Читать книгу The Complete Collection - William Wharton, Уильям Уортон - Страница 19

It’s amazing how fast they grow. By the end of one week their eyes are open and they begin laying their heads on the edge of the nest. Birdie doesn’t sit on them nearly as much and spends most of her time hauling food.

At the end of two weeks they’ve developed pin feathers and feathers over their backs. Their eyes are bright, wide open, and they cower down in the nest when I come in to look at them. Little tail feathers have started and stick out about half an inch. They’re beginning to look like birds. I even think I can tell the males from the females. I decide there are three males and one female. The dark one is definitely a male and one of the yellow ones. The spotted one is probably a male too. I judge this partly from the shape of their heads and the look in their eyes but more from the way they act in the nest. All the males keep away from the door and the wire of the cage and the little yellow one I figure for a female is less afraid. It’s this bravery which almost does her in.

By now, the nest is beginning to get messy. At the beginning, Birdie took their droppings in her mouth; then, by the time they’re a week old she has them trained to shove their butts up over the edge of the nest. Still, it doesn’t always clear the edge and the outside of the nest is covered with bird droppings. There’s so much crap I change the paper under the nest every day.

About half way into the third week, this little yellow female starts climbing up on the rampart of the nest to get a breath of fresh air and look around. I can see she’s going to be the same sort of curious type as Birdie. She’s just a little over two weeks old when she falls out the first time. This means she falls about eight times her own height to the bottom of the cage. There are practically no feathers on her wings, so it’s a free fall. It’s like me falling off the top of our house. Weight or density has a lot to do with falling. Baby birds even fall out of trees and survive.

I don’t see her fall but I look in and there she is, trying to stand on the flat surface at the bottom of the cage. Alfonso is hopping around in total confusion. He feeds her and there’s nothing else he can do. Birdie peers down over the edge of the nest. That baby bird’ll freeze if she has to stay out there all night. She doesn’t have enough feathers.

I reach in, pick her up and put her back in the nest. She has virtually no feathers along her breast or along her thighs. Also her head is very thinly feathered. She snuggles back into the nest with the others and I think that’s the end of it.

The next day I come home from school and she’s on the floor again. Alfonso and Birdie are frantic. I have the feeling she’s been out quite a while. When I pick her up she feels cool. I hold her in my hand to warm her, then put her back in the nest and hope for the best. Birdie feeds all of them and when I go down to dinner, everything seems in order.

After dinner, she’s out of the nest again. I put her back in and wonder what I can do. I watch to see what’s happening. Birdie might’ve taken a dislike to her and is throwing her out, or maybe feels that since she left the nest voluntarily, she shouldn’t be allowed back in. Who knows what goes through a canary’s mind? In about an hour, the yellow one’s climbed up on the rampart. She looks over the edge and out into the aviary where Alfonso is flying. She stands up on her thin, bare-thighed legs and flaps her slightly feathered stubs of wings. She tumbles forward and almost off the nest. In about two minutes she does the same thing again and falls. The only solution is to make sure she’s in the nest before I turn out the lights.

During the next week, all of them start standing on the edge of the nest. It becomes the thing to do. You can see they’re preparing themselves for flight. There’s much stretching of wings; they stand up high, stretch straight out and flap their wing stumps at faster than flight speeds. I wonder if they’re getting any lift from this flapping. I try it myself with my own arms as fast as I can but I can’t feel anything. You have to have feathers. I feel if I could only flap down without having to flap up again, I’d definitely get some lift. When I went off the gas tank, it was mostly falling.

By the end of three weeks they’re all standing on the edge of the nest, even at night, and Birdie isn’t sitting them anymore. She’s beginning to carry around pieces of burlap so I put in a new nest on the other side of the cage. Between feedings now, she begins to build again. Alfonso is more and more the main feeder of the babies. They’ve started mating again, too, and I figure it won’t be long before Birdie lays another batch of eggs.

Twice, Birdie comes over and snitches soft feathers from one or another of the babies. I’ve read how sometimes a female will pluck a whole nest of young naked to feather her new nest. This can cause all the babies to die from pain and cold. This is another one of those things that happens because canaries have been in cages so long. I wonder if it ever happens with wild birds.

