The Snow-Owl's Drift

So I ask again: Is it asking too much of the human imagination to think that a snowy owl that experiences pain on flying knows it’s in deep trouble? If the answer to that is no, then this: Is it not possible for an owl in trouble to deliberately make its way to a place where humans couldn’t fail to find it, and wait for help? If the anecdotes cited in my last post are to be believed, this kind of self-awareness is within the mental capacity of a turkey vulture and a cottontail rabbit. If a scavenger and a “lowly” herbivore like a rabbit can make the connection, what about an apex predator, which relies on cunning and innovation to catch its prey?

When I think about it in this outside-the-envelope way, so much suddenly makes sense. This owl, which had formerly shown a predilection for sitting on highway signs, now stays huddled on the ground. It can still fly well enough to get to the top of a tree or building, but on the ground it stays. It sits still when people gather nearby. I was told that people were trying to get close enough to pet it, and that, a couple of days after it appeared at the mall, two men approached it with a blanket and a box in an attempt to capture it. They were stopped by the manager of a nearby restaurant, who was suspicious of their intentions. It leaves at night to hunt, but spends its days in this most unlikely ditch, enduring the attention of hundreds of people, a crowd that grows with each passing day. Was the owl waiting for someone to notice that its wing was out of place; that it flew with difficulty? So many people told me, again and again, "When it flew, it flew fine! It looked strong!" I didn't see that. I saw a bird in distress. 

And this is where it gets really interesting. I photographed the owl all Monday afternoon, Dec. 18, until dark. In between shooting, I tried to keep people away from it, with varying success. Most complied, but some ignored my entreaties, in the quest for the perfect cellphone photo of the “tame” Harry Potter owl. I left the mall dispirited and completely exhausted, too tired to even upload my photos. But I woke at 6 the next morning and dove into it like a creature possessed. I wrote from 7 to 4, not stopping for lunch. I wrote a post about the owl, about the stress put on it by the ever-growing crowds; about its mysterious injury. I didn’t know then that it had been hit by a car, but I knew it was badly compromised, and I sensed it was going to die unless I did something. I posted “The Parkersburg Snowy Owl” on my blog around 4:30 pm Dec. 19. The post went crazily viral, with more than 44,000 views in less than two weeks. And the spinning wheels, a bunch of concerned people  fighting a mostly losing battle for public consideration for this bird, got traction and started rolling.

Several more days passed while a concerned group of people, including State Ornithologist Rich Bailey, Rebecca Young from USFWS, Katie and Jesse Fallon from the Avian Conservation Center of Appalachia, raptor biologist Vince Slabe, Bill Thompson III from Bird Watcher’s Digest, Jon Benedetti of Mountwood Bird Club, bird bander Joey Herron and I all quietly conferred about how best to help the bird. We knew it should be trapped and taken into care. We had to keep the plan quiet, anticipating that trapping the bird in a public place would be difficult enough without a bunch of people gathering around. The owl showed up at the mall each day, and crowds only grew. Finally, December 21 arrived. We’d all agreed to converge at the mall at 10 AM to attempt to trap the bird and take it into care. Two local police officers were invited for crowd control. As I was loading the car that morning, I got text messages from Katie Fallon of ACCA, and an email from Jon Benedetti, who had been watching over the owl and educating the crowd at the mall since Dec. 14. Jon was at the mall, but the owl was nowhere to be found.

I was befuddled. How far could it go with that injured wing? And where would it have gone? Only a few minutes later, Katie texted again. Local birders Kyle Carlsen and Mollee Brown had located the owl about ¾ mi. from the mall, atop a building just behind Faith Baptist Church on 10^th St. in Vienna. What luck! When Jesse and Vince arrived there around 8:30, the owl was gone, but it turned up on a telephone pole a few blocks away, gleaming bright white in the winter sun. We trained our binoculars and scopes on it, wanting to give it space so that Vince could set his bow net and possibly capture it. And we who had been following this bird with such hope and determination were heartsick to see its right wing hanging straight down from its side, fully extended.

