Chapter Nine
Back when Bill and I had been gawking at warblers on the Magee Marsh boardwalk, two guys stuck out from the crowd. Instead of watching birds, they argued about them.
“How can you dispute what I’ve got right here on my camera?” one guy asked.
“My points is, you can’t rule out a backcross,” said the other. “Your photos don’t have enough detail to show the distribution of white at the primary bases distal to the primary coverts.”
I had no idea what they were talking about or which species they were disputing, but I did know one thing. If I lived as long as Dracula, I’d never reach that level of expertise. I didn’t have a corpuscle of scientific rigor in my body, and far from keying in on subtle feather features, I felt lucky to be able to remember the most basic plumage patterns, such as “heavily striped face.” On good days it stuck with me that supercilium indicated a stripe above the eye, a loral stripe went through the eye, and malar referred to a mustache stripe at lower beak level that dipped down the throat. On bad days I stayed in the house and avoided glancing out at the feeder. Even so, I soon found lots of opportunities to learn about birds—though what I picked up had little to do with memorizing field marks and everything to do with getting deeply involved with the personalities of birds.
This was thanks to Linda, who said yes when Peg Markle, executive director of Wildlife Rehab Center, asked, “How would you guys like some baby dinosaurs?”
When I visited Peg to pick them up, I discovered that by some she meant six and that by dinosaurs she was referring to the gangliest northern flicker woodpeckers imaginable. Far from being chicks, they had full juvenile plumage including a dark mustache stripe that curved back from the mouth. Unlike adults, they lurched around making begging grunts that didn’t get on my nerves until just after I had backed out of her driveway.
The grunting droned on, muted only when I got them home and Linda started sticking a syringe into their mouths. “They’re sure not difficult to feed,” she said as her hand darted from one bird to another. “They remind me of the way starlings act at mealtime, only crazier.” As she was squirting slurry into one flicker’s crop, a sibling muscled in front, while another jumped on her wrist and pounded her knuckles until she shook him loose. They had inquisitive and penetrating eyes, as if daring us to try and put something past them. And while they greedily embraced the syringe with beak, throat, and crop, they possessed an underlying wildness that we hadn’t seen in other birds their age.
I enjoyed the chance to see these great speckled birds up close. We seldom ran into flickers in our woods, though in spring and early summer we’d hear their monotonous wick-wick-wick call—sounding like a pileated woodpecker reciting the terms of an insurance policy. Due to their fondness for ants, we were as likely to see them feeding on the ground as on the trunk of a tree. In the northern and eastern United States, the yellow-shafted subspecies has yellow underwings, but males sport a black mustache and accessorize with a red crescent on the nape of the neck. The mainly western red-shafted flickers have red underwings, and the males are allowed the extravagance of a snappy red mustache. Neither sex has the nape crescent.
The mealtime squabbles intensified, and so did the juveniles’ urge to access the world outside their cage. No feeding was complete without a bird climbing up Linda’s arm and flinging itself into the narrow slit between her desk and the wall. When Linda wasn’t squirting food into their mouths or mixing up batches of slurry, she was tearing off yards of paper towel, cleaning up their quarters. “These guys need to go outside,” she said. “They’re wild and woolly. It’s killing my back leaning down all the time.”
Taking advantage of a rare placid moment after a feeding, I shot a group photo and posted it to the birding group. Then we transferred the birds to an outdoor flight cage that a college kid had built for us, since I didn’t know which end of a saw to hold. The cage was twice the width of an old-fashioned phone booth with a full-size door that allowed Linda to walk inside and share a full-body experience with all six woodpeckers at once.
The interactions went smoothly at first. Pleased by their spacious quarters, the juvies perched on sticks or clung to the sides, allowing her to feed each in turn. Then a flicker decided that he wasn’t receiving his fair share, so he landed on Linda’s shoulder and sought her attention by pecking her neck. Brushing him away had the same effect as exciting a swarm of hornets, and she found herself enveloped by a flurry of wings and a hammering of beaks. She had to peel off four birds to make her escape.
“They are definitely ready to feed themselves,” she told me. But they refused to give mealworms a try even when I managed to paste a worm to the end of a syringe using their beloved slurry as glue. Food in a dish—offered by hand or set down on the floor—was out of the question, and they ignored the suet feeder that I hung in a corner.
