THE LOST HATCHLING

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Baby birds are disgusting looking creatures. Hairless pink wretches, blind and featherless, with amputated wings for arms and thick blue veins running impossibly close to their thin skin.   They’re not through yet, some exposed embryonic stage that should be kept under wraps, under their shell for a few more weeks at the very least. Impossible to survive. Destined to die a quick death in this harsh world.

“He’s been there all day,” he said to me, the grandfather of the wide-eyed boy who had brought me out to look at this baby bird dying on the pavement. The boy pleading with me with his nervous 12 year-old smile. Do something. No one’s doing anything.

“And he’s still alive?” I asked the world in disbelief. It was an ugly miracle.

Why is this my responsibility? Why have you watched this baby bird wither at the end of the driveway for hours on end?

But they were moving out, our great friends were moving from across the street and it was a sad day. And now it was just our neighborhood, my neighborhood, and my dying baby bird. They were leaving with their cares and attentions and responsibilities. There were babies left behind in every move.

“Where the hell is the nest? There’s no tree it could have fallen out of,” I asked. Shrugs and the kids whirled into action, peering in all the feeble bushes in everyone’s front yards, so carefully sculpted and unable to hold something as sturdy and important as a nest.

I grabbed the old butterfly net Lilah had dropped under their basketball hoop weeks ago and stood over the creature again. It writhed, just as I had decided it was dead, yanking it’s head filled with purple, swollen, unseeing eyes around, searching for anything other than this concrete hell it was trapped in. I gently flopped it on the taut top of the net with a stick and stood up, giving it a close once over. The boy smiled at me again, this time genuinely. Finally. Anything better than it just dying in the street.

I stood, trapped between our houses with the bird strung on my net like a moron. They all carried boxes stuffed with last minute shit, pillows and laundry baskets and garbage bags full of food to their trucks. What the hell kind of bird was this? No defining characteristics. Generic, gross baby bird. No nest to be found anywhere, in anyone’s yard including our own. What the hell was I supposed to even do with it?

“There’s an animal rescue in Morro Bay,” a woman walking her three dogs past us offered up over her shoulder. “They nurse all kinds of animals back to health. Seals and birds and rabbits and…”

She continued on and on and I stopped listening. Dog walking people are chock full of all kinds of information, and they don’t mind sharing it. In fact I think it’s one of the main reasons they walk their dogs. Inform the general public on a myriad of issues.

“I’ll call them, thanks,” I replied, quite believably.

It was 6 p.m. on a Saturday. No biologist volunteer was still there to wean this half-dead baby whatever to life. This was the chardonnay hour for animal volunteers, and chardonnay is worthless for weaning.

“I’m gonna put this little guy in the old starling’s nest in our back yard,” I told the boy, who was still hanging right next to me. Waiting to see what I would do, how this would turn out. He watched me walk back to my house, net outstretched like an offending platter of spoiled appetizers. So happy I was going to take care of it. Put it in a real nest. His responsibility was thankfully completed, and he could be sure I would take it from here and save the bird and he didn’t’ have to worry about it anymore. As far as he knew.

Really it was just another lie, a more appropriate and comfortable tomb, this old nest from the fucking starlings that had been plaguing me in my backyard for years. They were constantly nesting in the ugly overgrown bush that the hummingbirds loved but everyone else hated, especially my wife. The sort of quick growing shrub that our house’s previous owner planted on the quick and cheap to help flip the house. An invasive, blossoming species that grow infernally fast in odd shapes. We had hacked it back to a small shrub so many times, only to watch it explode into a small tree overnight. But the goddamned hummingbirds loved it, so it stayed.

I plunked the ladder down in the middle of its foliage, climbing to the second to last step, right next to the sloppy nest of the starlings. The stupid starlings, another invasive entrant into our little neighborhood, always bleating out their messages to each other throughout the day and especially while I am writing. Constantly worried or angry or a mixture of the two, diving at my head when I dared come too close to their poorly positioned cradle. But they had lost a baby, that I knew. Due in no small part to their stupidity and poor planning, but I am fairly certain my bulldog Maggie ate their last fallen child so I felt bad for them. And a good amount of guilt as well. They were shitty parents, but they cared an awful lot based on their constant prattering. They had a loss and maybe they would leap at the chance to take care of an orphaned baby placed in their dusty nursery.

The old nest was overflowing with dead leaves. I brushed them out with one hand, holding the butterfly net with the precarious baby gently trapped in the top of the webbing. Carefully, slowly, I rolled the flailing pink newborn into the small nest and climbed down and out, muttering my best Buddhist prayer that the cosmos and the birds and my backyard and my bulldog would take pity on this poor wretched thing.

Now I sit and write and four starling take turns diving into the bush and yelling at each other. Two sets of starlings, each pair having lost a baby and relishing the chance to raise another. No matter whose it is, no matter why it happened. This ugly pink ape dumped an embryo into their leaf-filled nest and now they’re doing their best.

One of the bright black ones dives at Maggie, her giant Frenchie ears pulled back in confusion. Then he hops on the ground just out of her reach, and Maggie charges after him across the yard, away from the nest. At the last moment, the starling whips up to the fence. All while his mate feeds the dying baby I just dumped into their dusty crib.

I am happy and proud and a part of this mishmash backyard family but I don’t tell anybody about it. And I never check the nest. I should, for science and accuracy of storytelling, but I don’t really want to know. Perhaps they are continually trying to feed a festering corpse, or have made another nest with their own, proper baby. Who knows.

In my mind, while I sit in my yard and make up stories like this one, they are all banding together to raise this lost baby bird. This invasive stranger like they are, like I am, like we all are eventually. Saving and raising it as their own. ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, and an ignorant plea, whose response I disavow. I hope and pretend and believe it to be so.

Sometimes delusion is all you have, and sometimes that delusion is the God’s honest truth. It makes the starlings diving at my head again comforting.