The owl sat there in the bright sun for a long time: 6 ½ hours, to be exact, while we watched and waited. It never moved from the telephone pole. People drove up, snapped photos, and drove away. It was hard to miss; you could see it shining white from Grand Central Avenue. I moved closer and parked several hundred feet away to observe and photograph the bird from my car window. All day long, it never once tucked the injured wing up. It would twitch the wing as if thinking about drawing it into a normal position, but never did. The longer I watched it and thought about it, the more I wondered about why, on this day of all days, the owl had quit the mall. Why it chose to perch atop a telephone pole on a quiet back street. Why it stayed there for so long with its injured wing fully extended.

I wondered if the owl had gotten the message from us that things had changed; that it was about to be captured. This message could not have come in spoken word; rather it would have come in the mind pictures we who were most closely involved with it may have inadvertently sent it. That animals think in pictures, and likely convey information to each other through a kind of pictorial telepathy, is likely. One has only to read Temple Grandin’s writing (Thinking in Pictures is a favorite book) to know this. One has only to live with an animal or bird to know this. 

I could bring Chet Baker yawning and stretching out of a sound sleep in another room by visualizing a fun run with him. In a far freakier feat, I once brought him slinking back from chasing cattle with a mind-picture I didn't even mean to send. As a crazy pup, he'd ducked under a barbed-wire fence and run straight into a herd of cows with spring calves. I had run after him, calling his name, until I couldn’t run any farther. He was having so much fun nipping the heels of the cattle that he’d ignored my screams.  In despair, I sank to the ground, and a picture flooded my mind of his dear little round head, kicked in.  And even as a heedless pup, Chet couldn’t ignore that horrific image that made its way from my vivid mind to his. And he stopped what he was doing, ran back to me and crawled into my lap.

My macaw always seemed to know when I was about to clip her toenails, a procedure she detested, well before I fetched the towel and clippers. She’d begin to tremble and move away from me. It was the darndest thing-- as if she was reading my mind. Well, she was! I became convinced she was able to see the pictures in my mind as I planned my strategy to corner her. Toward the end of her 23-year life, I would pay her the courtesy of announcing it to her, to save us both the trouble of her waddling and flapping away in dread. “Charlie, as you know, I’m going to have to clip your nails today. I’m sorry. I know you hate this.” She’d step onto my hand, allow me to walk with her to the linen closet, grab a towel and spread it on the floor. I’d then lay her down gently on her back and swaddle her in the cloth without a squawk of protest. We had reached an understanding. Charlie didn’t like being surprised by a sudden mind-picture, but was amenable to being asked nicely to cooperate. We both knew, after 23 years, the nail clip was going to happen whether she fought it or not.

If this is what people call “animal whispering,” all right. I don’t use the term. I don't use "furbabies," either. Animals are other nations, in harmony with us if we take the time and make ourselves still enough to receive their thoughts, their hopes, the pictures in their minds.  I believe that we communicate wordlessly with animals, and they with us, all the time, but most of us aren’t “woke” enough to acknowledge that it’s happening.

So here’s the owl, and let’s let our skepticism go long enough to consider that it has been reporting to the crowded mall every day for eight days in hope that someone will be able to help it. The way a turkey vulture hopes. The way a cottontail hopes. 

Hoping, in a way most of us can’t even grant it the intelligence and presence of mind to do. And nobody seems to get it. Nothing happens. It goes on trying to hunt at night, starving and getting weaker by the day. And that wing hurts. 

 So the owl knows that plan isn’t working and it’s not stupid, nor is it crazy. It’s not going to keep doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. On the ninth day it gives up. It quits the crowded mall and struggles to the top of a telephone pole in a quiet neighborhood. And it lets its hurt wing hang straight down there in the bright winter sun. Even the least observant person walking by might say, “Hmm. Look at that big white owl there. I wonder why its wing is hanging down like that?” I think about that 6 ½ hours of pole sitting differently, having entertained the possibility that the owl knows it’s injured and might be seeking help. I wonder if it’s a silent advertisement, a protest of sorts. Here I am. My wing is hurt. Anyone picking up on that?

