

My husband says I have a problem with wild animals.  I'm always trying to rescue them, sometimes even when they can't be rescued, sometimes even when they don't really need rescuing.  I've found myself trying to rescue lame squirrels, a robin and a blue jay in their last hour of life, a deer hit by a car, lost dogs, a fledgling hopping across the road, a stubborn copperhead unwilling to move from the middle of the road, a maimed rat snake, thousands of worms I have found over the years wriggling in the road while I am running, spiders in the shower, a baby bat sleeping on the ground, a kitten on the side of the highway, a stray dog with a pierced hind leg, a pigeon hit by a car, a sparrow hit by a car, a baby bunny being attacked by a dog, a noisy, stray, flea-ridden kitten alone, wandering through a community yard sale, a lonely mockingbird, and many more.  I cannot leave an animal who I believe needs help.  But don't accuse me of hubris.  It's not that I think myself a saint.  In fact, most often, I have no idea what I'm doing, how to best help these animals.  I'm like most people when it comes to frustration with my own animals.  I yell at my dogs, regularly furious with one for incessantly ringing her "let me outside" bell and for dragging my red blanket all over the house no matter how many times I tell her "no."  No, it's something other than godliness that makes me an amateur animal rescuer.  It's my hatred for helplessness and suffering.

Perhaps a part of me sees my own suffering and my own helplessness in these animals left to their own devices, of little importance to passersby.  I am reminded of those times in my life when I have been scared and alone and desperate for a hand to hold.

I don't make friends easily, not real friends, not the sort who won't find my oddities overwhelming.  My childhood was made difficult by bullying and rejection from my peers.  The wounds from those experiences remain raw.  A couple weeks ago, I walked my daughter Sophia into her preschool classroom and watched as she ran up excitedly to the girl she had told me was her best friend.  However, the best friend responded to Sophia's attempt at a hug with a nasty look and a cold shoulder.  All things considered, this wasn't a big deal.  Kids will be kids.  Perhaps this little girl was having a bad day.  Maybe she didn't feel like being hugged.  Still, I was suddenly standing in the middle of this preschool classroom with tears streaming down my face.  Every dirty look and cold shoulder I had ever endured came flooding back. I grabbed hold of Sophia's hand and left.  I couldn't take watching it happen to her.

I know.  I overreacted.  But in my mind, inside that moment, I was rescuing her from a cruel world.  Yes, every time I pick up another wounded animal, I have the same thought: What a cruel, cold world. Too much pain.  And then I whisper to the animal what I always wanted to hear---that they aren't alone.

Once, after I watched a deer die in pain, I cried in my husband's arms for near an hour, telling him I hated the pain of life.  And he whispered reassurance that life was not all suffering.  "There's so much good in the world," he told me.  "You just don't notice it."

This past winter, we made some wonderful new friends.  To my husband's delight, one of them loves to go fishing.  This spring, he and Jillian began fishing together, and on one of these trips, she pulled the car over with my husband in it to go after a cat she had seen on the side of the road.  "I think it was limping," she told my husband over her shoulder.  He shook his head and smiled. He dutifully followed her through fields and woods for twenty or thirty minutes until they caught up with the cat and were assured there was no fresh wound to worry about.

"Thank you for your help," she told him.

"I'm used to it," he said.  "Stephanie does this all the time."

We had found someone like me.  In fact, both Jillian and her partner Danelle are animal lovers and seem to share my need to help the helpless.

Last week, Danelle, Jillian, and I went out for ice cream with our little girls at Oley Valley Dairy and found five kittens that were malnourished, crawling through the goat enclosure in the petting zoo behind the restaurant.  Jillian didn't hesitate to determine the reason the kittens were so thin and dehydrated.  When she brought a kitten to its mother, twice, the kitten was met with a hiss.  She came to a quick decision.  We loaded up all five into a box and took them home to bottle feed them.  I ran to the pet store to buy the formula and the bottles, and together, all five us spent the rest of the day, until late at night, feeding kitten after kitten, milk dripping out of their crying mouths, happy tongues licking away at our hands, at the bottles, at their own noses.  I looked around the room and felt delighted.

