In my life before children, (which at this point I think might actually have been another life) I used to dabble in wildlife rehabilitation. By “dabble” I mean I would take in 60-75 baby birds a season, (from April to August) and by “rehabilitation” I mean I would raise them – sometimes from the egg. Wildlife rehab, (unlike human rehab) involves a lot of worms, heating lamps, seed/fruit/meat concoctions, and (perhaps a bit more on par with human rehab) syringes – minus the needles. Wildlife rehabilitation is something that actually requires a license, (Fun Fact 1: except for three birds; house sparrows, pigeons and starlings) and at the time, there were only two of us serving a fairly large city and it’s surrounding areas.
So, starting sometime in April, I’d begin to get calls to take in birds of many different species, shapes, sizes, ages and stages. I’d concoct formulas to match their seed eating, insect eating or omnivorous nutritional needs and use little one-millimeter needle-less syringes to feed them every 2 hours during the day until they were old enough to eat on their own. (Fun Fact 2: when you specialize in mammal rehabilitation, you don’t get the nights off) I raised sparrows, purple finches, golden finches, robins, mourning doves, wrens, blackbirds, red-winged blackbirds, grackles, whippoorwills, brown thrashers, northern flickers, blue jays, blue birds, and even once in a great while, (with a tiny little catheter tip on the end of a syringe) I’d raise a hummingbird. (Fun Fact 4: the formula I’d make for a hummingbird was part sugar-based, but also included protein – hummingbird parents feed their babies tiny insects).
I became the song bird rehab aficionado in a greater metropolitan area.
“What in the world do you have in your purse?!” (bag, box, pocket, etc.) was a on-going question as those around me would notice strange sounds coming from places that were normally strange-sound free in the days before the iphone. Feeding schedules necessitated that I bring many of these birds with me wherever I was. I had them (somewhat) secretly stashed away, but nevertheless with me at all times – at friend’s houses, the grocery store, in the mall, at church, on road trips, vacations and even the occasional canoe or kayak trip. People who knew me in my days of bird-mothering will often remind me, “Remember that one time you had a bird in your….?” (purse, bag, box, pocket, lunch cooler, file cabinet drawer behind your desk in your classroom, etc.) I was the bird lady.
And many, many birds I did raise from hatchling to fledgling until finally, released. However, unlike with children and students and other groups in which you’re not supposed to acknowledge the fact you have favorites, I admit – I really bonded with one unique bird.
He was a solo hatchling crow named, not-so-creatively, Edgar, (Fun Fact 5: raising crows solo is a last-resort, they imprint on humans something fierce). Edgar, with his lovely baby-blue eyes, (Fun Fact 6: crows have blue eyes until adulthood, then they turn black) would call me with a wide variety of different sounds. He didn’t just want to be fed, he wanted my attention, even my affection. From an early age, he was mischievous and playful. (Fun Fact 7: american crows can count and solve problems at a toddler-ish level) Once Edgar could fly well enough, I’d bring him outside with me where he would cause all kinds of trouble. Anything small and colorful, he’d pick up and fly away with – hiding it somewhere in the yard. Once, I took my earrings out and set them on the deck and turned around to do something else. In seconds, Edgar had picked them up, and brought them to his cache. I lost jewelry, clothes pins, hair-ties, small caps to this and that, pens, pencils, garden markers, even the electric fence insulators from our animal pastures if I happened to set them down and look away before I nailed them to the posts. Everything was fair game in Edgar’s world.
Edgar also introduced us to our neighbors, something we hadn’t gotten around to doing for an entire year. This was one of the most important implications of this intersection of bird and human life. He was a great link and conversation starter in our rural area with little neighborly proximity, where physical distance from house to house generally lends to people keeping to themselves. I was in the habit of daily runs on our dirt roads and Edgar was in the habit of flying along with me. He would fly from telephone pole to telephone pole, following me on my entire run. I would talk to him as I ran, and he would chatter back. What I didn’t know was that Edgar was also making a habit of flying this route without me, curious about the neighbors and uninhibited by the human concern that maybe they lived in a rural area because they wanted their privacy.
I found this out on one of our daily runs. Edgar flew on ahead of me a bit, and then behind some trees where a driveway was. As I continued on to where he was, I heard a little girl, “Mom, Roger’s here again and he wants a snack!” As I got closer I noticed that “Roger” was actually Edgar. “You mean Edgar?” I ask. “I mean Roger,” replied the girl, “He likes cinnamon rolls.” I stopped to talk to the little girl and her mother a bit. We laughed about the tricks Edgar/Roger played on all of us and remarked about how crazy it was that it took a crow to introduce us to each other. A week or so later, this same scene played out again – this time with a different neighbor. Edgar/Roger played the same tricks on this neighbor, but went by the name of Ben. “The man who used to live here was named Ben.” I was told, “He died several years ago. He was a great man, we thought this must be his spirit.” We talked about Edgar and Ben and wondered why we, as neighbors, hadn’t met each other yet. This scenario would repeat itself a few more times over the next few weeks with other neighbors I’d never met. Each time, we’d share stories and laugh about Edgar’s tricks and then wonder out-loud why it took a bird to finally introduce us.
At some point, Edgar abandoned visiting human neighbors and joined with the other neighbor crows, (Fun Fact 8: a group of crows is called a ‘murder’). By the end of the summer, a few had been making a visit to Edgar here and there, talking with him, maybe checking him out, maybe asking him where to get the cinnamon rolls, (Fun Fact 9: crows are omnivorous and eat whatever is available). I could hear their back-and-forth chattering from inside the house as they perched in the red maple directly outside of a window. He would leave with them on occasion, but would always return in the evenings. Eventually, his evening returns became fewer and fewer until one day, he just never came back.
Edgar was one of my last wildlife rehabilitation projects, and undoubtedly my most memorable. Although I’d worked with birds as respectable as the robin, as beautiful as the blue bird and as unusual as the whippoorwill, (Fun Fact 10: the whippoorwill has a tiny beak but a huge mouth that gives one the impression it has a flip-top head, it’s crazy – trust me) and although many bird snobs might scoff at “rehabilitating” a crow, it was an intersection of nature and humanity that had important implications in our little microcosm of a social system known as ‘our neighborhood’. Edgar left, but the connections he helped forge between us continued, mostly in small ways; a wave, a conversation, helping out with this or that. Crows are naturally highly sociable animals, this was very much a part of Edgar’s nature – as it is with ours. However, with his playful uninhibited curiosity, he had a way – as the crow flies – of engaging with people above and beyond the physical or social boundaries that might tell the rest of us to look away, stand back, keep to ourselves. Edgar, in his ignorance of these boundaries, showed us they didn’t really exist – at least not as rigidly as we thought they did. His natural drive to be sociable eventually called him to join the other crows, but in the process, in his mischievous innocence, Edgar reminded us of our own sociable natures, and of the delight in consequential interactions with neighbors. -A smile, a wave, a shared story about the fond memory of a crow.
