Enslaved by Ducks (27 page)

“They are kind of pretty up close,” he called back. “Aren’t you beautiful?” he cooed to one of the girls. Linda and I had determined that all four birds were females by studying pictures in our birding field guides and noting the absence of fleshy dewlaps. It didn’t take long for Bill to experience the full glory of turkey behavior. “Ouch!” he hollered. “One of them’s biting me. Yowch! Two of them.
Stop it! How do I get out of here? I’m surrounded!”

“They’ll do that,” I told him blandly, as I left the barn and headed for the basement to fetch the tools.

In theory, putting up a poultry fence was simple. You mapped out the shape of your enclosure, pounded in the metal posts at three-foot intervals, and hooked the fencing under the tabs on the posts, unrolling the bail as you went. Then you gave each post a couple of final whacks with a hammer to tighten its grasp on the fencing. But success depends on being able to sink your posts more than an inch into the ground. The barn seemed to have been built on top of a heap of boulders sprinkled with a cosmetic layer of dirt. As a result, Bill and I were forced to significantly alter the enclosure shape. I would begin by positioning a post at an ideal location, beat on it in vain with a hammer, then shake my head to relieve the ringing in my ears produced by metal striking rock. With the greatest optimism, I would move the post two inches in each compass direction. In the end I would have to deviate a foot or so off the parallel before I managed to slip the post into a crevice between adjacent boulders.

“Weren’t we trying to make a rectangle?” Bill snorted.

“This follows the natural contours better than a static rectilinear form,” I said.

“‘Natural contours’ is right. It’s shaped exactly like your head, if you can call that natural.”

I shushed him. “Hold it a second.”

“What?”

“You hear that?” Off and on throughout the morning, the turkeys had erupted into doggy yips from the other side of the barn door. “Somebody’s looking for you,” I told him. “You better go to her. But this time don’t lead her on with talk about how beautiful she is unless you plan on making an honest turkey of her.”

The turkeys took to their outdoor pen at once. It was large enough that they didn’t experience the kind of anxiety attack that had gripped them in the duck pen, which was fortunate. I didn’t think I’d have much luck convincing Dr. Rick to give me four more prescriptions for Zoloft. Even though they now had three hundred square feet of weed-infested, stony ground to explore, Linda was afraid they’d miss the rambling lifestyle of their Bradford Street days. Their love of the barn outweighed their wanderlust, however. Some days, in fact, even after Linda pushed open their door, they didn’t bother to hop down from the stanchion rails until she went back to the barn, shooed them to the floor, and hustled them outside.

Because the turkeys were essentially self-contained—coming and going from barn to pen as they pleased—I didn’t expect that Linda would have an opportunity to spoil them. But she managed. She decided that apples would be good for their health. At night after she had closed up the barn and the turkeys were on their perches, Linda would go from bird to bird holding an apple in her hand, allowing each turkey to peck at it. One evening she told me, “I don’t think the girls are happy about having to bite into a whole apple.” I had no suitable response. I merely watched as she diced the apple and put it into a bowl, which she presented to their highnesses in turn. And to insure that no turkey felt left out, she would offer each bird only a bite at a time so that she could make several rounds. The fussier turkeys might let the bowl pass them once or twice before they deigned to take their treat.

One night after she came in from the barn, I told her, “I can’t believe anyone thinks turkeys are stupid.”

I knew I never should have called the owl into our yard. I don’t consider myself particularly superstitious, although it’s true I won’t go anywhere in my car without buckling the seat belt first, and I have a phobia about running red lights or driving in reverse on the freeway. Automobiles aside, I like to think my decisions in life are guided by the rudder of common sense rather than blown willy-nilly by folkloric hokum and balderdash. But something about owls gives me the creeps. They’re secretive. They inhabit dark and lonely places. Their cries are eerie and foreboding. They see better on a moonless night than I do in full light of day huddled in front of my computer screen. They can zero in on prey using their hearing alone, swooping down on huge wings that make less of a rustle than an ant crawling on a napkin. Not for nothing are owls considered potent symbols of the invisible realm and harbingers of death.