Photo by Joey Herron, Dec. 21, 2017

And the owl looks down and there’s a gerbil wiggling around in the grass. An easy mark. It stares at it off and on for six hours, and finally takes the suggestion we’ve made that it come to us for help. I’m not going to imagine the owl knew there was a trap set for it and had to decide whether or not to take the bait. But I do wonder if it got our mind pictures of checking it out, feeding it while its coracoid heals; pictures of it spending time in rehab and then flying back free to the Arctic? 

Photo by Bruce Wunderlich of the Holmes Co. OH owl, Dec. 2017

Did it get the transmissions we were all unconsciously sending it? Maybe my head’s gone soft. Or maybe something really special was passed between a young snowy owl and the hopeful humans gathered on 10^th Street, behind the Faith Baptist Church, on the Winter Solstice.

Photo by Michael Schramm, USFWS

I simply cannot dismiss the possibility that the owl came to the Grand Central Mall, weird place of all weird places for an Arctic owl to appear, to get help. I believe that sitting on the ground at a crowded mall with your  wing crumpled and hanging down wasn’t as dumb a move as all the humans thought. I rather think that we’re the dumb ones, for taking eight days to figure out what the owl was trying to tell us. On the ninth day, he rested, up atop a telephone pole for all to see. And on December 21, as the longest night of the year came on, we finally got the snow owl’s drift.

As a storyteller, I like the way this ends. However. I know you are dying to hear some fresh news on the owl. Hey, me too! Katie Fallon (author of Vulture and Cerulean Blues, and my owl information connection, has been doing a writing residency and has been away from home, hearth, kids, husband and owl. She checked in this afternoon with this update!

 January 7, 2018, 1:30 pm. Jesse and Katie Fallon report that the owl weighed a (low-end but normal) 1500 gm before his meal today. The coracoid fracture has healed. His shoulder is stable. He's done with his antibiotics and is off pain medications. Still on an antifungal, just to protect against infection. Jesse has moved him to a larger enclosure today so he can exercise at long last. The owl feels strong!

Blubbering? Me, too. Thank you for following his story, thank you for caring, and thank you for remembering the Avian Conservation Center of Appalachia in your generosity.  And don't forget Project SNOWstorm, which is shining a great light on the hidden lives of snowy owls. Each individual is precious, and has so much to teach us, if we will only listen.

A bigger enclosure? Show it to me! Also:  Put me down. And lunch. Now.

Hey 21! Phoebe's All Grown Up!

 I was thinking last evening about how very, very different the weather was on the evening of July 10, 1996. It was cool, cool enough to slow the crickets down and make me stretch one of Bill's great big fleece pullovers over my head and heaving abdomen. I sat heavily in a cedar Adirondack chair, long since rotted away, and submitted to a video interview by Bill, holding a camcorder on his shoulder (remember those?) It was bigger than his head. He was asking me questions about how I thought our baby would be: what she'd look like, whether she'd have long legs like his or short ones like mine.

July 10, 2017. Now THAT is ugly. In the most beautiful way. I was frantically picking wax beans in the garden, trying to get a meal before it hit. I failed. My favorite weather: the leadup to a thunderstorm. I HAVE to be out in it.

At the time I was a bit annoyed, as only a full-term pregnant woman can be, that he would subject me to this interview, and I told him he had to avert the camera while I puffed through the contractions, dammit! I didn't know it then but I was in active labor, and technically probably should have been at the hospital. When I did get to the hospital they checked me and started rushing around like their gowns were on fire, but it was to be another 12 hours of fabulous back labor before Phoebe made the scene. I pretty much knew there was no big rush. There was an herbed chicken with sweet potatoes roasting in the oven, and a pint of ice cream in the freezer that I intended to eat, because my midwife had told me they wouldn't let me eat once I got to the hospital. Well then! I had the hardest 24 hours of work in my life ahead of me, and you have to eat to work like that. We didn't go into town until midnight. Phoebe arrived at 11:41 AM July 11, 1996.

I watch that prenatal interview now and I'm so glad we have it, because so much more than what I hoped for that mystery baby has come true. I couldn't have dreamt a baby like that one has turned out to be.

"Good" doesn't quite capture this light, does it?

