All the signs of spring have finally come to our little corner of the Northeast: buds are forming on the trees, frost is hit-or-miss in the mornings, and my wife is out in the yard squawking at the tree line.
That last springtime correlation is a relatively new development, but I’m beginning to think it may be a regular annual thing.
And, just to clarify, you may be thinking that Rochelle’s “call to the wild” is some sort of pretty “birdsong.” That is NOT the case. This is no cutesy “twittering.” No, what we are being treated to on our little homestead is a full-on, back of the throat, grating “AWWWK! AWWWK! AWWWK!”
Why is my darling wife standing in the driveway, in her bathrobe, squawking expectantly at the trees in some odd hope of attracting a bird, you might ask? Well, because last year she did this and it totally worked.
Last spring, there was a time where any member of our family could go out into the yard, squawk like a lunatic, and have a sweet little bluejay come fluttering out of the trees and land on their shoulder. It was magical.
It was also the result of an accidental kidnapping.
The abridged version of the story is that last year, Rochelle had spotted a commotion out in our yard and, upon investigating, had discovered an abandoned baby bluejay being sniffed at by our black lab. Seeing that it was struggling to get off the ground, and fearing that our cat might get involved, she was overcome by maternal instincts and “rescued” the baby bird.
It wasn’t until a few hours after bringing it inside and getting it settled in a cage that she googled bluejay growth and development and discovered that a few of her initial assumptions concerning the situation were a bit off.
Apparently, in the bluejay world, the transition from “chick in the nest” to “young member of the flock” includes a few weeks of tough love, wherein the parents force their young to flap around from branch to branch and struggle to become more independent. The parents will still provide food and look out for the offspring, but the young are responsible to flutter around and build up the strength to undertake real flight.
It would seem that what my wife had interpreted as cries of distress from the nearby trees had actually been words of encouragement, and where she had thought she was performing a daring rescue operation, she was more-or-less just crashing a graduation party.
By the time we realized this, however, there was no going back, as the parents were nowhere to be found. And, to be honest, I don’t think the baby bird was that broken up about the whole misunderstanding anyway. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that there may have been some family tension between him and his parents concerning his need to “spread his wings and fly.”
Squawkers (as he came to be called) ended up living in a cage in our living room while he “figured things out.” We put together an alternating feeding regimen of mushy oatmeal or chicken feed paste for him and, not knowing how else to go about it, decided that we’d just let him tell us when he needed to be fed.
It turns out, pre-graduation, our new ward must have been a drama major, because this little diva certainly knew how to catch one’s attention. There was zero subtlety in his methods.
Any time one of us would come into his periphery, he would throw his wings out and flutter them like “jazz hands,” crane his head back, open his mouth to a gaping degree, and screech out his one-hit-wonder “I’m Starving, I’m Starving, Help, I’m Starving!” (Each verse, the bridge, and the chorus went “AWWWK! AWWWK! AWWWK!”)
He would keep this up until he was packed so full of grain mush that he couldn’t swallow any more, and then he’d take a 15-minute intermission. Later, when one of us would walk by, he’d put on the whole show again. It wasn’t very original, and he was an over-actor, but he got good results. I’m confident we had the best fed bluejay in the county for the three weeks he lived with us.
We encouraged him to practice his flying in the house, and once he got so he could maintain flight for prolonged periods, we would bring him outside to flutter in the trees and learn to find food for himself. He enjoyed the freedom, but he also seemed to like sticking near our family (one time he even followed the boys 250 yards away to watch them swim in their grandma’s pool!).
He loved perching way up high in the branches and would routinely “request” his meals be brought to him up there, which, obviously, was impossible. This led to regular “squawking matches” between him and whoever was attempting to coax him down for his meal, which, in turn, led to our being able to call him to us at random.
And then, one day, while he was out enjoying a romp in the woods, another flock of bluejays passed by and he disappeared. Rochelle and the boys swear that they “carried on a conversation” a few weeks later with a local bluejay, so, though I think he’s off living his best life somewhere else, the legend of Squawkers lives on in the hearts of some members of our family.
And that is why my wife is behaving like a weirdo this spring, unabashedly attempting to summon a bird to her from the woods like she is a Disney princess.
