The Care and Feeding of a Bird
Newly arrived in the United States and setting foot on the red soils of Georgia for the very first time, Fiacha, our eldest and then a three-year-old, perched himself on top of a fire ant mound. It’s a rare child who makes that mistake a second time since fire ants sting ferociously.
1We had moved into a small ranch house a few miles from the campus of the University of Georgia in Athens, where I was to work for four years. The house was aesthetically unremarkable.
There were parched lawns to the front and rear, both of which hosted innumerable fire ant mounds. In the front yard, right outside the door, grew two desiccated shrubs.
What that neighborhood lacked in conventional wildlife it made up for with feral dogs. They howled all night and packed together in the morning, leisurely roaming the neighborhood hunting for those who, like me, were foolish enough to go walking in the early hours.
It was in this unpromising location that Fiacha—an Irish name that means “raven,” and whose second name is Daedalus, the father of Icarus—became a bird.
The care and feeding of a bird who is morphologically and physiologically human, though psychologically somewhat avian, is not an entirely trivial undertaking.
While he was in motion, there was little inconvenience to us—he simply flapped his featherless wings as he migrated from place to place. He was something of a restless bird: now in the living room, now the kitchen, and now perched in his bedroom.
Whenever and wherever he perched, the primaries on his wings would tremble, occasionally he would ruffle the length of his wings, and, at times, he would fold them and tuck them close to his little body. We learned to live with the concerned glances of strangers.
Feeding time could be a little strenuous, although we could entice him with shredded morsels that he would grab by his “beak” and toss back into his mouth. Sometimes he would disappear from the house, and after those initial panicked occasions where we
searched high and low for him, we knew he could be found sequestered in one of those forlorn-looking shrubs in the front yard. He would cling to a lower branch, peering out at the world through the patchy foliage. At least he was safely out of the reach of the packs of dogs and the fire ants.
