A robin and a piece of netting: a cautionary tale (tail?)

Well, we had some drama at ye old homestead this morning. 

I am behind in planting beans and squash this spring, and so yesterday, I finally got around to clearing the spot along the fence in the garden where I want to grow them.  One part of the fence has a nice, widely woven nylon string net that I leave up permanently to trellis the plants, but it only reaches about 15' in length, and so I supplement with a much cheaper, plastic net on the rest of the fence.  This stuff is as thin as thread, and the holes in the net are only about 1 1/2" in width.  The corners of each hole, where the plastic lines cross, are reinforced with a bigger blob of black plastic.  Yesterday during my clean up, it was rainy and yucky, and I absentmindedly dropped the black netting on top of a garden bed, to come back later and reattach it to the fence.

This morning, I decided--without any serious gardening agenda--to take a quick stroll through the garden and see how the tomatoes I planted earlier this week are recovering from transplant-shock.  To my horror, I discovered a robin fully tangled in the black netting.  The poor thing had obviously been struggling for quite a while and was horribly enmeshed--legs, wings, tail.  It crouched beside my coldframe, perfectly still and hoping to avoid my notice.

In case you haven't realized, I am a bit of an animal lover.  Even more, I love songbirds--I love feeding them, watching them build nests and teach their fledglings the ways of the bird world, I love watching them take water- and dust-baths, and I love to watch them sit on tree branches and fencetops and throw back their tiny heads, letting their passionate songs of romance and patriotism pour robustly from their throats. The songs they sing are larger than life and echo through the trees--certainly larger than the small bodies from which they emanate--and there is something that touches my heart about such beautiful gifts coming from such small, feathered, forgettable creatures.  They are just trying to make babies and defend turf, but they fill the air with music for all creation to enjoy.

Earlier this spring I realized, out of all the bird soap-operas being performed with great seriousness in our backyard, that I have had a relationship with robins longer than any other living being on the planet, aside from my parents.  I know robins.  I know how they hop, how they turn a beady eye toward the grass just prior to snapping up a worm, I know the sweet, sleepy songs they sing to each other at dusk.  I have known these things intimately since I was big enough to toddle outside and discover a baby robin in the backyard in what I deduced to be desperate need of human interference.  I had a childhood of nursing baby robins back to "health"--in retrospect, I know that they were out of the nest for a reason, aka, they were old enough to fledge, but at the time those speckled, frowny-faced babies gave me a wonderful thrill.  Thanks to me and the help of my parents, those babies were saved from unknown, imaginary horrors.  Even though I also was quite fond of earthworms, they were sacrificed easily in the care of a baby robin in a shoebox lined with grass and leaves.  I could hold one of these tiny, indignant miracles in my own pudgy hands and know that I, Maggie, had saved one more robin for the world and to the terror of worms everywhere. 

All of this flashed through my mind this morning, as I looked at the panicked, tangled mess I had unknowingly created.  This love that I have for the least of my furred and feathered kin is one of the powerful forces at work in my life still today.  This is what I want to teach my gardening preschoolers--to consider the worth and dignity of all life on this pretty blue planet and not just that of the human creatures like themselves.  And so much of the havoc that we wreck upon our world is done with the same arrogant carelessness with which I had left that netting behind in the garden.  What had I done?  What horrible hours of racing heart and struggling wing had I inflicted on this small creature?  I was sick--sick at what this little bird had suffered in the hot sun, thanks to my careless stupidity.

I may have lost you here.  You may be rolling your eyes.  This is a robin.  One useless creature in a world run amok with countless identical robins.  What would a practical adult do here--leave the bird to hang itself?  Kill it out of pity and try to salvage the netting?  This is not an important bird, remember.  This is not an endangered or particularly beautiful species.  I did not ask this bird to ruin some perfectly good garden gear and throw a wrench in my Saturday-morning plans.

Well, of course I did none of these things.  Carefully, carefully, I picked up the struggling bird, trying my best not to pull any of the net that was so horribly entwined around it.  The robin, sure that the world was ending in the form of a pale, featherless giant, did not make my task easier, straining, pecking, and flapping in my hands. Gently and firmly clutching my little friend, the yards of netting trailing behind, I made my way across the lawn to call for help and scissors from Jason. 

When I reached the back door, I had to steady myself before I could call loud enough for Jason to hear:  "Jason!  I need you!  Please come here!" 

From the interior of the house I could faintly hear him answer:  "Um, ok.  Be there in a minute."

Nope, not good enough.  "Jason!  No, sorry, I need you!!  Get the black handled scissors and hurry!"  Why was my throat feeling so constricted?  Looking at the bird in my hands reminded me of another adult robin, long ago, who had been ambushed by a neighbor's dog and died of fright in my hands a few minutes later.  I was certain, for a moment, that this little guy would submit to his terror and close his eyes for the last time.

Soon, my hero arrived, with scissors, and immediately understood the situation.  Silly as it sounds, we both looked at each other over the now-quiet bird in my hands and shared a moment of mutual understanding.  This was awful, and we needed to do our best to fix it.  I sent him back into the house for a eyedropper full of water, and we gave the bird a drink before getting started cutting away the net.  I held the little thing, and Jason carefully cut away the long, trailing part first, to simplify the situation.  Now came the tricky part:  trying to get the rest of the nasty stuff that was so closely wound around the bird.

In its struggling, the robin had managed to snarl the netting around its wings and shoulders, under its body and around its thighs, legs, and even its clawed feet.  I could feel how horribly tight some of the net was wound around the bird and was scared to pull any piece that might strangle it or cut more deeply into its skin.  Slowly, gently, and carefully, Jason clipped one piece after another, and we ever-so-softly tried to pull the netting free.  One tiny piece at a time, we worked, with the fearful robin occasionally clamping its beak around my finger or the wrinkled skin of my knuckles.  At one point, I realized that the chickens were all watching the operation, perhaps offering some sort of avian moral support--or more likely just curious about what their humans were doing.

Finally we had cleared away everything but the worst--the robin's left shoulder was rubbed bare and we couldn't figure out how to remove the deeply embedded plastic.  Thanks to the thick plastic in the corners of the netting, we couldn't just clip one end and pull it through.  Every time we tried, it would catch horribly on something and both the robin and I would flinch.  Eventually, after unfolding the wing and doing some careful snipping, the last piece of plastic fell away, and I lowered the robin to the ground, feeling shaky relief, tempered by the fear that the bird might be seriously injured.  That left shoulder wasn't bleeding, but it didn't look good all the same.

The robin, however, felt that things were finally looking up:  the choking invisible monster that had so thoroughly entrapped it had vanished, the pale, evil giants had miraculously let it go, and it was back on the familiar ground...and free.  After one good session of wing flapping (which reassured me that the left wing wasn't broken, at least), our little friend hopped away as we watch with relief.  Eventually, he reached a missing slat in our fence, hopped through to the adjoining yard, and was gone.  I don't know whether he can actually fly or not, and if his wing is damaged, then his odds aren't great in a world of feral cats, roaming dogs, and ever-hungry hawks and foxes.  But we did what we could do and at least tried to make things right for this small member of our neighborhood.

Even better, I got to have a wild bird in my hands one more time, a momentary resurrection of so many remembered missions of my childhood, reinforcing a lifelong ethic about caring for other creatures, great or small.  Feeling shaky and emotional, Jason & I went inside to wash our hands and pour a medicinal glass of wine, still sharing in both the enormous fear of that little weightless, trembling being and the boundless, effervescent joy of its newly regained freedom.