Summer of the Birds

While walking under a shady path at Logan's annual Summerfest Festival, a blob of something wet fell from a tree branch overhead and landed in my hair. It was a fine hit.
I saw the culprit flit away gleefully, twittering, nonchalant. It was a robin-- or maybe a swallow. I was too busy rubbing bird poop off my head to get a good look. My first thought on seeing the bird was, "I wonder if it has a nest...?"
I began taking cautious and measured steps toward the car, and glanced down at the small, white, glutinous mass on the tissue. It seemed innocent enough, but the lump triggered a series of memories, most of which had to do with my animal-loving sister, Shirsti.
The spring of 1999 found me in a fever. A perpetual bird flu, if you will-- except it's not at all what you're thinking. The highly contagious sickness was inflicted by Shirsti, who had been trying all her life to catch and tame a wild bird. She was extremely astute at finding baby birds, and under her guidance we ravaged the yard searching for nests, eggs,  chicks, and wounded black-bellied Plovers. We climbed trees and trespassed into neighbors yards. We scouted rooftops and ridgepoles. We wanted a pet bird, and by golly we were going to get one, even if it meant stealing it-- which was precisely what we did.
Working as stealthy partners in crime, on a whim we decided to take two smooth, gray-spotted Sparrow eggs from a neighbor's tree. One for her, one for myself. Hardly able to contain our excitement, we placed them under an aquarium light and waited for the chicks to emerge. Several days later, we returned to the same nest and stole a baby bird, as the mother Sparrow seemed to do a much better job at keeping her eggs warm than we did.
Only an inch long, the thing was bald and pink, with popping eyes and little tufts of gray fuzz sticking out of the sides of its head. I christened it Zinny (because of Sharon Creech's Chasing Redbird) and together Shirsti and I took turns feeding it throughout the day and night. Two days later, Zinny's head went limp and lolled to one side. I was filled with unspeakable horror. We mourned quietly for several minutes before we determined to steal a more mature baby bird from a Robin's nest in our pine tree.
Our yard, our birds.
We took the ladder from the garage and Shirsti climbed to the top, rustled around in the needles for a minute, and emerged with a tiny, fuzzy Robin with clear black eyes and a very disapproving expression on its face. For some unexplainable reason, the honor of naming the bird fell on me again and I called it Squeakers (because of the Wild Hearts Humane Society series I was reading). We told our mother the cat had knocked down the nest. As we very well knew, our mother couldn't say no to a needy soul, and so we were allowed to keep the little bird.
Squeakers was our first, and only, success story. Through the involvement of everyone in our family, we were able to adequately take care of the little Robin and, because of our mother's wishes, release her back into the wild. It was a supremely stressful process, and one that merited me many tardies in the fifth grade, which was just as well. Shirsti and I bonded over the ordeal, and I spent a good month of the summer sleeping on her floor next to the bird cage.

Ah, Shirsti. I thought to myself as I slowly shampooed my hair. I thought about how we also searched for wild cats, tried to tame squirrels, and bred hundreds of guppies in a twenty-gallon tank. She is the only one who has known my secret dream of finding an orphaned fawn in my backyard, or nursing a premature kitten with a bottle. I thought about how she had to bend the rules to keep Abilene, my pet bunny. We are the bleeding hearts of our family, our sweaters matted in fur, fostering wounded animals in secret. With bird poop in our hair, we come together to tame the world, one baby bird at a time.