We all went out on the deck last night to bask in the after-storm light. I was so overcome I was unable to speak. This is a new thing with me...I stutter when the light is good. I stutter when I see deer doing good things that need to be photographed. When a worm-eating warbler shows up at the studio window, as one just did. I literally cannot form any words. I see Bill and Liam looking at each other and then at me, the way the Jetsons looked at Rosie the Robot when she'd get a short and go on the fritz and throw her metal claws up in the air and spin around in circles like a big clanky phalarope.

I know my brain is changing as I age, and this sudden incapacitation in the face of great beauty is one of the early heads-up I suspect. Or I could call it rapture. Yes. Let's call it rapture. 

All this beauty gave me to contemplate about what can happen in 21 years. One moment, you have a squirmy little girl with a tuft of copper on her head who can't even sit up

so you fake her taking a great balletic leap as she lies on a blanket

 and the next you have a lissome woman at your side, who is not only standing up but walking alone.

Phoebe is both an object of contemplation and a muse.  She is also my friend. As is her brother. At this point, they are giving me far more than I give them (well, if you don't count Bowdoin's spring semester bill gaaaaaackkkk). Together, they plug me in each night, help keep me going.

Playing the Jungle Gym game with a very young Jemima Jay, the kids cracked up when Chet Baker inserted himself into the scene. You have your hands out. Pet me then. Pay no attention to the little bird on the basket. Do not even look at her.

This sustaining love they both receive and give has only grown through the years. 

When she could still outrun him... (October 2014)

and when she no longer could. (June 2017)

When she got back from Panama, the longest time she'd ever been away from Liam, from us, from home. 

That love between them is my favorite thing about these kids. 

On this, Phoebe's 21st birthday, I wanted to celebrate her, and I could easily spend all day posting photos and writing captions. But I thought I'd pick out just two things to celebrate. And those are the love between her and Liam and her maximum bird magic. 

It started early, with Charlie Macaw.  This bird, whose vise-like bill could crack a Brazil nut, decided Phoebe was her baby. And all babies need attention and preening.

Phoebe knows that better than anyone. She is who made Jemima the character she is. As my DOD always said, "Attention makes the pup." It's been borne out again and again. Ask Chet Baker. Ask Jemima. As fate would have it, Phoebe was home during the critical socialization weeks of this jay, giving her the undivided attention that gave her confidence and strength of character.

Did this love and affection cause Jemima to be hopelessly imprinted on humans? Nope. Not by current indications. More on that later. Data is still coming in in great batches.

Can you love a wee little jay and still set her free? Yep. You can. 

Can rehab be fun? Yep. It is (except when it's not.)

 I present Phoebe and the Amazing Inflatable Blue Jay.

On your birthday, Phoebe, I wish you all the happiness in the world. I wish you best friends and delicious food and beautiful days. I wish you the sustaining love of your family and bird magic, every day.

I wish you joy enough to leap for.

Keep those snaps and texts coming, baby. I'm on my way. 

The Grateful Gull

Liam and I, turned loose in Florida, when the Weather Gods decided to smile instead of crap on us. It was in the upper 60's and 70's for the duration of our visit, and only rained one night and the next morning. The reason I'm blogging this now is because it is unconscionably dreary here in them Mid-Ohio Valley right now. 40's and drizzly and gray. Not complaining, mind you, for all of you buried under yards of snowpack. Grateful. Just pinin' for the F'lords.

You never know when a walk on the beach is going to turn into a rescue mission. Liam and I saw this beautiful juvenile bluefish swimming wan figure eights in a tidepool. The tide was receding, and the lovely opalescent bluefish was clearly doomed to become gull food. 

The problem was how to catch a very fast fish with sharp spiny fins and a good set of razor-sharp teeth with only one's bare hands. Which, by the way, one uses to make one's living. I studied on this little dilemma as I walked a short distance past the fish.  I could have kept walking, which was what I wanted to do. But I couldn't leave it there to die. 

Being a landlubber, I don't have much practice catching fast toothy spiny fish bare-handed. Noodling, I believe they call it. I tried the Direct Grab, and the fish wisely nipped me. OK. Direct Grab, bad.

