The Pleasure of Letting Go: A Plan B Essay

The summer I raised orphaned songbirds in Wisconsin, the spare room in my house was scattered with plastic laundry baskets, each containing one berry box lined with tissue. Every twenty minutes, I walked from basket to basket, offering a needle-less syringe of soupy formula to the nestlings I’d placed in the berry boxes. If the birds were sleeping, I blew on their heads and tapped the side of the box to imitate the sound of their parents returning to the nest. The birds lifted their heads, stretched their necks, and opened their beaks, allowing me to shoot the formula down their throats. They wove from side to side, swallowing, then slumped down to sleep till their next feeding.

There were several laundry baskets because the nestlings had to be segregated by kind to make sure that each species learned to flock only with its own kind. A robin who flew with house finches would not know to migrate in the fall. Some of the birds were biological siblings whose nest had been blown down in a storm; others were brought together at the wildlife sanctuary where I was one of the dozen bird rehabilitators on call. Throughout the summer breeding season, the intake volunteer tried to give us several birds of the same species and age because a lone bird in a nest might refuse to eat. At our training session, I’d been taught how to press open the beak with my thumb and forefinger and slide in the syringe, but birds who had to be force-fed seldom thrived.

The main ingredient of the orphaned songbird formula was dry cat food, the veterinarian-recommended “high protein” brands sold at specialty pet stores. The pellets were soaked in warm water to soften, then mixed in a blender with bird vitamins and blueberries (for berry-eating birds, like cedar waxwings) or Gerber’s baby food chicken (for insect-eating birds, like robins). The recipes came from the black binder issued to every volunteer, a one-hundred-page compendium of advice from generations of volunteer rehabilitators who each contributed a chapter on his or her specialty (“songbirds,” “birds of prey,” “mammals,” e.g.). A suggestion offered in one chapter sometimes contradicted an admonition from another. The language was quaint—a misguided notion was called “an old wives’ tale” instead of a myth or a common misconception, and in the mammal section, the irritation on a young squirrel’s skin was referred to as “a diaper rash.” All the same, I read the binder from cover to cover and memorized much of the information. That binder was our Rehab Bible and I, a true believer.

I loved finding a young fledgling perched on the edge of the berry box it had just left, already knowing how to balance on one leg to stretch and preen. Birds never returned to sit in the nest they’d outgrown. As soon as they could stand on their feet and hop out, they got busy exploring their surroundings. Some instinct or reflex made them look down and peck at the paper-lined bottom of the laundry basket, over and over, completely missing the fruits and seeds I’d scattered there. Not one bird pecked at the food right away. Each practiced that downward pecking motion hundreds of times in the abstract before it could connect the gesture with the idea of food. By then, the birds were able to fly around the room and perch on curtain rods.

I moved them to the walk-in cage in my backyard, made by the few sanctuary volunteers who knew how to build things. The interior of the cage was rigged with tree branches, bird feeders, and clay saucers of dirt. Here, the birds practiced flying, perching, and foraging. I still visited them with syringes of formula, but only once every few hours. To show them where to find their own food, I got the robins to perch on the edge of the saucer by offering them the syringe, and then I dug out the earthworms I had buried there, making a stabbing motion with my chopsticks. I tried to tempt the house finches to perch on the cylinder-shaped feeder, their main source of food in my neighborhood, and dabbed the formula near the holes on the side where the seeds came out. For days, the finches ignored the feeder and stayed on the branches, begging me to feed them with the syringe. Then one afternoon, the smartest finch figured out the feeder in my absence, and in a few hours, all six or seven of them were on the metal perches, pushing their beaks into the tiny holes. Just before dawn the next morning, I entered the cage with a flashlight to pluck the finches from the branches where they were sleeping and put them in a pet carrier. Under a backyard maple at first light, I opened the carrier and watched the birds swirl up into the sky to join the flocks in the neighborhood.

