A Murmuration

Why did I decide to save her? She repulsed me from the moment I found her, splayed on the grass outside the cottage. Did I save her because Jim said, “Leave it to die”? Something in me rose up in silent rebellion.

The truth was I almost did leave the fallen baby bird to die a natural death. 

The ousted nestling did not look much like a bird but more like a gland, a fleshy glob with a suggestion of gray lint over its red flesh. Yet, the thing pulsed with life, and unbidden, with a paper towel to insulate my hand, I picked up the creature, set it in a shoebox, and showed it to Jim.

“We have to leave for the city in an hour; you can’t take that to the apartment.”

On a Sunday night—two hours in traffic, maybe three—the hatchling might die on the way. I ducked into the bathroom, searched on my cellphone, and found wildlife rehabilitators. I whispered, “I found a baby bird. It must be very young. Almost . . .” I lowered my voice, “an embryo.”

“I can’t hear you,” said the woman on the other end of the line.

Even though I knew Jim was outside packing the car, I hesitated to raise my voice.

“An embryo.” I felt as if I was shouting. “A bird embryo, but alive . . .”

The thing had a beak, I noted, a stretching yellow line that emerged from the gray blob and, to my surprise, began to open and shut.

“What do I feed it?”

“Do you know what kind of bird it is? There are seed eaters and meat eaters. Some catch insects and devour them in mid-flight.”

That was rather fancy language for a wildlife rehabilitator, I thought. She must be like me, one of the arts crowd who came up here weekends and summers, only this woman was a volunteer who rescued creatures and worked this hotline on Sunday evenings. I had heard there were people, mostly women, who saved even the repulsive or problematic creatures—possums, skunks, baby coyotes.

I described the bird thing as best I could. The rescue woman’s voice was hoarse as if she’d taken many urgent calls that day. In a cracking, fatigued tone, she finally offered the identification: “Sturnus vulgaris. A starling. Meat-eater. Dog food on a chopstick. Every hour.” As an afterthought, with a hint of the compassion that had led her to take on this avocation, she added, “Be sure it’s wet, canned food. I recommend the natural brands.”

“I think it’s too little to survive,” I said, but she had already ended the call.

It’ll be dead in the morning, I thought, with some ambivalence. But I told Jim that I needed the car for a few minutes and made a quick run to the corner gas station and bought a can of organic beef chunks in gravy “for puppies less than two months.” The label showed a happy little terrier with a lapping pink tongue that was nothing like the yellow maw now taking up almost the entire being of the starling.

Luckily, why luckily? I had a set of chopsticks and daubed one into the can and offered it to the sturnus vulgaris. It devoured the gooey meat in an instant and seemed to swell, growing before my eyes in gulp after gulp. I did not dare stop.

“Time to go.” Jim was already outside, his fishing pole snapped in half, and stored in the trunk.

He spotted the shoebox as I approached the car. “You’re kidding,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

I told him I couldn’t, wouldn’t leave it there to die.  “It’s common decency,” I said, but my voice had a quaver.

“You’re crazy,” he said.

I turned away from him, so he would not see my glare. With the setting sun on his blond hair, and his face aglow in the magic-hour light, he looked handsome, and I thought, I wish he weren’t so handsome. And I wondered where that thought came from; it too was unbidden.

I sat in the back seat, the better to administer the feedings. The nestling was swelling and took more wet food than the rehabilitator had instructed, but I couldn’t stop—she was gobbling the puppy food, and if I paused, she uttered a raucous cry that seemed bigger than her entire being. She was all open beak now, and I had to withdraw the chopstick from time to time to keep her from eating it too. By the time we reached the city, the thing seemed to have doubled in size.

“Not in our room,” Jim said, and I detoured to the powder room and set the box in the sink. I draped the box with a guest towel, hoping the darkness might induce sleep. Maybe the bird slept, but I didn’t. I lay awake all night, staring at the ceiling, wondering if it was alive or not.

In the morning, I tiptoed into the powder room, and I was startled to see it puff up, mouth already open. It was alive. Thus began the grueling all-day feedings.

I did not give Brenda Starr (Why had I named her? Why did I think she was female?) great odds. I believed her daily meals were only staving off the inevitable. Every morning, I expected to find her dead in her shoebox, beak sealed, scaly yellow feet curled upon her chest.