Thought some more with my big brain, like the hunter-gatherer I was designed to be. Aha! Got it. I cornered the fish in the deepest part of its pool and with both hands swept a big wave of water, including the fish, out onto the flat sand.

In moments I had it safely contained and on its way to freedom.

photo by Liam Thompson, who accompanied me to release it just back of the breakers. Yay.

Better luck next tide, Fish.

We hadn't gone another ten minutes of breathing salt air, walking on perfect wet sand and listening to waves when I heard a willet give a sharp, urgent, keening call I'd never heard before. It was clearly sounding an alarm, but for what? I followed the bird's gaze 

far down the beach to a woman with a fishing pole, and a small white gull, grounded, facing a man. 

Oh, that's not good. 

As I ran toward the scene I could see the man was afraid to approach the gull, and that it was tangled in his line and would only get more tangled the more it flapped. Well. We'll see about that.

I swooped in there like a big ol' bird and in one grab had the gull by the back of its neck with its wings tucked under my arm. It bit me a lot, but ordinary bird bites don't bother me in the least, because I was  perforated for 23 years by the best biter that ever lived. She could crack a Brazil nut in one go. Enormous masseter muscles; tremendous crushing power; piercing tip and shearing mandible. By comparison, a nip from a laughing gull is a loving tickle. 

I didn't bite you that much. I just bit you good. 

Yes, you did, Charlie, like a good parrot should. 

Back in my parrot-keeping days, I remember talking with a guy from whom I was buying a used cage. From the look of his hands, he'd handled a lot of parrots. Ever the reporter, I asked him about it. He said the bites didn't hurt him any more. "You get bit enough, the nerves die back." Niiice. Let's all handle parrots until our nerves die back. Then we wouldn't need to scoop bluefish out of tidepools like a wussy. We could just grab those runners with our nerveless hands.

I still have nerves in my hands, and want to keep them, so I secured the little laugher's pointy part, but not before he scored bigtime on my poor titty, whose nerves, despite baby Phoebe and Liam's best efforts, have clearly not died back. How do they know to stab humans where it hurts most? Not slow, these larids. Titty twisters.

I held the gull while the fisherman unwound his line, then Liam shot a commemorative photo of the happy bird-whisperer, and I joyfully hoisted the gull back into the air, to live and laugh again. That was sweet, to give it its freedom, with two still usable wings as a bonus. Monofilament is not kind to bird bones.

We'd been at the beach 20 minutes and already rescued two creatures. I guess we came at the perfect moment. Or we were the right people for the moment. Nobody else on the beach, I noticed, batted an eye or turned around when the willet started shrieking. To my ear, it might as well have been screaming, 

"OH MY GOD THAT GULL'S GONNA BREAK HIS WINGS!!! SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING!!! ZICK!! ZICK!! ARE YOU SEEING THIS???"

It's all about tuning into what the birds are saying, all the time. Being more huntergathery.

Our hunting and gathering at the lovely Quality Inn seemed to be strictly limited to carbohydrates. Man. I look at these hotel breakfast bars and there is literally nothing the Atkins adherent or Paleogal in me wants to eat. Liam is another story. Malted waffles, cinnamon rolls, English muffins, biscuits with lumpy white gravy...that's just pure breakfast heaven for him. Part of what is unfair about life is that a 15 year old boy can turn that stuff into several feet of python-lean beauty, growing up instead of straight out. His 50 something mother can only watch and marvel and have a half-bowl of Raisin Bran, a guilty pleasure I save strictly for motel stays. It's a sugar bomb, probably the worst of all breakfast cereals. At least motels are consistent in their choices.

We thought the gators looked very well-fed at Merritt Island NWR. They're not eating flapjacks for breakfast.

Little blue heron has that lean and hungry look I dig. An avian javelin, perfection in slate and mauve.

If you can't get a good photo of a little blue heron in Titusville, you're doin' it rong.

We saw more roseate spoonbills this trip than ever. What a treat! And this immature bird has yet to go bald, to show its slightly icky chewing-gum green scalp. I've always wondered why the white Eurasian spoonbill manages to keep its nice white hair, and ours goes bald. 

Miraculous bird, the spoonbill. Another gift.

