Betsy and the Bluebird

Two fledglings landed on my window screen one day--probably English house sparrows from the yearly nest that materializes in the attic.  Like two snowballs thrown against the glass they suddenly appeared, though fortunately for them the storm windows are out so they did not go splat and fall to the ground like the indigo bunting my husband found this spring outside our living room.  He scooped it up with a garden trowel and sat it on the windowsill next to the back entrance of our house so we could enjoy its iridescent blue feathers for a while.  They shone brightly against the silver and black of the small shovel.  Then one day the bunting simply caved in, as if its entire body--bones included--had given one last exhale--one long breath in the shape of itself.  

But these two landed safely like heavy moths against the screen, tail feathers splayed.  I turned my head from the computer and I could see it in their faces:  here were two adolescents realizing their power.  Flight.  Something wasn't quite right yet, they were thinking--I could tell.  Their feet, when they landed, should be less vertical somehow.  They were a little flustered, a little uncertain.  But with a few more tries they would realize their power.

Not so one of the bluebirds out back.  

Author David Gessner offers this advice to nature writers:  when you are describing that beautiful meadow, for every glistening lily there should be one can of Alpo dogfood.  In other words:  don't ignore the trash.  Adhere to this equation and you will avoid over-romanticizing nature.  So I warn you:  what follows here is all puppy chow. 

Later that day, while I was weeding the garden, my dog, Betsy, came over to the strawberry patch and started to pick strawberries with her mouth.  She left the patch after each one, flung it into the air and then proceeded to roll on it wherever it fell on the lawn.  After weeding, I went to lay with her for a moment in the grass and it had worked--a sweet strawberry perfume wafted up from her sticky neck.  She has done this before with pine branches sawed off by twig girdler and twig pruner beetles.  The pine scent, also sticky but longer-lasting, is a cleaner, more masculine cologne.  But usually she rolls in rotting carcasses or scat.  (Just this morning on our walk past the remains of a small raccoon she has dutifully ignored for a few weeks--now it is just fur and bone, mixed, today, with a little rain--she suddenly swept her neck downward in a break-dance like move to attempt a dousing; luckily I had her on the leash and was able to yank her away in the middle of the act).

But back to the bluebird.  On a more recent weeding expedition I saw Betsy over by the bluebird house, tail wagging, amidst the kind of group screeching birds sometimes emit that is easy not to notice, though if you attune to it, it will alert you to a snake, a hawk, a cat. As I strode across the yard I saw her preparing to perform her signature move:  that familiar neck roll.  There was a tiny bluebird on the ground by her nose, its eyes closed, nothing on its human-colored skin but a few tiny shards of barely-barbed feather-quills on each wing.  I gave her the signal to stay, and she did.  I picked up the bluebird and stuffed it as gently as I could through the hole in the box, back into what appeared to be a very full nest.  Then I called Betsy away.

Over the course of the next few days, I would peek into the nest and whistle softly at the babies to see how they were faring, Betsy always at my side.  She would sniff around the grass below, rather ridiculously, I thought.  What were the odds a baby would fall from this same nest again?  Then she would sit, intently focused and impossibly still, the way a dog will when it believes food is coming, and look up at me.  My husband, on his way from the barn to the house, would remark that Betsy looked like a student beside me at the bluebird box, intent on understanding something.

You can see where this is going, so I'll just tell you:  a few days later the same scene replayed itself.  I was weeding. Betsy disappeared, then reappeared at the bluebird box with a wagging tail.  By the time I arrived at her side she already had the little guy in her mouth.  You could see the top of his head protruding from one side of her muzzle and his feet from the other.  She pranced through the yard refusing to put him down for me or my husband, who tried to pry open her jaws, though surely the little bird's body was already as deflated as that indigo bunting's had become on our windowsill months ago. When I brought out half a leftover hamburger to coax Betsy to drop him--though I don't know what I would have done if she had--my plan backfired:  she bent to take the hamburger from the sidewalk without relinquishing her catch and they both went down, bird and burger--in one swallow.

I won't moralize about the misguided, unequal value my husband and I place on a cow vs. a bluebird, about how this incident only underscores that humans don't view the food we buy for ourselves at the store as ever having been alive.  And I won't try to appease my unjustified sadness at the bluebird's death by imagining how its warm cells turned into the warm cells of a border collie in a matter of seconds, how that bluebird--like those house sparrow fledglings--has in fact mastered its power, flying around my yard on four legs, hopping over soybean plants in pursuit of deer and coyotes, larger prey than it ever could have imagined.  I will only say this:  we were disgusted with Betsy for a few hours, my husband and I, but then we suddenly loved her again like our own child.  We should be more like her.  We are fickle, but Betsy--Betsy and the bluebird are of one mind.