My favorite birds were the cedar waxwings with their pale green breasts streaked gray. When they opened their beaks, the insides of their throats were bright red. Whenever I approached their berry box nest, their whole bodies vibrated with the zeee, zeee, zeee cricket call they made with their mouths open. In the outdoor cage, they learned to eat the grapes I’d tied to branches to simulate fruit trees. Like the house finches and the robins, they could be released in my backyard, where small flocks of waxwings descended at dusk to eat the ornamental cherries.

The bird that worried me the most was the eastern kingbird—a slender bird with a black back and a white belly. Although alone in its nest, it liked to eat, easily graduating from the syringe of formula to the mealworms dropped into its mouth with tweezers. Kingbirds live on flying insects they catch on the wing, so once it was in the outdoor cage, I threw the mealworms up in the air for it to catch. It quickly learned that trick, but there wouldn’t be flying mealworms out in the woods. I started catching the moths that gathered around my porch light every night. At dawn, I’d go into the cage with a shoe box full of moths and release them one by one. The kingbird dipped from its perch to snap them up. Still, I wasn’t sure if it would know to look for them on its own, so I kept delaying its release.

It was midsummer when Mike, our supervisor, found a pair of kingbirds who had nested on the sanctuary grounds. Their young, about the same age as my bird, were still staying close to the parents. “Birds don’t know how to count,” Mike said. “That pair will assume your bird is one of their own.” On the morning of the release, as soon as Mike and I got out of his truck, an adult kingbird flew overhead, spreading its white-edged tail like a handkerchief. Although we couldn’t see where it had landed in the leafy branches, we could hear it rustling above us and calling. I brought out the pet carrier and opened its door. Immediately, the young bird—no longer or perhaps never mine—flew up into the tree,calling back to the older bird. “They’ll find each other,” Mike said. “We can go.” 

I volunteered at the sanctuary for only one summer before my first book came out and I started teaching at summer writers’ conferences. Eventually, I left Wisconsin and moved east. These days, in my apartment in Washington, D.C., there isn’t enough room to keep baby birds away from my cat, and without being affiliated with a local sanctuary, I’m not licensed to work with wildlife. But if I had to give up my writing, raising orphaned songbirds is the only work I can imagine doing instead.

In the years away, I’ve gone out into the field and learned to identify the warblers in their spring plumage, the vireos, the grassland sparrows. Birdwatching is a rigorous discipline, akin to poetry or faith. After long, quiet waiting, you hear a call or a flutter of wings and see a flash of color. If you can get the bird centered in the binocular’s vision, the whole wilderness falls away. That bird perched on a branch is everything you need to know about the universe, and you recognize it by the details you’ve memorized from the field guide: the dipping tail of a palm warbler, the bold white eye ring that distinguishes a Connecticut warbler from a mourning warbler, the yellow belly and the cinnamon tail of a crested flycatcher. The miracle is in the precision and the discipline: for a fleeting second, the world is exactly as it should be.

Raising birds at home is more like prose work: repetitive and messy, with a kitchen sink full of spoons, bowls, and blenders. The birds brought to our wildlife sanctuary were mostly the humble house finches and robins from people’s backyards, not the colorful warblers (“jewels of the woods”) who nest in national parks. I fed the baby birds every twenty minutes but I could have changed the interval to fifteen or twenty-five minutes, so long as I kept a steady schedule from dawn to dusk. The discipline required for this work was not so precise; effort could make up for a lot.

Still, I had never felt so competent as when I held a nestling in my hand and knew how to force open its beak if I had to, or when I dangled the right food in front of a fledgling and its head bobbed forward and its beak opened. The trick was to approach each bird with compassion and authority: I was its temporary parent and teacher, I knew just what this bird needed.

But the best part was at the end, when I released the birds into the air where they belonged, to become what they were always meant to be, without me. Aside from writing, nothing has given me that same pleasure of letting go—the effort and the optimism.