It started out as a typical request over the phone. “There’s a bird flopping around in front of our house and we’re afraid it might get run over or attacked by someone’s cat. Could you come get it?”
At that time International Bird Rescue was located in the building adjacent to (and owned by) the East Bay SPCA in the warehouse district of Berkeley and the woman who called lived in the Oakland hills. She gave me her address and i equipped myself with a large towel to toss over the bird and a cardboard pet carrier to bring it back in. I hopped into my 1966 VW Bus with a stylized Murre painted on the tire cover and putted up to the hills.
Her house was located on a corner lot with a tidy lawn. No one answered the door. I looked around. No flopping bird. Frustrated, i headed back to the Bird Center. When i arrived, i learned that the woman and her friend had caught the bird a few minutes after her phone call and was (rightly) asked to bring it straight to the Bird Center. (Note: There was no such thing as mobile phones in those days so there was no way the staff could tell me to turn around early. Wasting time in such circumstances was simply part of life back then.)
The staff had already examined our newest patient, provided sweetened water, determined that the “bird” was an immature Kestrel, the smallest of the falcon family, and in perfect health. Since we sent all of the raptors we received out to the Lindsey Junior Museum in Walnut Creek, i called Gary Bogue to arrange a transfer. Gary surprised me by asking us to take care of the Kestrel because the museum was up to its armpits in baby wildlife.
“But we don’t know how,” i countered.
“Put it where it can’t see you and toss it a live mouse. If it eats the mouse then keep it until it’s ready to be on its own. If it doesn’t eat the mouse, then we could probably take it.”
We had a couple of very small rooms on the second floor where we had kept ducks that had possibly been exposed to Dutch Duck Plague. The ducks had finished their quarantine and had been released, so i hastily installed a couple of perches in one of the rooms and released the Kestrel there. Before i could close the door, i saw it crash into the wall in an inelegant attempt to fly. I fetched a cute little mouse from our small (and smelly) colony of lab mice, opened the door just a crack, and tossed it in.
An hour or so later i peeked into the room and verified the mouse was missing. We resigned ourselves to raising a raptor.
It ate several live mice a day, carefully delivered so that it could not see that a ‘person’ was involved. It did see a person, however, each day when we exchanged its bowl of water with a clean one. Its room had a window but the glass panes had been painted white to keep the ducks from trying to escape. Consequently, the Kestrel likewise did not fly into the glass and could not see the parking lot across the street nor the warehouses nearby.
After five days or so, we were running out of mice since the Kestrel was eating them faster than they were reproducing; a problem opposite the norm. Also, the stench of Kestrel shit in the room was seeping under the door. I called Gary. “What do we do now? The Kestrel seems to be quite adept at flying between perches.”
“Build an aviary somewhere out on your roof where he can’t easily see people and keep him there for about three days. Then open the aviary. He’ll fly off.”
“How big an aviary?” i asked.
“Oh, six by six by six will be enough.”
By the very next day, volunteers finished the aviary but they made it eight feet high, ten feet long, and six feet wide so the Kestrel would have plenty of space to exercise his wings.
Potential glitches in caring for the Kestrel bothered me. (A) He could see the person tossing in the mouse and (B) the mouse might run out of the chicken-wire before being killed. Well, the mice did run. Several times volunteers were seen dashing and scrambling on rooftop in their efforts to return mice to their chosen role: Kestrel chow. Some escaped. C’est la vie.
A few days later Gary Bogue came and banded the Kestrel and we let him fly away. He was out of sight within seconds.
During the years International Bird Rescue occupied that building (former secret factory during the Second World War fabricating Norden bombsights) i lived there in a room that was 10 x 13 feet and divided into two spaces by a seven-foot wall that demarcated the space into a 10 x 7 kitchen and a 10 x 6 bedroom with an open walkway between them. I cooked with a Coleman camp stove and had a dilapidated but adequate refrigerator. A low-income man-cave.
As i prepared dinner that evening after everyone else had gone home, i heard an odd noise. It wasn’t until i turned off the camp stove that i could tell from what direction it came. I left my dinner cooling, grabbed my flashlight, and followed the intermittent sound. After a few wrong turns and backtracking, i stood facing the door to the former Kestrel room. Opening the door, i could see the Kestrel silhouetted on the painted window by the street light on 8th Street. He was screaming. I took exactly the wrong action and it wasn’t easy. I should have turned around, eaten my dinner, and gone to bed. Instead, after gathering tools and chiseling where the sash met the frame, i pried open a window that may not have been opened since WW II.
The Kestrel jumped down to the floor looking for a mouse. It boggles my mind to this day that the Kestrel knew which window out of dozens on that building – some others painted as well – belonged to his room. He screamed at me so loud my ears hurt with that killy-killy-killy call that Kestrels make. He was hungry; i was hungry. I then took another wrong action; i bent over and slowly reached down near him. He hopped on my forearm. I stood up and tried to coax him onto my shoulder. Instead, he bounded up onto my head with a single flap. It hurt. His talons felt like straight pins in a bulletin board.
He stayed on my head as i walked down stairs and up stairs and through a storage room back to my kitchen. There i quickly closed the hot camp stove and gently brushed him off my head. He flew up to the curtain rod over my kitchen counter, turned, and screamed. Killy-killy-killy. My ringing ears rang louder as i checked my head for blood. There was surprising little. I daubed a little antibiotic on the little holes and considered what to do next.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
I closed the door to my living space, navigated to the mouse colony, and returned with his supper. I put the mouse on the floor and, before it had a chance to move, it was clasped with talons and its neck vertebrae severed by the Kestrel’s beak. We both ate together. When i finished, i cleared my dishes. When he finished eating the front half of the mouse, he flew over to my bookcase and stashed the rear half behind a small picture frame before returning to the curtain rod.
