The Robin Drama
Posted: September 5, 2013 Filed under: Musings, Sprituality, Thoughts | Tags: abandoned, baby bird, bird, fledgling, garden, intervention, nestling, orphan, protection, rescue, robin Leave a commentThe first baby robin was already dead when I found it on the wet ground early in the cool, damp morning.
I had seen the momma robin in her nest high up in the pear tree outside the kitchen window, ill-formed from numerous botched prunings. The foliage is thick in the middle but the majority of the canopy has been sheared away. She would come in and out of view on breezy days as the minimal outer branches swayed around her. She almost appeared to be bobbing up and down in the movement like she was in a small boat on a wavy lake. I had wondered about her and her nest, but acknowledged that a robin’s wisdom is impenetrable to me.
I was surprised by how far the baby was from the nest. It was on the ground at least 10 feet away under a completely different tree. The week had been full of thunderstorms with heavy downpours and steady winds. I assumed the baby had been blown from the nest, although I suppose it was also possible it had fallen and been swept along on or near the ground.
When I found the second baby robin, I began to get worried.
I found the baby on the ground directly below the nest. It had almost no feathers, its eyes were closed and it huddled motionless on the ground. It was a nestling: a baby too young to leave the nest. They lack mobility or the ability to vocalize. But if you touch a nestling it will thrust its head up and open its mouth in a wide maw to receive food for a second or two before retracting it back into its huddled position. I had no idea of what to do. After reading numerous articles online expressing a wide range of opinions of whether or not to rescue a baby bird, I had little guidance to go on. The best option is to return the baby to the nest, but the nest was far too high for that. I alternately worried the baby would starve, dehydrate or die of exposure to either the cold ground or too much sun. I watched and fretted and watched some more. The robins appeared to be tending to the baby throughout the day. I discouraged Otto from going near the area easily as he seemed unconcerned with the bird. I left it alone until nightfall and then built a little nest of Kleenex in a tissue box and tucked the baby in. I left its makeshift nest on the ground and covered it with a large box to prevent predators from finding it. I assumed the baby wouldn’t make it through the night without its parents to tend to it.
In the morning, I found the baby alive. It had defecated in the tissue, which I took to be a good sign. I gently removed the soiled tissue (wide maw opening towards me) and replaced it with clean, then set the tissue box where I thought the robins would find it. I watched anxiously out the window, but the robins didn’t seem to be interested in investigating the box. I would go out and pull more and more of the tissue away (wide maw opening each time) in hopes the robin would see the baby and continue feeding it. I worried the baby would starve. And I also worried that if I removed the baby from the “nest” that it would die of exposure. After a couple of hours of fretful viewing out the kitchen window, I became increasingly convinced that the robins couldn’t find the baby. Its hopes for survival seemed equally bad no matter what I did, but starvation seemed slightly more certain if the parents couldn’t find it to feed it. I thought if it could survive one more day (as it had the previous) I would box it up again at night and perhaps we could all work in some unspoken cooperative effort toward saving this baby. So I made the grim decision to put the baby back on the ground, open to the elements, but hopefully in view of its parents.
The baby huddled on the ground, eyes closed, motionless. I looked at it feeling sickened by my callous cruelty. Then I went inside to resume viewing through the window.
The robins strutted around in the vicinity of the baby, digging worms and then strutting on out of view. It was hard to tell if they recognized the baby or were tending to it. Yesterday they had clearly been feeding it. Today they seemed to be wandering in a less directed fashion once they had acquired food. I was helpless to intervene further. I knew there was nothing I could do. I told myself they were probably feeding it in the times I wasn’t looking out the window (which were ground increasingly less frequent, by the way) and that I had to let go of the idea that I could significantly alter the course of the baby’s life.
I was looking out the window when the baby robin died late in the afternoon.
I know it was the moment the baby died because its whole body convulsed and pitched the baby head first into the ground. It was as gruesome and awful as it sounds. I was unprepared for this cold and grisly ending, and promptly started to cry in the wake of this realization of how life just disappears. Death from starvation and exposure is not a painless drift into an indefinite sleep. It is a struggle and a breaking.