Peg was right to call them dinosaurs. With their powerful legs, alert eyes, and probing beaks, they looked like hunters that would be perfectly at home in a Cretaceous-period swamp hectoring a triceratops. I loved their coiled-spring energy and profound innocence of human expectations, which I experienced up close when I took a turn feeding them. One of the six immediately knocked the syringe to the floor. Another landed on the plastic cup in my other hand, catapulting mealworms throughout the cage.
Help was on the way. In response to the photo I’d posted, I received an email from Sherri Smith, an Ann Arbor bird rehabber with the Bird Center of Washtenaw County. In addition to her work with nonmigratory songbirds, Sherri undertakes the hazardous work of rescuing sandhill cranes, great blue herons, and other large birds. So flickers didn’t daunt her. She shared feeding tips with us, and we agreed to take a flicker she’d been raising, since she was soon to leave for Canopy Tower in Panama on a birding trip.
I couldn’t wait for the expert to arrive.
Feeling restless and energized by lingering sunlight at 9:00 p.m., I marched down the neighbor’s driveway toward the river. Just before I reached our path through the woods, something hissed at me. Stopping dead, I scanned the ground to assess what manner of reptile or mammal threatened my life. I didn’t find anyone and assumed I had misheard, when the hiss came again. Staring up at a tennis ball−diameter hole in a dead tree, I was amazed to find it filled by an excited little face staring back at me.
Orphan red-bellied woodpecker Big Boy enjoyed taking walks with us to the river.
“What do you mean, ‘a little face’?” Linda asked when I burst back into the house.
Laughing, I told her to come see for herself. I raced ahead. The light was fading, but we could still see the baby screech owl peering out and hissing like a grumpy cartoon character. The rounded edge of the hole was ringed in gold, framing the face in a kind of halo. Then the face disappeared. We exchanged questioning glances, but before we could discuss the wonder that we’d witnessed, a silhouette buzzed us, uttering an unhappy single-note hoo before returning to the dark branches of a tree. Mama wanted us to leave.
Not ten feet above our heads she watched us and her nest. I thought how splendid it would be if this devoted mother would take over the flickers. One by one I’d slide them into the hollow space inside the trunk, slowly enough so that she could keep an inventory. Then she’d initiate her new charges into the mysteries of hunting moths and mice on inky moonless nights. If only it could be. Turning back toward the lights of the house, we crunched along the gravel driveway, chorus frogs singing on both sides of us. From deep inside the barn, a duck heard our scraping footsteps and quacked.
When Sherri arrived in the morning, I decided not to share my plan about a screech owl surrogate mother. She was carrying a laundry basket, and since she wouldn’t lug her washing all the way from Ann Arbor, I knew it contained the juvenile flicker.
“Cages cause lots of feather damage in frightened, frantic wild birds,” she told me. “Netted laundry baskets can seldom do any harm to feathers, except to the truly self-destructive. They’re fine for transporting woodpeckers. But they aren’t good for woodpecker babies that we want to learn to eat, because a baby woodpecker wants to go to the highest possible place and then peck around for food.”
“Maybe that’s why our flickers aren’t eating on their own,” I said. “They’re clinging to the sides of the flight cage near the top, and there isn’t any food for them there.”
I’d been an avid follower of Sherri’s posts, and it was great soaking up her knowledge and enthusiasm in person. She loved our six flickers, and as soon as she stepped inside the flight cage with number seven, she made a great suggestion. “If you hang a sheet of plastic just inside the door, the birds won’t be able to fly out when you open the door. And you can slip past the sheet.”
We watched her flicker hop around assessing his new digs. “He seems to be doing well,” she said. He looked so much like the others, I lost him in the crowd after the birds had played a few rounds of musical perches.
Making a quick trip to her car, she returned with two shield-shaped pieces of bark to hang inside the cage for the flickers to grip while feeding. I had extra seed dishes from our indoor birds. I fastened them to the bark and filled them with the food that Sherri had suggested in an email: one cup of peanuts mixed with sunflower hearts, one cup of “Original” Science Diet cat kibble, plus a dash of calcium carbonate and powdered bird vitamins, all ground up in a blender.
The fun came when Sherri led me down our hill into the woods to search for natural nutrition for the flickers. Poor Linda, sitting at a piano at Ionia Free Methodist Church that Sunday morning, missed our treasure hunt for insect-infested hunks of wood. We poked through tangles of weeds and braved the boot-stealing edges of sneaky seeping groundwater. Sherri shamed me with her assured and agile movements, as if she were guided by an inner topographical map, while I puttered along distracted by the chiming repetitions of a song sparrow. The trick was finding wood in an advanced enough state of deterioration that in addition to housing creepy crawlies it had nooks and crannies for holding the ground-up food.
