Bird Flu

I pulled my rented black Dodge Dakota onto the second floor of the garage, two hours late. In tandem, six tiny goslings padded by, like fuzzy little weeble wobbles, led by one hissing Canadian and flanked by another. Where were they headed? Waddling in and out of foreign and domestic, hybrid and hog?

I pulled my key from the ignition and sat there in silence. My history of bird encounters goes way back. At the age of 21 I found an entire family of robins behind the dryer in my one bedroom rental unit in Columbia, Maryland. I called in late to work and spent two hours on the relocation project. I maneuvered the dryer, wedged myself behind it, scooped the babies up one-by-one in my t-shirt and put them outside under a bush. I suspected they had nested inside the vent and all hell broke loose when they finally hatched. I have no idea where the mother ended up. And I don’t know if they lived or died.

Now, twenty years later, the robins visit me again. Three times, this year alone, I have chased birds out of my house. One got into my bedroom through the space between the a/c and the window. The extrication was an hour-long ordeal at two in the morning after a night of heavy drinking. The bird was so exhausted after having spent much of the day inside, all it could do was stick itself in the corner and breathe heavily. I finally shooed him out the window by turning off all the lights.

Another got in the same exact way on a Sunday morning. I whispered to my 8-year-old son Thomas... come and see... he stood there in amazement, watching the little robin fly all around his collection of Thomas the Tank Engine books. This time, the eviction took less than two minutes.

One sad robin was nesting in the front door wreath, and fell in through a missing pane in my storm door, trapping itself for nearly a day. When I came home, the exhausted bird was finally released from his chaotic ordeal. I removed the wreath and the mountain of lost feathers...and carefully placed the nesting twigs and bits of string on the porch bench. Gradually, the twigs began to disappear (only two feet away, I later found) and took up residence behind my aging porch light. My husband put a quick end to it, muttering something about fire hazards. It made my heart ache, and I dealt with it by busying myself with the weeds.

But the birds survived! And moved 6 feet away into the nearby holly bush… which brings me to my next dilemma. Our yard guy …Gus…says the bush has to go. I could look the other way, but for the tiny blue egg that fell out of it yesterday… and lay weeping on the sidewalk. Thomas and I sat there looking at its broken shell. If Gus moves the bush, all the remaining eggs will certainly meet with the same fate. What if the babies are born by the time the wrecking ball arrives? What then?

I thought about these bizarre encounters, as the baby goslings scrambled to keep up with their elders. When I started at Phillips 6 years ago, having come from a hellish existence in the government contract world, the free parking garage was one of the biggest perks. Even though it was always leaking and crusty, I could always count on the garage to keep my vehicle free from the elements, snow, rain and the relentless solar rays. When the winter came, it was with great happiness I realized I was merely subletting space from the true owners of the garage. In January, they returned, squawking and pooping and hissing and digging up pansies. With absolute certainty, there is no middle ground in the human-to-geese-office-park arrangement. You either love them or you want them dead. I took on a strange kinship with the geese from the very start, often striking up one-sided conversations with them. Why are you nesting there? Don’t you know how unsafe that is? You are walking in the middle of the road!!! Hey you two! Welcome back!

Year after year I watch over them from my office window…nesting on the fourth floor garage roof, hatching in tandem in the early days of May... The routine is always the same… the goslings, coaxed on by their mother, hop one-by-one off of their four-foot-high nesting perch… and follow their new mother around and around the garage in a desperate and exhaustive search… for the exit. One such year, the search lasted two whole hours and threw me into intervention mode after the mother threatened to jump off the 4th floor ledge. Now that, I thought, would be an exit! I rounded up three colleagues and sprung into action. We each took a side and kept a safe distance. Amidst the resentful hissing and charging, we slowly corralled them, down one level and then the next, to the safe green grasses where even the weeble wobbles, only a few hours old, knew how to peck for food.

Today, in my rented car, in the dripping old garage, I watched the newness of life. The one in the back of the line wobbled a bit, plopped down and decided to sit there for a good 4 seconds, while the rest of the brood moved forward in formation. The adult at the rear gave a squawk and slowed to half-speed, prompting the lazy gosling to right himself and catch up with the others in an awkward jerking motion, like a rubberband snapping back into shape.

The big adult in the lead, the mother maybe, was scoping out the third story ledge, threatening. I got out of my car and started the lecture. Where are you going? You think you can just jump off of there with your whole family? The exit is down there!

Is it because I am a mother? Is that the reason these bird dilemmas bother me so? If I do nothing, the cycle goes on as intended. If I intervene, one more might live. Sometimes the decisions are grueling… and other times, like today … it was only one clutch. And this was something I knew how to do. I called for reinforcements. My shepherding compatriots from years past had all moved onto other jobs, and this year I had to recruit a new soldier. Michael looked at me suspiciously… stay on that side of them, I said. Keep your distance…this won't take long.