Take these broken wings and learn to fly
BIRDS again. I know, I know, this column is in danger of turning into Ornithology Weekly but I’m not sorry. Birds please me.
People please me too, of course, though not collectively. I am of a mind with dear old Jonathan Swift who declared that he loathed the animal called man, while heartily loving Tom and Dick and Harriet. What Swift thought of birds I’ve no idea but he shared a name with one and a very fine one at that.
Swifts are the signature birds of the Mediterranean. They circle endlessly above the terracotta roofs of Nice and Venice and Split, black against the summer blue and shaped like little crossbows. I’ve never seen a swift in New Zealand but I know their close cousin the swallow, and it is of the swallow that I have a story to tell today, a story that will warm those fabled cardiothoracic molluscs, the cockles of your heart.
As I may have mentioned before, swallows nest in my garage, have done so for a dozen years, returning always to the same nest they’ve constructed on a shelf of books just below the ceiling, a shelf now so encrusted with guano that the titles of the books are no longer legible.
They raise two broods a year, often three to a brood, which means that more than 50 swallows have been raised in my garage and I have worn their guano on my car with pride.
Last week I stepped out into my garage in the early evening to find two nestlings on the floor. One was dead. The other was almost dead. The adult birds darted and swooped about my head in consternation.
Quite what had happened I wasn’t sure but I suspect that the nest had been found by a rat or cat and the nestlings had leapt for their lives. The weather had turned southerly. Even in the shelter of the garage it was cold. I scooped up the one surviving bird and carried it into the house in the hollow of my hands.
❛ The parents found it
within a minute, swooping above and around, perching on a cable strung across the garage and looking down on the nestling and twittering to each other as swallows do
As a boy I reared several blackbirds and thrushes that had fallen from the nest. I loved to cup them in the globe of my hands, to feel the tiny beating of the heart, the fusewire of their claws. But this little scrap of birdflesh was so weak it barely registered as alive.
I put it in a shoebox of straw and covered it with an old shirt, and I lit the log burner to warm it. I checked on the bird last thing but it did not stir when I lifted the shirt and though I wished it good night and good luck I did not think it would last the night.
It lasted the night. Just. I would have fed it in the morning but swallows eat only the little insects their parents catch in flight so I took it back to the garage and laid it on the floor where I had found it and withdrew to the corner to watch. The parents found it within a minute, swooping above and around, perching on a cable strung across the garage and looking down on the nestling and twittering to each other as swallows do. Then out they both flew again and I wasn’t sure what would happen.
Another minute and one returned and banked the turn as only swifts and swallows can, and settled on the garage floor, and the nestling, instinctdriven, opened the yellow gape of its beak and fluttered its wings and the parent fed it something too small for me to see and my soft little heart went boom bang a bang.
The bird barely moved all day as the parents came and went, and in the evening I was still concerned about the cold and the risk of predators, so I scooped it up again and it spent a second night in front of the log burner.
On the third day the little one fluttered up off the floor on to the workbench, and from there to a perch on the shelf near the nest it fell from. On the fifth day it flew strongly into the garage window. I heard the thud from my study next door and went in to find it stunned on the garage floor.
So once again I gathered the little thing up and stepped out of the garage with it and I felt the bird recover consciousness and I unfurled my hands like a daisy opening and the wee bird sat there on my palm, its eye a black bead, its tail still stubby, its throat that one day will be ruby red still only a muddy pink, and it paused a moment and then it flew.