As was that evening's sunset on Biolab Road.  A good day with my sweet boy in the rare, warm sun.

Aftermath

 

All right. It's been two weeks since Charlie died and it should be getting better by now, but it's worse, worse by far than I thought it would be, to live without her. I thought it would be nice not to have to care for her, to start every blessed day changing reams of papers and sweeping the floor of her room, taking two wastebaskets of soiled papers out to burn, fixing a nice breakfast of ravioli, sweet corn, snap peas, carrots and cherries. But it's not nice. It's horrible. Easily twenty times a day I get something she'd like, a sprig of oxalis or a glassine envelope or a whole zinnia flower, and I turn for her room and she is not there and there is no one now who wants this little thing I've got to give.

Chet Baker hangs close and is as sweet as a biscuit with honey but it's her I want, her fusty feathery smell and the soft doeskin of her cheeks, it's her scratchy voice and her golden-eyed crazy glance and her bobbing head, her special bird consciousness, that I want. And nothing in me understands why I can't have that any more, now or forever. It is a grief and loss so specific that there is nothing that will fix it, spackle over it, but time.

Over the last week, I've channeled a great deal of this fiercely focused longing into fighting that hideous travesty of a "festival" called Snapperfest. The one where people feel a need to throw and yank snapping and soft-shelled turtles around in order to have fun. Hundreds of gallons of Bud Light and a good dash of animal abuse. Bring the kids!

And though Monday was one of those rare seventyish days with high puffy white and gray clouds and blue sky and a lulling cricket and katydid chorus, one of those days that starts in the fifties and never gets to the eighties, one of those days that should be spent messing about in a boat, I never looked up, not once, until 3 pm. I wrote and wrote and wrote and researched and consulted with my best herpetological and clear-thinking life experts and came up with a letter I think might give the State of Indiana pause about this awful thing going on down in its southeast groin near the beautifully named town of Rising Sun. Channeling, that's what it was, channeling the pointless, aimless grief and loss toward trying to ease the suffering of some unfortunate turtles that a bunch of people thought nobody would care about.  That nobody did know or care about for fifteen freaking years. Well, wrong. Thousands of people the world over turn out to care about snapping turtles, thousands and thousands more than anyone thought.  Once they know about them, that is. And to me that is a beautiful thing, and it fills my heart. Part of my heart. The part that doesn't include the hole a crazy small green macaw chewed right into it.

Monday morning I spoke with Ann Fisher, my friend who has a lovely program called All Sides on WOSU Columbus. We didn't have a long time, what with a big segment on the possible repeal of our spiffy new law eliminating collective bargaining for public employees, but what time we had we used well. Here is a link to the program, and I come in about halfway through the show. And now for something completely different...from Republican Senator Shannon Jones telling us how great Senate Bill 5 is for teachers and firefighters, to me, barely holding myself together as I remember a quirky little bird. If you want, you can hear me fighting back tears as I talk about what Charlie meant to me, and what it means to enter a lifetime pact with a large psittacine. If you want. I wouldn't blame you if you didn't want; if you would rather go outside and look at big puffy white and gray clouds in a clear blue sky.

Charlie's Secret

 

He was born in an Arizona incubator, came rolling out of an egg that had been taken from his parents. Which, right off the bat, doesn’t seem right. He was bred of captive parents for captivity, but he was never domesticated, and his kind never can be.

He was shipped at a tender age to a bird broker in Connecticut who put an ad in the paper, which was spotted by a 31-year-old woman who had recently lost Edie, her best-ever white budgie.

Who wanted a new baby bird who would live a long, long time. Who probably should have been planning for a human baby about then, but that’s moot now, beside the point.

She got what she wanted, and a whole lot more. She put Charlie in a big cage that took up almost her whole tiny living room in a cabin in the woods in Connecticut. Charlie learned to call her boyfriend’s name: “ROB?!” and he called Rob for the next two decades, even after the young woman left and 

 moved to Maryland, and then to Ohio.

  

Charlie bit Julie's new boyfriend Bill until the bird figured out that he wouldn’t get any more beer if he kept doing that.