What do we do when confronted with suffering we can’t ameliorate? Do we intervene with only incremental efforts even if we know the outcome is irrevocable? Are our good intentions enough? Is it meaningful and relevant simply to care? Does it matter that we can’t change the course of events, if we can bring some respite, even in minor degrees, from discomfort and distress? Does it matter if the recipient recognizes us as a friend or protector? It is easy and not easy to turn away…easy and not easy to try and do something. No effort feels like enough and yet simultaneously all efforts seem futile.
I put the baby back in the nest of tissue in the small box, covered it, and threw it away.
I turned to go inside and saw Otto staring intently into the hedge along our screened back porch. Staring. Locked gaze on something in the hedge…
“Leave it!”
The command was like the untoward release of a spring, and in the exact opposite motion of what I commanded him to do I saw Otto lunge forward with a warning snap of the jaw and I heard a shrieking squawk. There on the ground was a fledgling robin…eyes wide open, covered in feathers, and squawking its alarm.
No sooner had the squawk left the baby’s throat, then the parent robins began shrieking and swooping towards Otto and the fledgling. Something primal in Otto’s brain snapped and he went into a frenzy of barking and chasing the parent robins. He would not respond to any command and ducked every effort of mine to catch him. He alternated between chasing the parents and rushing back towards the fledgling which had started bizarre wobbling trek out of the protection of the hedge into the lawn. The few minutes it took me to get him into the house seemed interminable. Panting and shaking, I looked out the kitchen window. The parents were still calling the alarm and the baby continued to wobble across the yard. At one point, I went out to check on it and found it in the middle of the lawn. The parents squawked angrily at my scrutiny. I went back in the house and the parents continued to call the fledgling until well after dark.
When I went outside in the morning, the robin’s entire broken nest was on the ground where it had finally fallen from the tree.
I searched but could find no other baby robins. Nor could I find the fledgling. I kept Otto leashed but felt unsettled not knowing where the fledgling was. I went back inside and resumed my watch at the window. I hoped I could catch the parents feeding it and determine its location. My strategy worked. By mid-morning I witnessed the parents going over to a patch of long grass and a little robin head thrust itself out with a wide maw for food. I knew where the fledgling was and I had a plan.
I emptied out a hanging planter of its plants and most of its soil and placed the robin’s nest in the bottom. I then found the fledgling and placed it in the nest in the planter and set it on the ground where the baby had been hiding. I went back in the house and waited for the parents to find and feed it. They figured out the new situation quickly and with this small success I felt by the end of the day that I could hang the planter in a new tree and the parents could continue to card for this fledgling in this new location. With great relief, the parents were able to adapt to this new situation for their offspring and within a few days the fledgling and parents were gone. I wouldn’t have guessed the fledgling was big enough to fly, but as I said before, the robin’s wisdom is impenetrable to me.
I would be leading my readers amiss to not acknowledge that at the end of this I felt more prepared to answer some of the hypothetical questions above.
If you can return the baby robin to the nest, do that. When something catastrophic happens, it is best to be back home with family that can take care of you.
If you can’t return the baby to the nest, get the baby off the ground into something nest-like. We all do better when we don’t sleep on the ground and we have some structured material to keep us warm and safe.
If the baby is too young to survive without parental attention for long, don’t worry and overthink. Do the second option and get the baby off the ground, warm and safe. Maybe the parents will find it and maybe they won’t. Even if that is all you can do, it is enough. It is something. It is more than nothing. And no matter how bad or sad the ending, it might just be a little less bad and a little less sad because you expressed your care and took action.
Otto
Posted: September 2, 2013 Filed under: Musings, Social Culture, Sprituality, Thoughts | Tags: abandoned, animal control, animal hospital, dog, homeless, pet, purebred, rescue, rescue animal, schnauzer, stray, vet, veterinarian 2 Comments
The vet tech said Otto was “not well cared for” by his previous owners.
Otto was picked up as a stray by Leawood Animal Control in Kansas and taken to the State Line Animal Hospital for boarding and care. He was not neutered and wearing a worn black harness without ID tags or microchip. The hospital holds stray animals for a trial period before spaying or neutering and putting them up for adoption. No one came to claim Otto.