The third time Birdie comes over to take a pass at one of the young for some soft down to line the new nest, Alfonso pounces on her and chases her out into the aviary. She comes back twice more and each time it’s Alfonso to the rescue. For the next few days he sits beside the nest on guard. There are so many things that can go wrong.

Finally, Birdie is finished with her new nest. In the meantime, I’ve had great fun watching the young make their first flights. The yellow female keeps falling out till she’s figured it by trial and error. I begin to think she likes falling. I’m beginning to like it myself, jumping, not falling, but free falling as far as possible. I can already jump from eight feet without hurting myself.

The first male to make the flight out of the nest definitely decides to do it. It’s the yellow one. He’s too careful to let himself fall and he’s almost too careful to fly. He spends a lot of time on the edge of the nest tottering. He flaps his wings madly there, standing high, and nothing happening. It doesn’t look as if he’s getting any more lift than I do with my arms. It’s like somebody thrashing their arms and legs about in the water when they don’t know how to swim. You have to feel that air has substance and can hold you up. It’s mostly a matter of confidence. This yellow male can’t seem to work up enough confidence in the air to shove off. I watch him for hours, days. I become that bird. I know I can feel what he’s thinking, when he almost gets himself to do it, when he backs off.

By now, each of them looks almost like a real canary. Their tails are still short and the soft flesh around the corners of their beaks hasn’t hardened; they still have little fluff y antenna-like hairs sticking out over their eyes. Other than that they look like canaries, only half-size.

This yellow male finally makes the decision. Still, after he’s committed, he tries to go back, but it’s too late, he flutters down in a half glide to the far corner of the breeding cage. He slips and has a hard time standing on the slippery newspaper and gravel in the bottom of the cage. He starts hopping after Alfonso for something to eat.

Now, sometimes a male won’t feed the babies unless they’re in the nest, but Alfonso seems prepared to accept the inevitable. For the next while, he’ll be the prime parent for the baby birds. He feeds both of the escapees, the new yellow male and the yellow female who’s been out for a day. It’s while he’s feeding these two that the dark male, out of pure greed, having nothing to do with flight or wanting to escape from the nest, comes flying down with a bump near Alfonso and starts begging to be fed. Here he’s made one of the most important moves of his life, his first flight, and all he can think of is food. He couldn’t stand to be up there in the nest while feeding was going on down on the floor. It’s easy to miss the important things in life.

The last one, the spotted one, jumps later the same day. He’s a really timid one. He climbs out of the nest onto the perch and only winds up on the bottom because he can’t balance himself.

They all huddle on the floor in a corner, trying to recapture the warmth and security of the nest. Whenever Alfonso comes into the cage, they chase after him and practically hound him to death with a continuous feed-me pleading. Alfonso’s very good with them and ferries food back and forth. I feel sorry for him and put a good supply of egg food in the bottom of the breeding cage.

Now is the time I’ve been waiting for. I want to watch carefully to see how the babies learn to fly. At this point, they haven’t flown much more than I have.

I watch them do all kinds of feather cleaning and wing stretching. They’re still so unsure of their footing they’ll almost fall over when they try to stretch a wing with a foot. They still can’t sleep on one foot.

They’ve been getting a good deal of wing exercise during the feeding process. Probably without realizing it, this flapping of wings while being fed is flight preparation. I can’t see any other function for it except to attract the attention of the mother or father bird. They’re flapping those stumps long before there are any feathers on them. I determine to flap my arms at least an hour every day. It seems as good a place to start as any. It’s where birds start. I flap for ten minutes that first night when the babies are out of the nest and I can’t go on. In the morning my shoulder muscles are so stiff I can barely lift my arms. My chest muscles are so sore I can’t touch them.

The first flights they make are up onto the lowest perch by the feed dish and water cup. It’s about the same kind of jump if I were to jump up onto a table. These baby birds are already trying to separate themselves from the ground. They seem to know that their place is in the air. At night, they struggle to get up onto that first little perch and somehow balance themselves. When you see their courage and determination, it’s easy to know why people can’t fly; they don’t want to hard enough.

Most of the times when the babies make that first jump up onto the feeding perch they swing right on over and off the other side; they can generate enough spring with their legs and frantic wing flapping to get up there, but they haven’t learned to use their tails yet to stop themselves and balance.