 

Bill and Julie got married and built Charlie his own room with glass doors and a sunny window and a big countertop to play on. Charlie could keep Julie company in the studio, and he did, very well indeed.

Along came a little girl, Phoebe, in 1996, and Charlie was fascinated and fell in love with the little girl. 

They played for hours all around the house, in closets and halls, hiding and chuckling and sharing secrets together. 

 

Phoebe could do anything with Charlie. She could wrap him in her blue blankie and carry him like a baby.

 When Liam was born in 1999, Charlie fell in love all over again, and suggested to Phoebe that she should probably learn to fly off and find her own territory. That never happened, so they all learned to get along.

 Liam loved Charlie, too, and that made Julie very happy. She felt lucky to have a bird that everyone in the family could handle and enjoy.

Charlie was 17 when a little black and white puppy came to live on Indigo Hill. He bit the pup once on the nose and was the Boss forever after. Chet and Charlie played lots of games, but Charlie wasn’t much for sharing toys or seats or beds. He just took them and bossed Chet around.

 All along, Charlie kept his best friend Julie company as she worked on her writing and painting. He loved to watch a bird take shape under her hand. He liked to check to see if their shiny eyes might come off the paper.

 

For her part, Julie loved his warm doeskin-soft cheeks, his kisses, his crazy sense of humor, and the sweet familiar weight of Charlie on her shoulder as she worked and thought.

 

She did not love the endless messes he made, but she took the good with the bad. She often said that there is no dirtier animal than a macaw, and she sounded like she meant it. “A hundred times more work than a dog! A hundred times!”

 

Phone bill? What phone bill?

Sometimes papers went missing. Bills, things like that. Books were notched, stationery was confettified, and cabinets were emptied, especially when Julie was otherwise occupied. 

 

Really, the safest place for Charlie was on Julie's shoulder, supervising the bird painting.

There were warm summer evenings and lawn games;

there were chases and screams and Sungold tomatoes.

 

 There was mashed sweet potato from a spoon. And cheesy eggy grits. Everything good.

 Julie loved to draw Charlie when he was snoozy.

And then in late summer 2011 Charlie started to act strangely. He fell silent and began looking for a corner where he could build a nest. He wanted to tear up the wall of his own special room, but Julie gave him newspapers and thick art catalogues instead. He could reduce them to confetti in a single day. He chewed and chewed. 

July 15, 2011

Charlie began pulling his tail forward and making odd roaring squawks. He rushed at anyone who entered his room. He hardly paused to eat. And then there was a rattle in Charlie’s breath, and Julie became very alarmed. She called his best veterinarian, Bob from Connecticut. Bob listened to Julie’s story, and the first question he asked was, “Are you sure Charlie is a male?”

 

 

The bird dealer had assured Julie that Charlie had been surgically sexed and was a male. Charlie had been mating with Julie’s sock foot for years (whether she liked it or not). Julie thought Charlie was a boy…but maybe someone had lied, someone who was trying to sell a macaw quickly. If only the dealer could have known what that lie would do. It would have been good to know Charlie's sex for certain. It would have explained a lot.

Summer 1990. Photo by Michael Stern

On a Monday night in August, Charlie’s biggest secret became clear. She was trying to lay an egg, an enormous egg, and it would not come out. The egg was so big it had collapsed Charlie's air sacs, causing the rattle in her breath. Julie held her little hen macaw in her arms past midnight, then got up at 4 AM to rush her to Columbus on Tuesday morning. All the way, Julie cradled Charlie’s cheek in her hand, stroking her sweet sea-blue head. But the egg wouldn’t come, and no amount of work by a bird veterinarian could remove it all. Charlie was terribly sick and fading fast. When the doctor let Julie in to see her, Charlie was in an incubator once again. Which didn’t seem right at all.

And when Charlie heard Julie’s voice, her eyes flew open and she struggled to the front of the plastic cube to be closer to her best-ever friend.

Winter 1989. Photo by Michael Stern.

And that was the last they ever saw of each other. Which still doesn’t seem right. 

But there’s nothing to be done about it but to go on, in a studio that is now much too quiet.

Charlie

August 19, 1988

August 9, 2011