The Bird Rescue

It’s difficult to recall that dynamic instant of silence that the bird I exchanged in our stares right before it lost its nerve. This is because I am sitting in a Boston Starbucks next to three Korean girls who have painted their faces on (disarmingly angled eyes accentuated by dark hyperbolic lines like the immortal eyes of ancient sarcophagi) and who all share the same impulse to chincha each others statements out of existence (chincha being a word roughly equivalent to that annoying conceptless unanswerable English question, “really?”) Only if I slyly cover my ears by leaning my face forward to rest it on my hands can I hear that dull thump of tiny bird skull against glass. When I remove my hands engine, voice, and Beatle’s cover rush in. The images that I had begun to form of an immature pine warbler with its beak opened nervously fade quickly; images connected maybe to that paleomammalian level of my brain; images that might make up the syntax of animal speak; images that for many people and for me in the cacophonous city can only exist as words.
I have been asking myself why exactly I panicked the little bird so much and why exactly I, as a person who has spent much time watching birds, had no knowledge of how to communicate to the bird my intentions to help it. City folk (and TV gobbling country folk who I theorize have identically working brains) might scoff at such a notion of communicating with animals but I feel this is an oversight created perhaps by a lack of non-domesticated (or abstractified domestic) animal interaction. Unlike many of these people there are images in my head that prove such communications are possible. I just don’t have the right words.
In one of those happy coincidences I happened to listen to a Quirks and Quarks podcast while driving back from one my hikes in New Hampshire. It was an interview with Dr. Temple Grandin, the author of several books and dozens of papers on animals. Two of her books mentioned in the interview caught my attention. The first was entitled Thinking in Pictures and the second, the one I picked up as soon as I got back to Boston in light of my bird rescue, was entitled Animals in Translation. What held my attention about her interview was the likeness between how I feel about animals and how Dr. Grandin understands them.
To give a brief example of this in the first hundred pages or so I have come across a large section devoted to animal curiosity entitled “Curiosity Doesn’t Kill Cats or Any Other Animal”. Throughout this section she argues very strongly for the benefits of curiosity to animal life. It was a little less poetic (or so I fancied) and much more scientifically sound than my own take on curiosity’s importance to life yet was still, in many ways, quite similar.
It has always been my opinion that it takes a keenly observational mind to understand animals. Dr. Grandin embodies this idea. Not only is she an exceptional scholar she is also autistic. In agricultural circles across the continent she is known as the cow whisperer for her ability to see and understand the details of a cow’s environment from the cow’s perspective, an ability she links directly to her autistic mind (something she explains with intriguing detail in her book).
I am neither autistic nor a scholar (obvious, I know). I might not even be that much of a keen observer of animals (though I fancy this true too). My hope is that in seeing the world through Dr. Grandin’s eyes I will understand a little better, even if it is just in words, that world of animals I feel so strongly about.
The following is something I’ve extracted from my notes. I hope it shows that my impulses about animals at least come from a genuine place.

She flew into the middle of the three kitchen windows lined up over the sink. It was the one that could not open. It was also the only one without a screen. I approached slowly but from behind her which I think panicked her as she had to alternate between her attempts to fly through the invisible barrier and keeping an eye on what to her must have been a very large presence. When she perched still her beak remained opened. This looked unusual. I had never seen a bird with their beaks opened without making a sound. She was silent. The whole cabin was silent. I wondered if she had any idea that she was perched between two small wooden ducks that decorated the sill. I think probably not though my human brain certainly acknowledged the humor of it.
I tried speaking in a calm voice. This panicked her further and she began to thump against the glass again and again. I knew that I had her cornered but I did not know any other way to help. I opened one of the side windows and removed the screen. My plan had been to step back and leave her alone but after I opened the window she only tried harder to fly through the invisible barrier. The sound of little bird skull against glass was the only one in my head and I began to fear that she would damage herself. I decided to act.
Stepping close again I cupped my hands and tried to put them around her gently. As her wings fluttered against my fingers I felt the soft down of bird feather but also the more rigid presence of bone. Immediately aware of the fragility of bird bone against the dense fist-forming weapon wielding bone of human hand I drew back in fear that I would damage her most important evolutionary structure. She toppled backwards into a plateful of soapy cheese water. I scooped her out quickly moving her to the right of the center window. She flitted off my hands and out through the opening dodging the wood of the open window with astounding aerial agility. She landed on the sheltering branches of the closest conifer.
I watched her for some time as she sat very still on the branch. I tried to imagine her relief or if she felt any. I believe she must have though I couldn’t be certain. Looking at her all I could clearly see was the information my bird watching brain could process; small bird, light brown maybe olive color, largish beak, no prominent coloring underneath (no yellow). Even as a very amateur bird watcher I was fairly certain that it was an immature female pine warbler. Yet when she had fluttered about so intimately close to me I was at a complete loss as how to communicate to her that I meant it no harm. And yet there remained a part of me that felt that such a communication was impossible, a part of me I would link to the perplexity I once felt watching a Korean family happily swallowing a dinner of live squirming sea snails.

As I finish writing I find myself looking at the heels of two of these three Korean girls. The reason I am focusing on their heels is because they are sockless and covered with band-aids where the back of their pink hard plastic shoes meet the skin. The plastic does not look pliable. It gives their shoes an appearance of rigid newness. To me, who considers comfort and practicality to be ancient qualities of excellence in footwear, they might as well be wearing empty tissue boxes. I don’t get it at all. All I can think is that after ten or fifteen minuets in the White Mountains they would likely want to chincha their shoes out of existence. And so, with typically mixed human feelings, I realize that as far as animals are concerned I might at least understand them a little better than Koreans, women, and cities.