Bird in the Hand

On Sunday, I took a short walk at a township nature preserve just down the road. Aside from two hunting trips, this was the first time I'd set foot outside in weeks when I wasn't walking to my car or around campus. I had a beautiful walk; snow fell the entire time, and to my nature-starved eyes, even the bare shrubs, with red, white, and purple-black berries, and the clearings full of tan and rusty grasses and weeds were pleasing. After about half an hour of walking, I reached a junction of trails: one would lead me back to my car in about five minutes, the other would take me around a small wetland and add about twenty minutes to the trip. Thinking of chores awaiting me back home, I took the shorter route.

The journey should have been uneventful and was until shortly after I'd passed from an open meadow into mature forest of oaks and hickories, when I heard a quiet but insistent flutter around my feet. At first I guessed I'd flushed a chickadee, but no bird had flown. I heard the fluttering again, and saw a blur of gray and yellow when I looked down. Once the fluttering stopped, I could see a golden crowned kinglet hanging from a dry weed, its left wing snagged by tiny but tenacious burrs.

I tend to leave wounded or otherwise distressed animals to their fate. Often, you can't approach them safely, they may still flee you if you try, or there may be little you can do if you can reach them. I know that accidents happen for them, as well as for people, and that sooner or later they will become food for something else. Who am I to deprive some opportunistic predator of its meal?

In this case, though, I couldn't walk away. My clear-eyed, unsentimental, big-picture take on suffering in nature (or so I usually think of it) melted at the sight of something tiny, cute, and harmless in a grave predicament, especially because its predicament was one I thought I could easily fix.

I was mistaken. I tried to snap the stem where it attatched to the bird's wing, but it held fast while the kinglet convulsed once again, twisting at the end of its tether. To get a closer look at the burrs, and to prevent the bird from harming itself more than it already had, I took the bird in my gloved hand. This was the first time I'd ever held a living bird. When I looked under its wing, I saw the problem was more complicated than it first looked. The ends of the stem terminated in clusters of spiky balls that I could not pull away. It looked as if someone had spilled sticky peppercorns on the underside of the bird's wing. I took off my left glove to pull at individual burrs with my fingernails, but I made no more progress that way. Fearing that my continued plucking at the bird might hurt it more than the burrs, I placed the nails of my thumb and index finder around the weed's stalk and sawed it away as close to the wing as possible.

I opened my right hand and the bird darted away, but immediately snagged its right wing on the same plant. I took it again, and this time the burrs pulled out easily, not having been driven in by the bird's struggling. Not wanting to risk a third snaring, I took the bird to the center of the trail and heaved it up with both hands the way you see people dispatch homing pigeons. It flew about fifteen feet, then dove into a tangle of raspberry briars.

Did this thing want to live?

It did, I'm sure. And it may have. Possibly, once it attatined a stable footing, it used its beak, a much more precise instrument than my fingers, to pluck out the burrs . But I knew that circumstances may have led to a point where survival was unlikely. Even before I came along, the kinglet could have broken its wing while thrashing about while suspended by the treacherous weed. If not, my ministrations might have broken or dislocated it. Maybe the burrs remaining on the wing made flying painful. If I'd done nothing else, I'd at least lessened its agony, I supposed--I'd rather die resting on the ground than dangling above it by an arm.

Even so, I walked away sad and discouraged. I'd had a chance to do one simple, good thing and I'd failed. That the thing wasn't actually so simple didn't much mitigate my regrets. I thought of other efforts I've made to provide immeditate and personal help to wild animals--nursing an injured grackle, taking in an orphaned litter of rabbits, watching and bringing food to a hurt pigeon resting under my shrubs--and couldn't recall a single survivor. My mind wandered to the memory of seeing some wildlife "rescuers" releasing a raccoon at a river landing, then later watching it sitting next to some bank fishermen as if it wanted to be taken home. I gave it until an hour after nightfall. I remembered also the owls on display at a fishing show I attended a few years back, saved from injuries so they could travel between exhibitions where they would sit leashed to a perch.

I don't think all hands-on assistance to wild creatures is necessarily futile (ignorance probably contributed much to the failure of mine), and I know that wildlife rehabilitators do some good and important work. Still, while driving home, I thought about the difficulty and the irregular success of this sort of assistance. Maybe, I supposed, we can best exercise compassion for wild creatures from some remove--improving or restoring habitat, for instance, or establishing legal protections for certain species, or preventing pollution and other sorts of environmental degradation. Setting out seeds and letting the birds come who will.

There certainly are examples of altruistic behavior among animals, but the the centrality of altruism in our social existence and our efforts to cultivate it are among the most prominent markers of the divide between our species and others. We may never feel that divide more sharply than in those times when we try to reach across it with gestures of compassion.


Tags: Birds; Nature