Otto was 17 pounds when he was picked up which put him close to 20% below his target weight. When we went to pick him up at the hospital, where he had been living for a month, he weighed 18 pounds. You could see his ribs, all of his vertebra, and his hip bones. His coat was so thin that he couldn’t be clipped short in a standard grooming cut because his skin would show through. Otto was essentially missing his “wire” coat: the thick, coarse hairs that gives structure and weight to his fur. The vet techs said that Otto found life in the hospital very stressful and they had a hard time getting him to eat. Because of the deplorable condition of this teeth, the vet had estimate Otto to be approximately 8 years old.
It is not unusual for skinny, ragamuffin strays to be picked up without tags or ID. And not even that unusual for them not to be neutered.
But Otto is clearly 100% purebred schnauzer. And even in his poor condition, he is very, very handsome.
Purebred + not neutered + bad condition + old age + stray = breeder’s dog dumped when too old to be of use
Sounds pretty harsh, doesn’t it? It is not uncommon in the mid-West. If you find this difficult to believe, there is more…
The vet techs were correct about Otto being a skittish eater. At first he appeared finicky: he’d approach the bowl slowly, sniff just over the rim and then turn and walk away, usually to go curl up in bed. I would have to coax him back into the kitchen repeatedly and even hand feed him some kibble before he would stay at the bowl and eat. And even then he might only eat a portion of the food before voluntarily walking away from the bowl. And there were other strange signs. Otto never asked for food. Not first thing in the morning nor in the evening. He never begged and he never looked for dropped food on the floor. If you stood in front of him holding his bowl and turned away even slightly, Otto would leave the room and curl up in bed. Any distracting movement or noise in the kitchen and Otto would leave. He wouldn’t come back for a second try on his own. He would just go back to sleep.
Otto had no expectation of being fed. And Otto had no comprehension of food belonging to him. Which meant that Otto had most likely never been fed on a regular schedule and had probably been intimidated while eating.
Otto didn’t know the word “cookie”. And he did not appear to understand being given a cookie, showing reluctance and leaving the cookie on the floor the first time until encouraged to eat it. Otto had never eaten anything that wasn’t kibble. He didn’t recognize apples, carrots or other fruit and vegetable tidbits and would leave them alone unless encouraged to eat them.
Teaching Otto to sit before eating resulted in a anxious bowing, scrabbling, grovelling gesture that would have been tremendously funny if it hadn’t been so grotesquely sad.
While Otto was slow to grasp the practice of consistent eating, he immediately found his place with his bed. A plush bed with a thick curved bolster and a reflective layer to generate heat, it is a possession Otto covets. Next to his bed, his most favorite thing is “hugging”: Otto likes to be picked up with both paws around your neck and his whole body pressed against you. An anomaly in a dog, who typically merely tolerate hugging, Otto craves a hug shortly after breakfast and in the evening. Truth be told, Otto will take any cuddling anytime he can get it.
After a month, Otto gained 3 pounds and his coat grew back in thick and shiny. His bones are now covered with a layer of sleek muscle. He loves running top speed around the yard and monitoring the fences that look out onto the street in front. He is a brave protector. He has a home and a duty and a family. He is safe and loved. And he starts doing the “dinner dance” half an hour before he is fed…right on schedule. He sits up straight and tall to “earn” his dinner and eats the whole bowl without looking up.
It is easy to fall into habitual patterns of questioning thoughts about the past: was that a good decision? should I have taken a different course of action? where would I be in my life if I had gone down a different path? Otto reminds me that I needed to do everything that I did in order to be here with him, to rescue him, and to bring him into a home that would help him overcome his past. A past of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for. Of being neglected and abused. Of being vulnerable to strangers. Of being homeless and without family. None of these alter that Otto is worthy of love and belonging, with his own love to share. And that in return, so are all of us, regardless of our past choices or the directions our lives have taken us.