“The best ones are dried out and so lightweight, you can carry them with one hand,” she said when she saw me dragging a wet log.
After we arranged our finds in a tidy pile, she pulled out the buggiest, most dilapidated piece—a prize-winner that she had discovered on the hill behind our goose pen. A daddy longlegs hopped off while a nematode hung on for dear life. That fine specimen of natural disintegration would serve double duty as a buffet table and perch. As Sherri stood inside the cage holding the featherweight log above her head, I balanced on a plastic chair outside, fishing loops of wire through the ceiling. She was totally unperturbed as the raucous woodpeckers flapped and cried and clung with steely toes on and around her throughout the operation. The female screech owl would have been proud of her motherly devotion.
“I think that’s very lovely,” she said when we had finished. Judging by their interest, the flickers concurred.
Ideally you would never want to release wild birds until they’re eating completely on their own. You would also want to sock away vast sums of money for retirement and remember to buy your favorite calendar in August while it’s still available. Unfortunately, few things in life measure up to the ideal.
Three of the flickers busied themselves chiseling away at the insect condo. When they weren’t eating, they joined the others literally climbing the walls or jumping from branch to bark. The confinement was stressing them. Linda felt certain that the leader of the successful foragers was Sherri’s bird, due to the immaculate condition of a tail that had never scuffed up against the bars of an indoor cage. She decided to release him and the other two eager beavers in hopes of reducing tensions. It worked for about a day. Then the remaining four birds grew more frantic.
“I can hardly feed them anymore,” she said. “We should probably let them go, and if they get hungry, they’ll come back like the starlings and robins.”
Over the years, some of the orphan birds that Linda had raised became so attached to their cushy lifestyle, she had to gently toss them out of the flight cage to get them to leave. Not the flickers, though. Once she opened the door and freedom beckoned, they launched themselves into space. I fretted that they wouldn’t be able to find their way back if they got hungry. I needn’t have feared. I had never been good at recognizing the one-syllable call note of a flicker, but I quickly learned the kleer when they began summoning us for food—meeting us on the hackberry tree and perching just out of reach.
A few days after the big release, Linda was standing on a chair refueling them with a syringe when a dark shape cut across the roof of the milk house and powered into the woods. It must have been a hawk. Panicking, the flickers scattered. Instead of flying up, up, and away like the other three, one shot straight out from the tree at high velocity and hit the hardware cloth wall of the goose pen. He didn’t fall but clung to the wire mesh, breathing heavily with open beak. Linda pried his toes loose and set him upon a piece of wood at the bottom of the flight cage. He didn’t move, except to breathe.
She made an appointment for me to take him Dr. Bennett, but I soon acquired a second flicker patient. Balancing on the chair to feed the little dinosaurs, I only found two of them. I heard the third calling as if from a distance, but whenever I strayed from the backyard, his kleer became unclear. Oddly, the call was loudest when I stood close to the house, but there was no way he could have pulled a downy and pecked his way into our walls. Acting on a weird hunch, I opened the tiny clean-out door at the base of a chimney for a basement wood furnace that we hadn’t used in over a decade. I discovered the bird coated in soot, blacker than the blackest crow. For reasons that would only make sense to a woodpecker, he had located the chimney opening and decided to plunge deep into the unknown.
Dr. Bennett handled the bird that had collided with the goose cage with exquisite tenderness. Shining a light into its red-brown eyes, he told me, “He’s got a concussion, but nothing appears to be broken. I’d let him sit quietly for a day or two, and as long as you’re able to keep some nourishment in him, he should be okay.” Already the flicker seemed a little livelier. It might have been my imagination, but I thought he appeared more reassured than discomfited by the zoo vet’s poking and prodding.
After examining the sooty bird, Dr. Bennett pronounced him “fine but filthy.” All hopes vanished that he’d whisk the flicker into a backroom and return him good as new when he prescribed a thorough bath with a dishwashing detergent that’s often used for cleaning oil-contaminated seabirds. “He definitely needs to be washed, because he’ll try to groom himself, and the soot can be carcinogenic,” he said. “Be very careful of his eyes. And keep him warm once his feathers are wet, or he could get a deadly chill.”