By the time i finished washing the dishes, he was standing on one leg on the curtain rod with eyes closed. As quietly as i could, i opened the two swing-out windows behind the curtain, took my final trip to the bathroom on the other side of the building, and called it a night.
As soon as i woke the following morning, i peeked around the room divider and was relieved to see that the Kestrel was gone. The ass-end of the mouse was still on the bookcase, however, and Kestrel shit streaked the curtains below where he perched. Relief.
You, dear reader, know where this is going. After all, this story is “The Kitchen Kestrel.”
Staff and volunteers left before dark that day as sunset was around seven o’clock. I finished the final feeding of our avian guests, washed the smell of whitebait fish from my hands and headed to my ‘apartment.’ Standing on the curtain rod eating the back half of the mouse was the “Kitchen Kestrel.”
Our lives fit a narrow routine. Every other evening the Kitchen Kestrel would scream “Killy-killy-killy” for a mouse, i would fetch a lab mouse from our colony, Kitchen Kestrel would eat the front half, and stash the back half in a different location – behind the salt shaker, under my hat on the closet shelf, pushed into the bookcase on top of Foundation’s End – never in the same place as before. By the time i awoke he’d be gone. On alternate evenings, he would fetch the mouse remains from the hiding spot – he never forgot where he cached it – rip it into shreds for a while and then swallow the last chunks whole.
Word got around and i had more evening visitors over than was usual. People wanted to see the Kitchen Kestrel. I sometimes offered my visitors dinner but few accepted after watching him eat or they left early to avoid the killing of a lab mouse.
As i drove up to the Bird Center one day, i saw the Kitchen Kestrel on top of the parking lot fence. I pulled over, took out my binoculars (bird people always have binoculars), and watched him. He was bobbing his head up and down while focusing on something across the way. He left the fence, flew swiftly across to the fence at the far side of the parking lot – a full block away – and smashed feet-first into a clump of weeds at the base of the fence. He immediately rose back into the air with a brown (not white) mouse in his talons. He was soon out of sight behind a building.
OK. So that’s why he is only eating half a mouse a day in the kitchen. He’s doing quite well in the out-of-doors, even if it is an industrial area. Therefore, tonight i won’t give him a mouse to eat. It’s high time to wean him off food from people. The rest of the day was filled with fish, medicines, hematocrits, bird shit, documentation, phone calls, planning, and enough to exhaust the best of us.
I was in the kitchen when the Kestrel returned from his Kestrel life and perched on the curtain rod. As was his routine, he spent about five minutes preening his feathers before he told me to fetch a mouse with his “Killy-killy-killy.” I ignored him. Less than a minute later he repeated himself but louder, “Killy-killy-killy.” I turned to him and declared – as though he could understand English – “Sorry, but you’ll get no more mice from me.”
He immediately flew at me and gently alighted on my head. He walked from the crown of my head forward, and then sank his talons into my scalp. He leaned way over until we were eye-to-upside-down-eye and screamed, “Killy-killy-killy-killy-killy-killy-killy.” I managed to get him to release his grip on my scalp by pushing on his breast with my hand. So now his talons were skewering the flesh on the back of my hand – an improvement of sorts, i guess.
I moved a chair over toward the window with my other hand, stood on it, and brushed him off onto the curtain rod. I then dashed out of my room closing the door behind me. I stopped in our treatment room and held a couple of compresses over the holes that were still leaking blood until the bleeding ebbed – just a couple of minutes. I administered a few dabs of antibiotic and several Band-Aids before i went to the mouse colony to fetch him dinner.
* * * * * *
Some days later, a volunteer handed me the phone. “Here, you should take this.”
“Hello, how may i help you?”
It was a woman’s voice. “As i explained to the young woman, we have a sick bird here.”
“Can you bring it in?”
“Well, it’s already flown off today but it must not be well. It lands at one of our windows almost every day about noontime. The girls have been giving it some of their lunch.”
“Where are you located?”
“We work at Bayer in Berkeley on the fourth floor.”
Bayer Pharmaceuticals was just three blocks from the Bird Center. “Let me guess, it likes meat the best.”
“Well, yes but sometimes it eats other things.”
“And it’s reddish and grey with black stripes over white on its face.”
“Well yes. How could you know that?”
Not wanting to divulge the whole story, i said, “Because that bird has been hanging around our bird center here which is just up Carlton from you at Eighth Street. It was separated from its parents when it was still too young.”
“What should we do?”
Damn good question. “Uh, tell the others to stick with meat.”
* * * * * *
A few days later i spotted two Kestrels flying between Bayer and the bird center. Through my binoculars i saw that one was a female and the other was the Kitchen Kestrel. They flew in wide circles, not together but not far apart. Higher and higher until at about 500 feet the Kitchen Kestrel suddenly plummeted in a vertical dive. His speed built quickly and then he was going too fast to keep from smashing into a warehouse roof. Miraculously he pulled out of the dive with only inches to spare and skirted the flat roof at about 90 mph. As if that were not a sufficient display of his abilities, he shot through a maze of power lines strung over Carlton Street still clocking at least 70 mph. Scared the crap out of me. I could only marvel at his judgment, reflexes, and his ability to withstand incredible g forces.
I scanned the skies but could not spot the female.
That night he ate the whole mouse in one sitting.
* * * * * *
A week later, the curtain rod stayed empty – he never returned. I scanned the skies for weeks without a glimpse of him. I suspect my unwise actions that made him fearless of humans, may have led to his capture or demise. Over the next few years i checked with Gary Bogue to learn whether the Kitchen Kestrel’s leg band had been reported – but nothing. To this day i hope that he found a mate, raised a brood or two, and had a good life
– in spite of my missteps.