Jillian and Danelle took care of the kittens all week, waking up every few hours in the middle of the night to bottle feed.  They helped them go to the bathroom.  They cleaned them after they made themselves sticky, milky messes.  They let the kittens snuggle in balls next to them.  They even gave each kitten a name.  This was no easy feat for a family who already had six cats, two dogs, and a ferret.  I was in awe.

After the first week of kittens was coming to a close, Jillian called to tell me about the lame robin she found at a bank in Wyomissing.  "I don't know how they find me," she laughed.  She knew the robin was my favorite animal.  "His legs don't work," she told me.  "I don't know what to do.  The kittens have upper respiratory infections.  I can't leave them to help the bird."

"I'll help," I said, thrilled that she had thought of me, that there was a robin I could help.

"Red Creek Wildlife Center in Schuylkill Haven helps injured animals," she said.  "Call them.  They might be able to help him."

"Just put the bird out of its misery," my husband said.

I rolled my eyes, called the wildlife center, and within an hour, at 8:00 p.m., we were on our way to Jillian and Danelle's to pick up the bird and take him the half hour to the Schuylkill Haven.

In the car, the bird, unable to stand, lay limply in a box on my lap, looking up at me with wide, scared eyes every time I lifted the lid of the box.  When my  husband pulled our car into the driveway at Red Creek, I carried the box gently to the door and opened it.  Inside was like nothing else I have ever seen before.  A starling slept, his head tucked in his wings, in the cage to my right.  Next to him was a tired looking cardinal, and under him swung a playful sparrow in his own cage.  Behind the desk was a cheerful woman with a stack of little cages next to her.  I leaned over the counter to find baby bunnies, baby opossums, baby squirrels, and baby birds in little cages and boxes everywhere.  The woman smiled at me.  "Are you the one with the robin?"

I nodded, hopeful.

She reached into the box and gently pulled out the robin to examine him.  He squeaked at her and tried to peck.  "Shhhh," she told him.  "It's okay.  I've got you." She was so comfortable with this delicate little creature in her hands, so confident as she felt around, looking for the source of his problem.  After she ran her fingers along each leg, she looked at the ceiling as she felt around his pelvis, which she quickly announced was broken.  "Ohhh," she whispered to him.  "I know that hurts."  She looked up at me.  "I think we can help him.  I'm going to give him some antibiotics, pain medication, and with some cage rest, this should heal."

"Really?" I said, my mouth widening into a grin.

"Besides," she said.  "We just got some baby robins in.  He can help us take care of them." She looked down at the bird as she took him to a cage.  "I have some work for you, Buddy."

When she came back to the counter, I told her she was wonderful, and she smiled back at me obligingly.  "Thank you," she mumbled.

"So, he's going to be okay?" I asked.

"I think so," she said.  "You can call anytime to check on him if you want."

My husband reached out for my arm.  He chuckled.  "You okay?"

I nodded.

On the way home, I leaned my head on the passenger side window, unable to stop smiling.

My husband was right.  The world is full of suffering.  But it is also filled with refreshing goodness--people who will pull over to follow a limping cat through the woods to make sure he is okay, people who will give up their own comfort and their own sleep to nurse kittens through the night and day for weeks, people who will run non-profit organizations dedicated to saving wild animals, people who will give a robin pain medication, people who will ask for nothing in return for such efforts.

When I was a little girl, I never noticed birds.  I didn't notice their songs in the mornings, their flight patterns, their evening chatter.  But now, after learning about how much my mother loved birds, I have learned to see them.  I seem them everywhere---robins, sparrows, doves, hawks, finches, owls, vultures, cowbirds, catbirds, even eagles.  They have this beautiful world all their own, and when I watch them, I find myself lost in their magic.  Perhaps the same can be said about the world's goodness.  All you have to do is pay attention, and you'll find it everywhere.




http://redcreekwildlifecenter.com/

In the Ashes

“The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there, whether we know it or not.”  -Kafka