Begin Anywhere
Posted: August 27, 2013 Filed under: Musings, Social Culture, Sprituality, Thoughts | Tags: begin, beginning, fresh start, garden, gardening, native gardening, new start, order, starting line, starting over, weeds Leave a commentIt starts early, this idea of a starting line, when we are children playing games or lining up for class. There is an order and it begins with a specific place, a line on the ground, a boundary designating where to start. You go to the line, but don’t step over it. Stay behind it. That is the right place to start. And then you run the race or play the game or file into the room in an orderly fashion according to the rules of that activity. As a child, you may have taken delight in the order and the certainty, knowing where to start and how to progress. Or perhaps you felt the rebellious need to defy these seemingly arbitrary constructs. Regardless of your response, chances are you were unaware of the blissful state of ignorance around a critical aspect of starting lines: the idea that they will always be there. Because sometime later, you will find yourself in a world with no clear starting line from which to begin.
You may just find yourself standing in the middle of a bunch of weeds in a strange place.
No plans and no starting line.
Just weeds.
Perhaps some people never feel this sense of disorientation. But I doubt it. I imagine it catches up with all of us eventually although it may take longer to reach some whose lives contain more of that clear linear order than others. For myself, I believe the death of my mother around age 10 produced a permanent sense of being slightly disoriented, as though my inner compass suffered a wrenching twist that I have been painstakingly trying to repair ever since. With order swept away by this loss, I can see and feel my halting starts and turns through life, still looking for that bright line of guidance. And finding it elusive and invisible.
Without a clear line from which to start, it becomes apparent that what you need is not the right place to start, but just a place to start if you want to move forward. Any place. It doesn’t matter. Forget what you learned as a child, the starting line, the order of procession, the rules of the game. Just begin anywhere. Even if it is smack dab in the middle, the thickest part of the thick of it, the messiest or the most difficult. Or take the path of least resistance, a place where you have a little wiggle room to grow and rest. There is no place for judgement in this decision and perhaps even no long term goal. It is just a beginning…and it can happen whenever and however you want.
I started under the poor butchered pear tree in the middle. The ground around it was already mostly bear, so it would be easiest to clear. It was good I started in an easy place, because the soil is full of clay and resistant to planting. It needed a lot of tilling and mulching before it was ready for plants, so I was glad to be able to focus on this rather than just digging up the crabgrass. It is always good to have a bit of planting with all that clearing away, a little something to look forward to in the midst of a getting rid of what you don’t want.
Sea of Lawn
Posted: July 30, 2013 Filed under: Musings, Sprituality, Thoughts, Urban | Tags: excitement, gardening, Hank Hill, King of the Hill, landscaping, lawn, motivation, native gardening, new beginning, starting over Leave a comment“I showed that lawn tender feelings I should have saved for my family.” Hank Hill (King of the Hill) lamenting the destruction of his lawn by moles.
Before we moved, I took pictures of every plant in my yard in Portland.
Not just pictures of the yard as a whole (although I have those too), but pictures of each individual plant. Luckily it was still early spring so a significant number of perennials hadn’t emerged. Otherwise I would have had easily two or three times the number of pictures.
I had always worked in the yard and “gardened” as such, and then in the last three years had become committed to the Backyard Wildlife Habitat program sponsored by the Audobon Society of Portland. The program certified neighborhood yards meeting certain requirements of native plantings, stormwater management, and wildlife habitat (food, water, and shelter sources). I had dug up the majority of the lawn on the property, planted well over 100 plants, and laid many yards of chip in paths and borders. The yard was Gold certified by the time I left, and I counted over 40 different native species of plant between my front and back yard. I had a bird bath and several feeders, a brush pile, a mason bee block, and bird roosting boxes. Over 15 species of bird had been sighted in the yard and several species of bees. It was right at the point where the majority of planting was done and everything was beginning to expand and fill in. It had a beauty in both its appearance and its functionality.
Portland has a wide variety of yard-scapes, from simple lawn plus hedge, to lush overgrown jungles full of hydrangea, rhododendron, wisteria and lilac, to dry landscapes of chip and decorative grasses. My yard was a three year exercise in balance: evergreen and color, sun and shade, thick hedgerow and open space, with all the canopy levels represented. Lots of structure and a little wildness, it looked mostly planned with spots of spontaneity, personal yet appealing. It was astounding how much habitat could be built into one urban yard.