But on the third morning, I walked into the bathroom, and she stood up in her box, spreading her featherless wings—she flapped—looking like a mini oviraptor escaped from Jurassic Park. The resemblance to a tiny dinosaur was keen—she was rapacious, demanding to be fed. I did not find the sight appealing, but I was impressed. She wants to live, I realized. She made unappealing sounds, caws, but I found the image of the bird, alone, opening her mouth without anyone to hear, unbearable. 

Which explains why, when I had to begin rehearsals in the city for my first supporting role in a Shakespeare play, I began to take Brenda Starr, in a larger shoebox, to the rehearsal space, day after day. The other actors claimed to be charmed. I couldn’t carry her in the subway or on a bus, so I took taxis or Ubers, and only one driver commented: “What’s that smell?”

“She stinks,” Jim said. “How long are you going to keep that thing?”

Brenda Starr splattered away, emitting what I conceded were foul droppings. What had I done? I’d brought the worst of the country, a fecal spray, a wild thing, into what had been an oasis of urban civilization. I did notice the sturnus vulgaris seemed attentive when I tuned in a classical station. And I soon knew why when I began to read about sturnus vulgaris. The starling was a very musical bird and a mimic called “the poor man’s mynah.” 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had kept a starling as a pet and had even written music for it—A Musical Joke, often referred to as the starling’s song. When his starling died at the age of three, Mozart arranged a funeral procession, in which heavily veiled mourners marched and sang a requiem for the bird. His starling was buried in his garden, and only four years later, Mozart himself died, at the age of thirty-five.

Jim argued for the bird’s release (or abandonment, as I saw it). “It’s illegal to keep a wild bird in an apartment.” He pointed to the bird’s splatterings, which dirtied its shoebox, and the newspaper I soon began to place under an improvised perch by the bathroom window. 

He armed himself with knowledge too. “They are the biggest pest birds in the country. There are billions of them. Their acid droppings corrode buildings and destroy crops; they have jammed airplane engines and caused deaths. There is a special poison for them, Starlicide. It’s legal to kill them.”

He’d always conclude, “When are you going to let her go?”

“Soon,” I said. “When she can fly.”

I countered with my new knowledge: Sturnus vulgaris is not native to our continent—therefore not illegal to keep in an apartment. Starlings were European, imported to New York, in 1890, by a pharmacist who loved Shakespeare. He released all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays in Central Park. He’d let loose many species—thrushes, nightingales, finches, skylarks, but only the starlings survived. The joy over the starlings’ first observed roost—in the eaves of The American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West—quickly dampened and hardened into disgust, along with their droppings. 

What did Shakespeare include in his plays that so inspired that original release into Central Park? A quick check and there it was in Henry IV. Hotspur threatens: The king “forbad my tongue to speak of Mortimer. But I will find him when he lies asleep . . . I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it him to keep his anger still in motion.” The bird was to say “Mortimer, Mortimer, Mortimer” until Henry IV went mad.

How curious I should now find a starling and also be cast in my first Shakespearean role, Ophelia, even though I was way too old. (But I look young, everyone says, a permanent ingénue, preserved perhaps at that stage in my life.) “Synchronicity” the actors call it—but maybe some events are preordained and play out in formation, as destined? 

I tried to ignore her odor, her dog-food encrusted beak, and force myself to nourish Brenda Starr and coo over her. But she wasn’t cute. Her face was foreshortened—she looked like Andy Gump, I thought, tiny beady eyes, bright with ruthless appetite, a compressed jaw when her beak closed, which was seldom.

The truth was when I was alone with her, Brenda Starr had begun to take short flights. She flew to my head and perched there. She was becoming more attractive; the pebbled, raw-looking skin was now covered with iridescent feathers, black from a distance, but up close, rainbow-streaked, violet and green, dotted as if with tiny stars. Was that where the name starling came from? I wondered. I whistled and sang to her, and Brenda Starr began to fly longer distances; she could fly to me from another room. All this was kept secret from Jim.

One day, he opened the window and urged her to leave.

I threw myself at the window and slammed it shut.

“She’s not ready.” I was shaking.

“I saw her flying.” He went for the window again. I blocked him.

For an instant, the blue glare of his eyes beamed so close to mine I thought, he could push me out this window.

There had been a recent news story about a man who did just that, from the ninth floor of a landmark building. The doorman, reporting on the nightly news, had watched the wife fall, her nightgown swirl above her head, and he thought for a moment she could fly.