Damn the days when the meetings at work go badly, when a family member gets some not-so-good medical news, when arriving homes turns into a big three-way fight, when your first shot at teaching Zumba ends with a sweat stain in a painfully embarrassing place.  Damn the days when you wish you were someone else, when you realize you are no longer young, when perhaps you are not even any longer sexy, when all of your confidence melts away and you are left with a longing for the old days, for nights at the old coffee shop where you and your old pal Ramon served up lattes while dancing on the counters, both of your heads covered in the soap suds from the sink full in the back, when you laughed good guttural laughs a dozen times a day, when last-minute road trips lasted 72 hours and swept nearly the whole of the east coast, when almost every night was spent out on the wrap-around porch, Camel Light and Cabernet to the right, laptop on the lap, the words coming out of you faster than you could type them. 

Now I type 75 words per minute, mostly on student work.  I still laugh but mostly at myself.  Things have changed. Starkly.

But, as my friends reminded me yesterday after one of these bad days, today is a new day, and as an old hero of mine used to say: “It’s fresh with no mistakes in it.  Yet.”

Here’s when I should write about the phoenix, about rising up from the ashes, about the glory of trying and trying again. 

But instead, I’ll write about my robins again, harbingers of new beginnings, of the rebirth of ideas and spirit.   My sweet robins, who I wake to every morning now, who wait for me on both porches, almost seem to watch me out of the corner of their eyes, wondering about me.  They have spirit.  They have joy.  They have kinship.  I know because I watch them as they protect one another, as they dance with each other in the air, as they sing in the mornings and dart high and low into the evenings.  They do not fly as high as the hawks, as the vultures, as the geese and ducks.  They are not as majestic as the eagles.  They stay close.  They need no escape. 

Last year, I watched one of them die.  I held her as the life slowly drained out of her, and I spoke soft words to her, telling her I was with her.  More tired than afraid, she stared carefully at me as I ran my finger over her wing then laid her down.  I was with her as her body seized suddenly, and I watched helplessly as her open eye went dark and her little body folded in on itself.  I cried a few silent tears over her for a while then buried her in the corner of my backyard. 

I wondered, like I so often do, what I could learn from the robin, from her quiet death on my back porch, from the way she waded patiently through those last labored breaths.   And what comes to me is that more important than rising from the ashes is, for me anyway, staying with them, accepting the ashes as ashes, the moments when I’m knee-deep in ashes and there doesn’t seem to be any way out of them, no way to rise, no wings to carry me.  In these broken-winged moments, I must learn to turn my eyes away from the sky and face the moment with the patience of the robin—the bird who has spent her joyful little life darting through the air and singing the mornings into their light.

Sometimes in the evenings, after a broken-winged day, I want to run away, to fly away, to be something else, someone else, somewhere else.  I fear the slow dark days.  I fear the bad news, the sad realizations, the growing old and tired.  Perhaps part of me believes that I can go back to where I have been, that it’s even possible, that ashes can be built back into clean, untouched joy.   But just now, a robin lands on my fence, just outside my back door, and she reminds me that this is the only moment that exists.  And it is mine. 

She flies away as fast as she arrived, but she doesn’t go far.  I step outside after her, to stand in the evening air.  A storm has just passed, and the ground is still wet.  And because there is nowhere else to be, I stand in the dusk alone, forgetting for a second about the new day that will be tomorrow.

Fear of Flight

Near Cowanesque Lake a couple weeks ago, my husband pulled the car over to the side of the road so that I could jump out and stare up at four soaring bald eagles, their wings unmoving as they dove and rose in the invisible currents generated by sun's warmth on the ground or by the interference of the hills to my left.

To soar like this, the very tips of their feathers on the very tips of their wings twist slightly, propelling them until the birds drop from the current, their large golden brown bodies becoming larger and larger to me as I stand wide-eyed underneath them, reaching one arm towards them as if I might have a chance to run my fingers over their feathers before they catch another current.

I know very little about how to fly.  In fact, ten years ago, after a flight to North Carolina from New York, as I gripped either side of my seat in terror during some bad turbulence, I vowed that if the plane stayed in the air long enough to get me home safely, I'd never  fly again.  And I haven't.  Like my sister says, "I've now promised my soul never to die like that."  Perhaps what she means by "like that" is thousands of feet over land, in the control of some combination of air currents, engines, pilots, and gravity without any of your own grip on your own fate.