I told him, “No problem.” But back at home the procedure turned scary as I soaked the bird in the shower. The recognizable shape of the flicker faded and the underlying anatomy emerged—a lollipop head attached to a shivering lollipop body with pipe cleaner legs. The feathers had turned so mushy, I couldn’t imagine how they would ever spring back to life. I feared that I had irreparably injured him. Dialing down Linda’s blow dryer to the lowest setting, I gradually succeeded in resculpting him into a bird. His plumage was a few shades darker than before, but I didn’t want to put him through the cleaning ordeal a second time, so I called it good.
He ended up in the flight cage with the head-injured bird, who had recovered to his full pesky glory by the following afternoon. I released them. They rejoined their siblings to return for handouts with decreasing frequency. We started seeing them on the ground vacuuming up ants or hunting bugs on tree trunks. Within a week, the woods had absorbed them. Occasionally we’d hear their kleer call in the trees.
Life without them became easier but duller—though not for long.
“How’d you guys like another baby dinosaur?” Peg asked. Before Linda could answer, she added, “This one isn’t a flicker. It’s a red-bellied woodpecker and very sweet.”
I flew to my field guides for insights into the red-belly’s personality. I came away empty except for an aside by Barrows in Michigan Bird Life. “In Florida, at least in some sections, this bird is know as the ‘Orange Sapsucker’ and ‘Orange Borer,’ owing to its fondness for eating oranges.” If a love of oranges was Barrows’s way of suggesting that the species was sweet, he could have stated it more directly.
But Peg had been right about his personality. “Big Boy,” as Linda called him, won our hearts as soon as she installed him in the little cage in her study. Even though he resembled a flicker in general shape and proportions including a wickedly pointed beak—he lacked a flicker’s pedal-to-the-metal philosophy of life. Instead of madly pecking our hands or gulping down the syringe at mealtime, he was almost oriole-like in his mannerliness. Sometimes Linda wouldn’t even know he was hungry until she approached his mouth with the syringe. Then he’d snap open his beak and eat with excited squeaks. He was curious about his weird-looking parents. He tracked our movements with interest and enjoyed investigating our fingers with a tongue that felt as stiff as a toothpick.
He was slightly smaller than the two juvenile robins that she had put him in with, because she didn’t want him to be alone. Linda never would have housed a frantic flicker with robins, but Big Boy sat contently in his margarine dish or clung to the side of the cage to taste the bars, never competing for food or territory. Some of the docility might have been due to his tender age. His head was prickly with pinfeathers that hadn’t yet split their sheaths and blossomed into plumage. The gray incoming feathers lacked either the solid red bar from nape to beak that would distinguish a male or the broken red bar of a female. So she had named him prematurely but presciently.
Every day of his life, Linda’s parrot Dusty liked to throw his seeds on the floor, and every time he threw them, Linda reacted as if a water main had burst. She would be the first to tell you that she wasn’t a patient person. At mealtime, Bella stood on the countertop beside us, supposedly eating from her dish but mostly eying our plates. This low-key form of begging barely registered with me. It drove Linda crazy. “You’ve already got spaghetti,” she’d tell the parrot. “I’m not giving you the rest of mine, thank you very much.” These were disputes with family members, though. When it came to the little ones who were passing through our lives, her patience seemed limitless.
The day she told me, “Big Boy ate a worm,” I knew this was a hard-won victory of love that didn’t just happen by itself.
The robins would sit upon their perch and gape, so it was easy to sneak them a worm. Big Boy was more difficult, because he didn’t wait open-mouthed for food to drop in. Taking advantage of his curiosity, Linda held a mealworm just beyond his reach. He leaned forward, tapped the metal of the tweezers with his tongue, then the wriggling worm, then the metal. None of it registered as food. She kept trying, alternating the tweezers with the syringe and teaching him to lunge and grab. After a couple of days, he finally swallowed a worm and immediately wanted another. The same trick worked with the robins, and before long she had turned all three birds into worm snatchers.
When Linda moved them outdoors to the flight cage, it looked like she was going to have the same problem with Big Boy that she’d had with the flickers. He didn’t want to eat on his own, ignoring worms in a dish on the cage floor as well as worms in a dish attached to Sherri’s hanging bark. Buggy wood didn’t tempt him either. After a few days, the robins began systematically emptying the floor dish, and Linda sent them winging away. But Big Boy remained dependent on hand feedings.
