Looking Up

Backpacking buddies clustered at the homebrew tap. On the piano bench, home-schooling moms compared data transfer rates. Therapists’ children shoved their way toward the fruit plate. An emergency-room doc perched on the cold wood stove recounting zip-lining in Costa Rica. But most of us had crowded into the kitchen, of course. Wedged so tightly our elbows pressed our bellies, drinks held close to our chests, we leaned toward Shannon to hear the story of the tiny, almost featherless baby.

Shannon set her drink on the gold-flecked, black granite island and cupped her hands in front of her. At the simple gesture, my thoughts shot backward through time.

There I am, twenty-five years ago, scooping up a baby bird. I’m in my boyfriend’s parents’ backyard, on spring break from college. I can still feel her, tiny in the cup of my palms, warm and trembling. Gray-white skin showed through her straggly feathers. Lines of pulsing blue mapped the veins beneath.

Of the chick’s species, Ben and I weren’t certain. At nineteen, information wasn’t a prerequisite to action. We lowered her into a cardboard box lined with rags. She called out ceaselessly, plaintively, head back, mouth open.

We rummaged in Ben’s bathroom for an eyedropper and pushed some water down her beak. Now, obviously, she needed food. Hamburger? wondered Ben. I dug beneath his hedge, found a few thin worms, and lay one in the box. She stumbled across the worm, then shat on it. We dangled a worm into that open prayer of a beak, but she wouldn’t swallow. So we gave her a little more water and turned a lamp on above her for warmth. Maybe she would eat something later, we told each other, when she was calmer.

At about her fifth hour in our care, as we were attacking her with the eyedropper again, she spasmed, shuddered, and was still. I think we may have drowned her.

The experience humbled me on breezing into an animal’s life and rearranging it. I still free sparrows from chimneys and spiders from bathtubs, pick a dazed beetle up off the dirt road and lay it on a low branch, and stop my bike to urge a sunning snake off the deliciously radiant pavement.

But babies, no. I’ve read about the unwitting harm humans do, bringing home what they think are abandoned young—fawns, bunnies, seals—which were only lying motionless, mother nearby. Sarvey Wildlife’s rescue “ambulance” driver told me that the majority of his “rescue” work is instructing the human to put the animal back and leave it alone. I have never again brought a wild baby animal into my house.

Beside her kitchen island crowded with hors d’oeuvres, Shannon recreated the baby robin. A physical therapist, Shannon is attuned to musculoskeletal movement the way a good mechanic is attuned to engine hum; she talks not just with her hands but with her neck, wrists, knees, and torso.

Every hour on the hour, Shannon explained, she and the kids used a mortar and pestle to concoct fresh-ground, organic, local worm-slurry.

“All night too?” I was stunned by what she’d taken on.

“No.” Shannon laughed. “The good news is, robins sleep at night.”

I suppose they do. They sure let you know when they wake up. “Cheery–cheerily”—that loud melody penetrates your sleep, reminding you how early day breaks in summer.

In bold red breast and bright yellow stockings, like the happy homesteader in an old-fashioned melodrama, Dad Robin bounds to his worm-work, whistling. Meanwhile house-builder Mom straps on her tool belt, rolls up her gingham sleeves, and sets to construction, bustling, afterward, among her hungry brood. As the brood gets older, Dad spends more and more time with the flock of males in the evening roost. Eventually the teens join him there while Mom builds another house and coos over another set of newborns.

“American Robins are industrious and authoritarian birds,” says one field guide. Other guides evoke “the quintessential early bird,” “sweet-singing and familiar...