Oh, how I have wanted to see the world since then, to fly to the places that have called to me--Denmark, France, Colorado, California, Canada, Kenya, Mali.  But the need to take part in my own flight, to steer myself through the currents has stopped me, may always keep me.

My only glimpse is the feeling I get when my chin is lifted so high into the air to watch the birds that I forget I am standing on ground.  When all you can see is sky, you can almost believe you are flying.

The eagles' wings rise in gravity but fall with the strength of their pectoralis muscles.  My own arms, so unlike wings, both stretching out into the sky now as I spin in circles, fall in gravity and rise in my own strength.  My husband climbs out of the car and I run over to him and jump on his back with excitement.  He spins me around.  "Do you see them?" I say.

He laughs and nods.

And then two of the eagles dive towards one another, their talons reaching, clasping the talons of the other, and as we watch, they begin to spin in a shared circle, bird over bird, as if they were one bird falling, falling, so fast that my mouth is open in awe.  Then they let go of one another and screech so loudly that it echoes out over the hill, and we are left with the tingling of our spines as they each catch their own current and depart from one another and then from us, leaving the skies empty.

The two birds were not mates though mates have been known to do this spinning dance in midair.  These were two males, one of them having flown too close to the shared circle of another pair.  This was a dance of dominance, and the shrieks were angry warnings.  Both males were stunning, and I am in awe of their brief encounter.  I turn to my husband and wish for a moment that he would do such a thing if another male came too close to our inner circle.  We are both still laughing excitedly.

My daughter wants to know if she will fly one day, and I always tell her that of course she will, that she can go anywhere she wants.  What I don't tell her is that she will have to learn to let the currents carry her and let go of the need to pilot herself, alone.

As I climb back into the car, I am still impeded by gravity, by how heavily I tread, cling to each step on the earth, each grip  of my hand on something steady and reliable.  I tell myself I am in control, but the birds remind me this is an illusion.

Five miles down the same road, we pull the car over for another pair of eagles, and I leap out of the car to the let the wind hit my face and blow my hair and so that I can stare so high for so long into the sky that I will forget, one more time today, that I am standing on solid ground while the eagles dip and dive, dip and dive, my arms spread out at my sides, my fingers feeling their own way through a current or two, as if they could be propellers.

Who knows.  Maybe one day I'll go with my dad to Kenya and see Kibera.  Maybe I'll go to Copenhagen and meet some of our family who live there.  The longer I watch the birds, the less I forget the fear that I cannot always be in control, that I won't be here forever, and not every current will take me home.

When all you can see is sky, you can almost believe you are flying.  

Spring's Lesson: Letting Go

The dark-eyed juncos are gone from my backyard feeder, and in their place are the sparrows and finches.  The robins, too, are back, pulling up worms from our lawn, performing their darting dances from fence post to fence post.  Unfortunately, the house two doors down that was abandoned for three years is now occupied, and when the new neighbors moved in, they removed the robin's nest from the top of their porch light.  Now our annual robin couple we've come to rely on for at least a baby or two every May has no place to roost.  Already this spring, I've seen the couple--the male and female robin who have come back, expecting their nest to be where they left it.  They land on the metal porch light and slide slowly off, bewildered, mouths full of dry grass.

I'm glad they're back.  I had thought they wouldn't return, not after what happened last year.  They had three babies last May, and as the hatchlings progressively became more alert, sitting on the edge of the nest and flapping their wings, I grew nervous.  If they fell, they'd hit the concrete, and so I laid out two yoga mats and one sleeping bag mat, just in case, as I waited for them to venture out into the world.

When I came home from work one day to find one of the hatchlings hopping across the road, I couldn't help myself.  I went after it, spoke softly and kindly, bent over with my hands out, and it hopped right on.  Slowly, I carried the baby back to its nest, intending to put it back with the other two.

My husband ran inside and came back out with a dining room chair he put down under the nest.

"Take him," I said, wanting my husband to climb up on the chair and put the baby back in the nest.