Lazy both by nature and by choice, I tended to leave the bird-parenting chores to Linda, though I made an exception when it came to Big Boy. He seemed to enjoy my company for its own sake, though when I joined him inside the flight cage I usually brought mealworms. I’d hold a jar lid of them near him, and with a volley of lisping baby squeaks and a few adult chuck-chucks, he’d snap up the worms with uncannily accurate beak strikes. There was no prodding impatience from him as I fumbled to replenish the lid, just a cocked head and happy noises as his bright eyes watched. He could have taught our parrots lessons in amiability. And they could have given him tips on independence.
A happy change occurred at the end of the week. I was arbitrating a quarrel between new cat, Frannie, and monarch of the upstairs, Agnes, when Linda called. “Quick, sweetie, come outside. Hurry!” She added something about Big Boy that I didn’t catch as she rushed off. Fearful that we’d suffered another woodpecker disaster, I clomped down the stairs. My worry evaporated when I ran into her huge grin at the flight cage.
“Look what he’s doing,” she said.
It took me a moment to find him in the upper corner of the cage, then another moment to process the importance of what I was seeing. He was vigorously pecking at a block of suet that had been neglected by the flickers. This meant that it would be safe for Linda to release him. While Big Boy taught himself to bang on trees in search of insects, he could actually live off the fat of our land by frequenting our two suet feeders.
Our woodpecker followed the flicker path to independence by showing up on the same tree that they’d favored for refueling. But unlike those slurry guzzlers, he eagerly gobbled up mealworms. It became the highlight of Linda’s day to listen for his chuck-chucks and rush outside. In honor of his vocalizations, I wanted to rename him Chucky, but she insisted on sticking with Big Boy. We knew now that he was indeed a boy. His feathers had started to reveal the ghost of a red racing stripe.
Linda would hold the jar lid filled with wrigglers close to the bark, which helped him associate trees with insects in case his instincts needed a boost. After making short work of the worms, he seemed to want to just hang out with her. This was a child who loved his mama. And he proved his devotion by accompanying us on walks.
More than half of the birds Linda released would wing away never to be seen again. The others would return to beg for handouts within sight of the flight cage, which they remembered as their place for happy meals. None of the babies had ever sought us out in the woods until the afternoon that we heard a red-bellied woodpecker calling overhead.
“Big Boy!” Linda called to him.
I started explaining to her that we often run into red-bellies when we’re out and about and they all share the same vocalizations, when the bird zoomed down and landed on the trunk of a sapling beside her. No doubt about who it was. He clung to the bark, staring and chattering at us until we decided to follow the clumps of wild aster to a gently sloping spot that would take us down to the river. Before we got there, he zipped to another tree. He anchored himself at eye level and soaked up Linda’s praises as she told him, “What a handsome boy you are.”
“Didn’t you feed him today?” I asked. “He must be really hungry to follow us.”
“He wants to be with us and let us know that he’s okay,” she said.
I doubted that a desire for companionship motivated him to seek us out, and to prove it I brought his worms along when we went out again the next day. He repeated his tag-along performance, keeping with us tree-by-tree, blending into dark bark with a feather pattern that had earned him the nickname “zebra-back” in some of my older field guides. When I offered him the jar lid of worms, he turned away, reaching out to peck the petals of a yellow daisy instead. I had obviously committed a faux pas equivalent to tipping a family member for dropping in. Generous to a fault, he forgave me immediately.
He became a familiar sight in the woods, and no hike felt complete without his enthusiastic participation. “Do you want to take a walk with the woodpecker?” I’d ask Linda, and somewhere between our house and the river Big Boy would show up. But as the red on his head grew brighter, his visits grew shorter. He might treat us to a flyby, or if we ran into him while he was foraging, he’d chuck a hello at us. He was becoming independent from mom and dad, and while it saddened us to lose him, few things pleased us as much as his transition into adulthood. And though we didn’t know it at the time, he still had a small but important role to play in our lives.
Linda received another call from Peg. This time she didn’t want us to raise a bird. She had been nursing an injured green heron back to health. “His wing is 90 percent healed,” she said. “Normally we’d keep him until he’s 100 percent, but he stopped eating and we don’t dare keep him any longer. You guys have the perfect habitat, and you could keep an eye on him if we released him at your place.”