But I couldn’t resist calling one into our yard. It was a barred owl, and ever since I had first moved into our house, I would hear
its distinctive cry in the spring. You can’t mistake a barred owl for anything else. “Who cooks for you?” it demands in the middle of the night, after even the telemarketers have gone to bed. “Who cooks for you all?” it repeats in dialect, betraying its identity as the spooky old hoot owl of Southern swamps. Though I had heard the barred owl several times, I had seen one exactly once—an hour before an owl aficionado came over for dinner, strangely enough. On my way to the grocery store to pick up a head of broccoli in the late afternoon, the sight of a large bird fluttering in the bare tree branches less than a quarter of a mile from our house stopped me dead on the road. I went back for Linda, and we sat in the car watching his deep black eyes watch us. When he tired of the rubbernecking, he launched his heavy body off the tree, laboriously flapped his wings, and sailed across the street.

“You can call an owl pretty easily, you know,” Jason told us over dinner that evening. He was a college student who had worked for us cleaning up our duck pen a couple of times, and because of his interest in birds, we had invited him and his girlfriend over for a meal.

“How do you call them?” I asked.

“Jason does great owl impressions,” said his girlfriend, Kathie, who preferred exotic snakes to birds. When Jason had first met her in the dorm, a rough green snake was peeking through her hair.

“Do the screech owl,” she said.

He made a warbling whistling sound that may or not have been a perfect rendition of an owl that I had never heard before in our woods, though Jason insisted that we lived in prime screech-owl habitat.

“Do you do a barred owl?” I asked, envisioning a nightclub career for Jason.

Jason took a preparatory breath, flicked his eyes, and paused. Too embarrassed to turn his mimicry into a medley, he suggested
instead, “You can also use a recording of an owl’s call. They’re very curious, and they’ll come to investigate.”

My own pathetic rendition of the barred owl’s call a few nights later resembled a six-year-old boy imitating a trombone, and the sole answering hoot was unmistakably derisive. The following week, I was outside after dark bringing in our bird feeder to keep it from raccoons, when an owl not more than one hundred feet away inquired about my dinner. “Who cooks for you?” it demanded. “Who cooks for you all?”

Darting upstairs, I returned with a flashlight, a pair of binoculars, and a boom box with a tape of a barred owl call. Out on the back deck, I cranked up the volume and let a few repetitions rip into the night. The swamp below our back fence was swollen with water from recent rains and added an unsettling metallic echo to the calls. The owl didn’t reply. I rolled the tape again. Across the swamp, beyond our barn, and within a chain length of the river, our neighbor’s chocolate brown Labrador retriever responded with an explosive volley of barks. Then from somewhere in our yard, somewhere close, the barred owl’s throaty, sliding call came back to me, a cross between a fanfare played on a muted trumpet and an animal growl that prickled the nape of my neck.

“Linda! Linda!” I ran upstairs, summoning her with a hoarse whisper. “There’s an owl outside. He’s talking to my tape.” She looked doubtful. On previous occasions when I had dragged her outdoors, a glorious song would invariably sputter to a halt the moment her feet crossed the threshold. This time, I played the tape again, and the owl astonished me by answering immediately. The final, drawn-out syllable of his call descended in an icy vibrato that mimicked the quavering “hoo” of a classic Hollywood ghost.

Linda turned to me with wide eyes. “He’s right in the yard,” she whispered, enunciating every word.

“I think he’s in the walnut tree,” I said. Switching on the flashlight,
I swept its beam up a tree about fifty feet away. A weak circle of light caught an owl perched on a low branch with his flat face turned directly toward us. Linda kept the barred owl illuminated as I peered at him through binoculars, then I held the light again and let Linda gape at him. The intensity of his unblinking stare unnerved me. It was as if the bird were training twin lasers on me whose wattage dwarfed the candlepower of my feeble flashlight. I felt the pressure of his eyes even as I leaned down and fumbled with the tape recorder controls.

“Who cooks for you?” the boom box demanded.

Hearing another owl within pouncing distance, he leaped off the branch to soar directly at me, zooming between the house and the milk house with his five-foot wingspan not five feet above my head before circling back into the yard, landing in another tree, and hooting his response. His approach had been so quick and so unexpected, I didn’t even have a chance to curl up into a cowardly ball. For only the second or third time in my life, I experienced profound gratitude that I hadn’t been born a field mouse.