If these babies look at Alfonso and Birdie moving so easily from perch to perch, twisting, hopping along, without a thought, without an effort, it must be discouraging. Something like flying isn’t easy even for birds; it takes practice and effort. I don’t see anything of Alfonso or Birdie trying to teach them, the babies have to work it out for themselves. I notice, though, that when one baby has figured something out, the others pick it up quickly. They seem to be learning from each other.

The next day, in the back yard, I use the old saw horses and a four-by-four as a perch to practice with. I put my perch up three feet and take a running jump flapping my arms. I realize how much spring those baby birds have in their legs already. If the spring in the legs develops in comparative strength the same as the wings, a grown bird must be able to hop even without wings, almost as well as a frog. It would be interesting to see how a bird growing up without wings would behave. I don’t mean a penguin or something that gave up flying to be able to swim, but a bird who naturally would fly but doesn’t have wings.

That night my arms are deadly sore from flapping, but I keep it up. If those little birds can do it, I can, too. I get so I can jump up on the perch and stay there. My main problem is the same one they have, that is, stopping my forward motion and not going over the other side of the perch. I flap my arms to keep myself balanced.

What I need is a tail. I could put some cloth sewn to my trousers between my legs, but that wouldn’t help. The tail has to be completely independent of the legs and controllable. Already those babies can tilt their tail up and down and spread the feathers. They got practice at this shitting from the nest. I’m still keeping up with them but already I can see that I don’t have a chance without mechanical help. The one thing I know is I don’t want a motor or anything like that. If I can’t fly on my own power, then I don’t want it.

It’s the dark male who makes the first up-flight successfully. Alfonso’d flown onto a higher perch to get away from them after he’d finished feeding and this one flies right up after him. I don’t think he even thought about this flight either. Maybe that’s part of flying; you can’t think about it too much. I don’t know how I can stop myself from thinking about it.

The dark male lands on the perch beside Alfonso and then, in the violence of his wing flapping for feeding, facing Alfonso sideways, gets unbalanced and tumbles off the perch. He catches himself midway and glides more than falls into the food dish on the side of the cage.

The baby birds seem able to take an awful beating with their falling around, and not show any sign of it. This jump of the dark male was up at least four times his outstretched height; for me this would be like jumping up onto the roof of our house. I can’t even jump down that far without hurting myself, and he isn’t a month old yet. It’s discouraging, but I’ll watch more closely and practice. I know I want to fly at least as much as any canary. I don’t have to fly anything as well as a canary: gliding down from high places with arm control might be enough.

Birdie has laid a new egg and we’re off on the second nest. I take it out the same as last time and put in a marble. She doesn’t sit too tightly on this first egg but she stays by the nest to protect it from the young birds. She gives off the feeling she’s finished with them and wishes they’d get out of the breeding cage. It’s a bit like some parents with teenagers. She puts up with them and she’ll feed them if they insist but her mind is elsewhere.

In a few more days they’re all capable of flying up to any perch, or the nest, and are beginning to have fun trying out their wings. Birdie starts sitting tight on the nest as soon as she’s laid her third egg. I think she’s more afraid of the babies doing the eggs harm than anything else.

All of the babies have started picking at the egg food when I put it in the bottom of the cage. The way they get started is by smearing it on themselves accidentally while jumping around Alfonso when he’s eating. They’re hopping in and out of the dish full of egg food and then, more by chance than anything, discover they can go directly to the source. This is a critical moment. I decide to leave the door of the breeding cage open and watch what happens.

As soon as it’s open, of course, Alfonso takes off out into the aviary. He’s been locked in with those babies for five days and is showing signs of going stir crazy. He flies about madly, checking all his systems and giving the old wings a workout. It’s almost as much fun for me watching him through the binoculars as it must be for him. It isn’t long before the little yellow bird who kept falling out of the nest is on the edge of the cage door looking into the aviary. I can almost feel her mind trying to work it out. There’s a perch in front of her and slightly down, about twice as far as she’s ever jumped before. She cocks her head this way and that trying to figure the distance. Birds don’t have stereoscopic vision, and have some difficulty judging distances. She takes off for it after about three minutes pondering and makes a perfect landing. Now, she really looks little. Alfonso, almost as if he’s rewarding her, comes over and feeds her.