Insomniac that night, I went to the living room and hunched over my laptop, searching for more. When could I release her?

The answer stunned me: Never. Brenda Starr was “an imprint bird.” By saving her life, I had restricted it. She had known only me and was not a part of a flock and probably never could be. Starlings flew in great numbers, sometimes as many as a million, and were famous for their aeronautic displays, coordinated patterns of flight— thousands of birds executing the same moves in unison. 

I had heard that flocks of birds bore fanciful names—a murder of crows, a charm of finches, a parliament of owls . . . and a murmuration of starlings. “A murmuration” stayed in my mind, insistent as a whisper. There were no individuals. They always were part of the flock.

Brenda Starr could never join other starlings and fly free in the skies with them. If let loose alone, unable to fly outdoors, she would fall to earth and die, most likely eaten by predators.

I’m it. It would be Brenda Starr and me, for as long as we both shall live.

Months passed. She achieved her full size, her face filled in, and she was no longer all mouth. A misted ring appeared around her irises that allowed me to identify her sex: Brenda Starr was male.

Nonetheless, I continued to think of him as female and didn’t veer from the name Brenda Starr. When we listened to public radio’s nine o’clock Mozart, Brenda Starr cocked her head and appeared attentive. She also listened to Jim and me when we argued, and squawked, “I can’t stand this anymore. Just stop it. Stop it, stop it stop it.” 

We resumed the summer visits to the cottage. I sat in the back with the bird. Jim drove on in silence, his hands white at the wheel.

Why had I stayed with him so long? 

Had I been too young when we met? We were only eighteen; he had been my first lover, though the word lover did not fit. Had it ever?

I could not remember. Had he not been so handsome, I would never have married an actor who, several years later, would give up on acting to become a commercial real estate developer. (“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot” was a lyric that played over and over in my mind.) I had come to resent the perfection of his profile, the cleft in his chin, the fullness of his lips. And especially the gas-jet blue of his eyes.

We had now been married as long as we had previously lived. I would be thirty-seven soon, a precarious age for a woman. He had seemed restive since age thirty-five. We argued without content; we fought about fighting. Do you have to use that tone? You slammed the door. Don’t walk ahead of me. Among our friends, it was the season to divorce or reproduce.

“What about you two?” some friends asked. They said we made such an attractive couple: he so fair, and I so dark; Jim so practical and I so airy. They said that was good, that we complemented one another. I was not so sure. Ever since Brenda Starr fell into my lap, so to speak, I burned with a feeling I did not want to name.

We were only at peace when we slept. We had paired in some animal fashion and could roll over in unison. I inhaled his scent, so pleasing, redolent of vanilla, and his even, sweet breaths soothed me. We went on subconscious control into our favored sleep position: spoon, my back to his belly. But out in the world, in the car, I never again occupied the passenger bucket seat. I remained in the back, with Brenda Starr now in an outsized department store box that had once held boots.

The last drive up to the country, I leaned back and stared out the open sunroof.

Without warning, the autumn sky filled with birds, flying in formation, turning and twisting, reversing their pattern and starring the sky.

My heart beat harder, the pulse visible, moving under my blouse.

“Pull over,” I said.

Jim swerved off the road, skidding into a cornfield. I heard the dead cornstalks begin to rustle.

The sky seemed to drop like a curtain upon the field, a shadow that swirled, then paused. When we were deep inside the shadow and could not see for the birds that surrounded us, I leapt from the car with Brenda Starr cradled to my chest. Her body was warm against me in the chilling air. 

I heard Jim call out to me, call me back. His voice was guttural, indistinct: My name or another word? 

In the sudden darkness, with the beat of a thousand wings around us, I raised both my arms and tossed her upward toward the sky.

I don’t know if I spoke or only thought the words. At most, a whisper. 

Fly, fly.

I shut my eyes and felt the flock of birds as a breeze looping round me. When I looked up, I saw the murmuration rising high, higher, and then reversing seven times upon itself before the gray cohesive cloud and Brenda Starr disappeared into the heavens.

LAURA SHAINE CUNNINGHAM

Laura Shaine Cunningham is an NEA award-winning author of two bestselling memoirs, Sleeping Arrangements, the story of her orphaned childhood being raised by two Jewish bachelor uncles, and A Place in the Country, a New York Times Notable Book. Both books were excerpted in The New Yorker. She is also a playwright.