“He thinks you’re his girlfriend,” Linda lamented. “The poor guy.“

“Or a rival,” I countered, puffing out my chest. But the truth was that my initial elation over luring him into the yard had soured into embarrassment. It’s one thing when a black-capped chickadee hops from the pine tree to our bird feeder to get a close look at the idiot who is mangling his simple, two-note song. It’s quite another bothering a solitary predator whose life depends upon determining if another owl has invaded its territory and whether that invader is a prospective mate or a probable foe. What must our barred owl think, I wondered, to follow the call of a fellow owl to its source only to find a guilt-stricken skinny guy and his disapproving wife? Summoning such a formidable creature merely to see if it could be done was akin to uncorking a bottle and disturbing
the thousand-year sleep of a fierce genie and then telling him, Oh, never mind, go back to bed. Parrots don’t forget when they’ve been teased. They wait months for just the right moment to take revenge upon their tormentor. I doubted if an owl would be any more generous. You underestimate the strength and patience of a bird at your peril. I learned this when the shy duck Chloe bit my arm bloody defending her nest and again when Hector kept coming at me in a savage hissy fit no matter how many times I flung him from me. An annoyed barred owl could easily tear my clothes and shred my flesh with a few twitches of his knife-sharp beak and talons. Cold, hard logic told me this would never happen. More likely he would wield his influence with supernatural forces to teach me a lesson instead.

“That’s the last time I’m ever doing this,” I vowed loudly enough for the owl to hear, as I unplugged the tape recorder and wrapped the cord around my wrist. “Sorry,” I hollered to the owl. But it was too late. The damage had been done, and I prickled with unease that I would pay for playing tricks on an emissary of the unseen world.

The next morning, in a haze of sunshine, Linda flung open the door to the girl ducks’ pen. Ducks Maxine, Chloe, Clara, Marybelle, and Gwelda trotted out into the yard with goose Hailey bringing up the rear. But goose Liza stayed behind, suddenly unable to walk or even stand.

For two weeks, Liza had been waddling with a limp, but we hadn’t thought it was anything more serious than a pulled muscle. The green-headed mallard–Khaki Campbell males had taken advantage of her condition by chasing her around the girls’ side of the pen until they had flattened her into a corner or she had retreated into a doghouse.

Since Liza’s mobility problem hadn’t descended on her all at
once, like Chloe’s broken leg had, we didn’t think a traumatic injury had occurred. Dr. Carlotti agreed, but that was all that he could say for certain. Although he kept a pair of picturesque horses in a tidy corral in back of his country practice, he was by no means a country vet. He mainly treated dogs and cats, and his experience with poultry was limited.

“If I had to guess, I would say that it’s a temporary nerve problem,” he sighed. “If she’s been sitting on eggs like you said, it’s possible that one or more eggs in her oviduct have been pressing against a nerve, temporarily paralyzing her leg. I don’t see any sign of injury. Let her rest, and if I’m right, she should be walking in a couple of days.”

This hypothesis seemed reasonable and reassuring. After venturing a few steps into our woods, I shouted my thanks to the now invisible owl for visiting nothing worse than a scare on us. Maybe mimicking a mate was equivalent to a parking infraction rather than a felony in the owl behavioral code, I reasoned. But when four days passed without Liza showing any improvement, we grew concerned enough to set up an appointment with the knowledgeable Dr. Hedley.

I had bought a beagle-size pet carrier that we often used for duck and rabbit duties, and it sat on the floor beside my chair in Dr. Hedley’s crowded waiting room. Hoping to reduce the stress on Liza, who wasn’t accustomed to being folded up and shoved into a plastic box, I had draped a towel over the front grate. The shrouding succeeded in piquing the curiosity of a dachshund on a long leash. “What kind of dog do you have in there?” asked the woman on the far end of the leash, just as her dachshund poked his snout behind the towel and Liza responded with a startled honk. I grinned uneasily, then stared intently at the floor tile pattern as a pungent scent resembling tincture of highly concentrated grass
clippings seasoned with a dash of boiled cabbage wafted up from Liza’s carrying case. A man seated across from me with a kitten in a cardboard box on his lap coughed. The kitten coughed, too. My mind grappled in the dark for the barest beginnings of an explanation, and in despair utterly abandoned the attempt.