The yard at my new house can be characterized by what I note appears to be a city-wide standard of appropriate landscaping: lawn plus sculpted hedge. A few trees included. And the lawn description is generous. The front yard I would describe as lawn plus dandelion farm plus hedge. (I pulled enough dandelions to fill two large yard debris bags.) The back yard is about six different invasive ground-covers that have been mowed to look like lawn, plus dandelions plus hedge. (Oh, and there is that big patch of poison ivy that my husband found accidentally and much to his dismay.)
I am grateful in a way, that the back yard isn’t full of lush lawn. Then I don’t have to feel bad about digging it up. Its all just weed and not worth saving. All I have to do is get to work.
Get to work…again. Starting over from scratch. New yard, new native plants to learn about, new plans…
I should be excited. A blank canvas for me to fill in with my own vision.
Wait, should I be excited? Because I’m not excited. I mean, I am excited to research plants on the internet, join the Grow Native! movement, and go pick up stuff at the nursery, But I am most definitely not in that sustained brimming with enthusiasm excitement that would power me up to wield a pick ax through clay soil to dig up scrub plants that are only suitable for a goat to eat.
It gets harder, you see, to start over. Working with momentum is different that beginning from a full stop and slowly pushing your way forward. Motivating yourself to begin and not feeling overwhelmed by the immensity of the task. Trying not to think about how long it took you the last time you undertook a project like this. Before I moved I would watch people on House Hunters and other such shows complain about the paint color or the tile or the landscaping and I would think, “who cares? just change it when you get there”. But now I understand: it just takes so much mental effort to overcome the emotions that come with starting over or starting from scratch. The worry you can’t do it, that you don’t have it in you, that you are not enough, and that the first time you did it successfully, well, that was just a fluke. The uncertainty keeps you static: maybe you were just lucky before, maybe bad luck will befall you this time.
I know it is just the lawn…but I think Hank Hill understands.
Living in Disaster
Posted: July 23, 2013 Filed under: Musings, Sprituality, Thoughts, Urban | Tags: abandoned, break in, crime, disaster, Fannie Mae, foreclosure, moving, plumbing, theft, transition, vacant Leave a commentThe house has been empty for a while. More than just days…more like weeks, months.
When you enter the home, you are struck by the intermingling of cold and the musty odor. It gives the air a tangible quality you must push through as you enter so it doesn’t force you back onto the porch. It seems colder than outside as cold has sunk into every corner and cranny. The brief wafting of fresh air into the house as you enter dissipates as soon as the front door shuts behind you and the air closes upon itself again. Still, leaden, and unmoving. There is no water and no power. It has been like this a long time: without pulse and without breath. It feels abandoned.
We didn’t anticipate buying a house in this state of un-livability. We knew it was vacant, a foreclosed property in the hands of Fannie Mae. But it hadn’t been on the market long and the house was fully intact when we made the offer. The first piece of bad news came the day Fannie Mae accepted our offer: someone had cut through the screened back porch, broken the glass pane on the back door, gone down into the basement and removed all of the copper plumbing. The second piece came on the day the house closed: someone had entered the same way (turns out the property manager didn’t secure the back door) and had cut all of the lines to the electrical panel and taken part of the furnace.
No water, no power, no heat.
You walk through this cold, musty home and there is no welcoming. No warmth or vibrancy. The day is gray and cold despite it being spring. And the house agrees. No signs of life here. Inertia is beginning to come with a feeling of deja-vu. Back to the hotel and long list of phone calls to find contractors in an unfamiliar city.
Displaced, again.
Walking through the house, I think, “this must be a glimpse into what it is like returning to your home after a disaster.” Grateful to be home, but not really home. Grateful for plumbing, but not able to shower because there is no hot water. Not able to cook or keep perishables because there is no power. Then the power is on, but there is still no heat. The unseasonably cold spring is more salient to you as you put on another sweater and sleep under every blanket with socks on. Seems like it takes an hour for the bed to warm up. It is too cold to unpack and too cold to clean. You drift from room to room rubbing your hands like a distraught ghost, haunting your own house.
Then the day comes that there is water, hot water, power and heat all together.
The house begins to hum, only you hear a symphony.
This is Not My Beautiful House
Posted: June 24, 2013 Filed under: Musings, Sprituality, Thoughts | Tags: home, home staging, house, interior design, moving, realtors, selling your house 2 CommentsHome is where the heart is.