But something about my husband's hand around the baby's back terrified it, and it began to shriek, at which point all three babies took off into the air, their first flight together, each in their own direction--one under a car, the other smack in the middle of the road again, and yet another under a bush.

"Damn it," I shrieked as a gang full of neighborhood birds flew over to cuss me out, all of them on the parking lot dancing about, as they chirped angrily.  My husband and I had seen this before--birds defending each other like this, especially their babies, the innocents, but we'd never seen such a large group so sorely offended. They were aghast, all of them--sparrows, finches, starlings, and robins.

"I'm sorry," I said, having learned my lesson--that I knew less than they did about how to protect the babies, how to help them navigate the world.  I had interfered and only made things worse.  After that, for several weeks, the two parents had to deliver worms to three separate locations--under the neighbor's porch, behind our back fence, and under a lawn decoration the next block over.  Every once in a while, one of them would perch on my deck and glare through the window as if to suggest that they were exhausted, and I was at fault.  Stupid human.

I'm sorry.

Still, they have returned, and as a peace offering, I ran out and bought them a roosting house, one just like Google says they prefer--with an open front and semi-open sides.  We hung it on our porch, high above the ground, out of the elements.  I wait for them to bring their mud and dried grass there so that I might have another chance to watch the babies hatch and grow, and this time, take flight on their own time.  But as of yet, the robins have denied me the pleasure.  They do not like how often we go in and out of our front door, how much noise we make, the dinging of our wind chimes.

Last week, I stepped out onto the back deck and found a lone white egg on the top of the recycling bin.  It was cracked, a tiny yellow pool beneath it, and as far as I could see, there was no conceivable explanation for its being there.  There is no roof above the bin.  There is no nest anywhere it could have fallen out of.  But still it was there, a mourning dove's loss.

"Maybe it stuck to the bird and fell off of her while she was flying," my husband said as I held it up and examined it.

Maybe he's right.  Yet, I'd like to think of the tiny egg as a sign, a reminder even.  The little life that was inside the egg is gone now, and the cracked artifact of both its beginning and end is left to me.  I let it remind me of last year's lesson, of the importance of standing at a distance, of observing with love and respect, of letting go of control.  And I stand at my front window and wait for new life to return to my doorstep.

The Eye of the Red Tail

Red-tail hawks are everywhere. Four of them once lived along my route up 222 North to Reading Area Community College.  Now there are three.  I wondered about  the fourth when I didn't see her on her branch one morning.  When she wasn't there again the next morning, I was sure.  She'd gone.

Two live along the road to the YMCA, where I work out.  One of those two is rarely perched.  She spends most of her time in the air, her wings still, her eye on the ground.  She once took a mouse as our car passed her by.  The other, closer to home, dives brazenly into our neighborhood sometimes.  She took a mourning dove this afternoon.  Young and uncouth, she fails to understand that she does not belong in backyards like she does in the wide open fields that surround us, nor did she understand why I stopped and stared at her from across the road as she tore into the feathers of the dove in her talons.  She let me stare only a moment before she took off into the sky, dove in tow, and found a quiet spot in a secluded backyard where I wouldn't bother her.

Many Native American cultures believe that visionaries are surrounded by red-tails.  And perhaps to earn my right to be in their consistent presence, I have begun sharpening my eye for the world, looking around when I would rather close my eyes, breathing in when I would rather stifle my breath.

I have fallen in love with these birds like they fall in lifelong love with each other, finding each other in flight, the male plunging downwards then ascending above his female before plummeting again, this time reaching his talons for her with whom he will live out the rest of his thirty or so years.  Sometimes, high in the air, they will entangle their talons, spinning themselves in one cycle of circles toward the earth before they will, just in time, release themselves and then glide away into their own swells.

I watch them as they look down over us all, and in their elegance and beauty, I find grace.  In meditation, I soar with the red-tails in their smooth circles, plunging low then rising high, riding invisible waves, hollow bones light as feathers.  My breath feels as clean and strong as the wind, and my closed eyes feel open.  

***In the picture above, you will see the young hawk who got herself a dove this afternoon.