It’s exciting, for me watching, as each of the young birds comes out into the aviary. At first, each flight from one perch to another is a major adventure, there’s lots of falling and fluttering to the bottom. Once they’re on the bottom, it’s a major project flying back up to the lowest perch. This perch is at least two feet from the ground. They all work it out though and in a few days are making experimental test flights. They seem to enjoy fluttering down from one perch to a lower one, more than struggling their way up. It’s a couple of weeks before they catch onto gliding.

This is the opposite of the way I’ll have to do it. From what I know now, I think I’ll have to be satisfied with gliding first, then work my way to some kind of flapping.

It’s several days after they’ve left the breeding cage before one of them, the dark one, finds his way back. Birdie has finished laying her fifth egg again and I’ve put all the eggs in the nest. These days, Alfonso has been able to fly into the cage from the aviary and feed Birdie or sit on the eggs when she wants to go out to feed or take some exercise. Now, this young bird comes over to the nest and starts giving the feed-me signal. Birdie hunches down deeper on the nest and ignores him. I’m wondering if I’ll have to lock Birdie in the breeding cage, leaving Alfonso out, something I’d hate to do. Then Alfonso takes care of things himself. It’s almost as if he’d figured it out.

He flies into the breeding cage and chases that baby bird out. When the baby, all confused at this hostile act from the ever-loving father, is outside, Alfonso feeds him. In this way, he trains all the young birds to stay away from Birdie on the nest.

But it’s no real problem. They’re all beginning to have such fun flying, they don’t do much of anything but eat and fly all day long. They practice different flying tricks. Now, I’m sure they’re watching Alfonso to learn how to do some things. It would be interesting to see how quickly a bird would learn to fly if it never saw any other bird flying. I decide to try that one out when I have enough birds.

I’m keeping a notebook of all the things I see. I’m doing a lot of drawings and I write down my observations and thoughts. I’m also writing down all the different experiments I want to try so I can figure out what flying is and how birds learn. I take ten pages of notes alone on how a bird learns to turn around on a perch. It’s definitely something they have to practice; they don’t know how to do it for almost a week after they’re out of the nest. Out in the back yard I’m working on that trick myself and it is not an easy thing to learn.

Birdie seems happy and well. She’s extraordinary, laying a second clutch of five eggs. The book says a female can have three nests a year without hurting, if she’s in good health. Birdie looks fine to me and as the young birds get more and more independent with their feeding, Alfonso gives her more help. He brings food up to feed her on the nest and sits when she flies out to eat. She takes long exercise periods, completely ignoring the baby birds; they ignore her too. It seems that after baby birds leave a nest, the mother bird just forgets them. At least, that’s Birdie’s way. The weather is getting warmer now, so Birdie isn’t so passionate at sitting as the first time. Sometimes she’ll take as much as fifteen minutes off the nest to preen her feathers. With Alfonso up there anyway, hovering over the nest, there’s no real danger. I don’t think Alfonso really sits on the eggs, not the way Birdie does. He spreads his legs and straddles the eggs, more like he’s protecting them than as if he’s trying to brood. If Birdie abandoned the nest or died, I don’t think Alfonso could hatch the eggs.

The babies are growing fast. The growth of their tails seems to be stimulated by flight, or maybe it’s the other way around. By the time they’re five weeks old, I can scarcely tell them from grown birds. Some have started cracking seed already. Until all of them can do that, they aren’t really safe. The book says the real test is when they molt their baby feathers and grow in the first adult feathers. I’m not worried too much; they look so healthy.

It occurs to me one evening as I’m feeding the birds that all I did was put two birds in the aviary, some food and water and nothing else and now there are six of them. I know this is perfectly natural, it’s one of the things life is all about, but to have it happen in my bedroom, under my own eyes, is magic.

My aviary begins to look and sound like the real thing. There is the continual fluttering of wings, the sounds of birds calling to each other and the sounds of beaks being wiped on the perches. My mother, who hasn’t been paying too much attention, accuses me one night at dinner of having bought more birds. I explain they’re the babies of my first two. She goes Harumph, sneaks a look at my father, who’s putting a piece of baked potato in his mouth, then says they’re beginning to stink up the whole house. It scares me when she talks like that. She has so much power over my life and the world of birds in my bedroom.

The next day I buy some stuff in a bottle that makes everything smell like pine trees. I put it around in all corners of my room but not in the cage. My room begins to smell like a fake forest. It’s such a terrific thing having birds, I’ll do anything to keep them.