While I don’t deny the verity in this common saying, I favor a slightly more expansive definition of home. For me, “Home is where the heart resides in privacy”. Home is where I go to leave the world behind, to drop off the weight of appearances, to allow the petty complaints of insignificant relationships to fade into the background. Home is where I can walk barefoot, barefaced without makeup, free of the concern for how I appear in favor of simply being who I am. Home is where the garden is, my favorite blank canvas, a work of creation that both is and is not under my control. But it is an easy give and take…plants grow if they are given what they need, there are no hurt feelings or judgement if in initial placement doesn’t work. You simply move them and a new dialogue begins. Home is where cooking manifests, that personal alchemy of comfort and nourishment. Home is where my husband walks in his own unadorned splendor, where I get to have a singularly unique relationship with him full of private jokes and comedic expletive calls to action against all those who thwarted us that day. And home is where my dog is, sweet, stalwart, and constant equally in his affections and his habits.
Only by this time, my dog isn’t there and my heart is already struggling. And the feeling of home, or even of having a home, is rapidly deteriorating under the insidiously invasive process of trying to sell a house.
The seed of this process really starts with the realtors, although when you interview realtors it is really just a matter of getting the house a little cleaner than it normally is. And I suppose for some people, the effort stops there. We had already seen countless interior photos of homes for sale choked with knick-knacks, dated furniture, bizarre paint colors, and questionable cleanliness. At the time, it seemed ludicrous that someone would not do everything possible to prepare their home to sell at the highest price no matter what the inconvenience of the process. But after experiencing myself the sinking and unsettling sense of losing my home while still residing in the house it used to exist in, I better understand. Moving itself generates enough change to manage in the future new house, no need to turn the existing house upside down in the process. Put off that feeling of being uprooted as long as possible until the moving trucks arrive and the boxes are taped shut for loading.
In direct opposition to this approach, we had decided to have our home professionally staged. The walk through with the staging designer resulted in a long list of changes, mostly eliminations to the home. Pre-packing of personal items, removing certain furnishings, taking down the window coverings. We were going to give him a semi-blank canvas to work with. In the midst of this stripping away process, we had scheduled the one major remodel project in the house to refinish the wood floors for the day after my husband returned from KC…and inadvertently three days after I put Shotzee to sleep. Refinishing these floors quite literally pulled the ground out from under us when a “misunderstanding” between us and the contractor resulted in a house reeking like someone had dumped ten gallons in paint thinner into our small house as the mineral spirits in the finish cured and dissipated sluggishly in the cold damp Portland spring. The house was unlivable. We were homeless and the selling process had hardly begun.
After two weeks in a hotel, we were able to return home and finish our preparations for staging. But the feeling of exile lingered. The brilliance of our staging designer had transformed our house into a chic showroom quality bungalow. All its tiny flaws hidden or de-emphasized. New furnishings added and our existing furnishings re-arranged. A strange hodge-podge of us and the staging…it was our house but it was far, far from being our home. And the entire front of the house had no window coverings and lighting on timers that remained on well into the night. It was like living in a beautiful fishbowl and we hid in the little castle comprised of the back of the house where we could have some privacy and respite from the public exposure. If that weren’t surreal enough, there were a large number of strangers walking through it those first few days. You could feel it in the air. Items would be moved out of place. The bed looked like it had been sat on. You wondered what else they had looked at, touched, commented on, evaluated and judged. And while the home sold in just a few days, we had to maintain it in the strange staged existence through the inspection period. To add insult to injury, the buyer asked to view the house again twice after the inspection period to show members of her family…as though it really was just a showroom existing only for her and waiting patiently for her arrival. Needless to say, both requests were declined.
Even after all the staging was removed, our home never returned. More things were packed, given away or sold. Shotzee remained painfully and heartrendingly absent. Because of the rapid proximity of the events, my mind had generated a strange and twisted logic that his absence was only temporary in order to facilitate the sale and if I could just restore the sense of “home” to our house he would return. But neither was really possible…no Shotzee and no home. Just a house that soon would belong to someone else to pack up and leave behind.
I Say Missourah 