I had fallen in love with green herons years earlier, back when I thought the only heron was the great blue heron until Linda spotted a half-pint greenie at Magee Marsh. It didn’t even bother me that green herons weren’t green. The older name “green-backed heron” came closer to the truth about this mostly brown and white bird, though the gray back only takes on a greenish sheen if the lighting is right and can just as easily appear blue or purple. Small at seventeen to eighteen inches long—from the tip of his beak to the end of his tail—compared to the forty-five- to forty-seven-inch great blue, the green has the cool shape-sifting trick of looking short and squatty until it suddenly sprouts a long neck when alarmed or hunting.
Peg once had a juvenile green named Forceps who startled me by landing on my shoulder and perching like an attenuated parrot. I stood statue still as he explored my ear with a stiletto beak. (She released the bird a few days later, after it had become curious about the human eye.) I barely breathed until Forceps flew back to his comfy towel bed on ancient wraith wings. Green herons made flickers seem like sensible modern birds in comparison.
The night of Peg’s call, she showed up after dinner with her husband, Roger, who lugged a pet carrier down to the riverbank that weighed ten times more than the bird. He opened the front grate and tipped the container until the heron launched himself into wobbly flight close to the ground. With a tentative sounding skee-yow, the bird managed to glide to a low branch overlooking the river. After that he didn’t stir.
“It’s up to him now whether he makes it or not,” said Peg. “At least we know that he can fly.”
“We could get him some fresh smelt from the store to eat,” Linda said.
“Anything’s worth a try,” said Peg.
When we took our walk the next day, we discovered that he hadn’t moved an inch. Plodding back to the house, I returned with a few whole smelt and a few that I’d chopped up. I put some in a bowl of water in case he wanted to fish for them and the rest on the ground in case he didn’t. But he didn’t seem interested in us or in the smelt—and I confirmed this when I checked back after dinner and found everything exactly as it had been. If he didn’t eat, he wouldn’t last much longer. I didn’t know how to help him.
In the morning while I was at work, Linda reluctantly made a trek to river, expecting to find the worst. “You won’t believe what happened,” she told me later. “I couldn’t find the heron at first and figured he was probably lying dead somewhere, but I walked down the river path a little, and there he was standing on a rock in the water looking a whole lot perkier.”
“His instincts must have finally kicked in.”
“But you haven’t heard the best part yet. Perched on a tree not too far from him was Big Boy! I called Peg and told her what had happened, and she said that the two birds knew one another. Big Boy was in a cage for a while right next to the green heron, and even though he was a baby at the time, he must have remembered him and wanted to cheer him up.”
Stranger things than this happened nearly every day, and after living with animals for twenty years, I had learned not to underestimate them. If Dusty could tell an orphaned blue jay in a perfect imitation of my voice, “You’re okay, sweetie,” when the upset jay had started squawking, why couldn’t a woodpecker comfort a green heron?
The next morning felt like a turning point to us. Either the previous day’s progress had been a fluke, a last-ditch effort to escape the fatal gravity of the tree branch, or he had taken his first step toward a full recovery.
“I don’t see him,” Linda said when she spotted the rock that he’d occupied the day before. I couldn’t decide whether his absence was a good thing, suggesting he had flown off to his destiny, or a bad thing, indicating he had keeled over and floated away. While I scanned the mudflats across the river through binoculars, Linda dashed ahead and called out, “There he is—on a stick.”
I walked about fifty feet and picked out his rounded form near the water’s edge. Turning to face me, he did the giraffe stretch with his neck to appear formidable in case I posed a threat. Realizing I was nothing at all, he reverted to an oval with a beak and shifted his attention to the shallows.
“I think he’s going to catch a fish,” said Linda, grabbing my arm.
He hunkered down on spindly legs and froze. Skates zipped past him. Then a lone minnow moved into his shadow. A dozen more drifted over. The water reflected a puffy white cloud that suddenly broke into rings as he struck.
“He’s eating!’ Linda said. “Wait until I tell Peg.”
The next day, we found him snagging minnows fifty feet further down the river. The day after that, we couldn’t find him at all. We figured that he had recovered enough to fly to a place of his own choosing where he could hunt and skulk away from prying eyes.
Over the years, thanks to help from experts and the occasional spurt of good luck, I had seen several spectacular birds. But none of them had satisfied me as much as the green heron that we didn’t see. He may not have been rare, but when he suddenly made himself scarce, he defined a whole new category of “life bird” for me.