THE BIRDS SAVED DEBI. IS SHE REALLY CALLING IT QUITS?
ONE DAY DEBI SHEARWATER, WHO was then named Debi Millichap, walked onto the porch of her parents’ house in Chester, Pennsylvania. There she found her 12-year-old brother Scott Millichap sitting with a baby House Sparrow that had fallen out of its nest. Debi wasn’t interested. She was 18 with a husband deployed in Vietnam. Who could care? Scott put the bird in a shoebox and put the shoebox in the cellar. Later that night Debi, who was sleeping over, like you do when you’re 18 and your husband is at war, went into the basement, heard the bird in the box scratching and yelling, “Meep!” and brought the box upstairs. She gave the bird a shot of whiskey with an eye dropper—her mom’s idea. (Yes.) The bird “got totally drunk,” Debi told me this fall, 51 years later. “The little bird stood up and fell back down and then stood up and fell down again.”
Debi put the drunk bird in the box and the box next to her bed. In the morning, amazingly, it was still alive. Debi and Scott named her Meep, and the two humans spent the next week watching Meep bathe herself and pick at her little shards of feathers until those feathers started to unfurl. This was definitely the most exciting thing going on in Chester, Pennsylvania. The humans loved Meep; Meep loved the humans. Even once she was feathered enough to fly away, Meep chose to stick around. Outside the Millichap house, Meep sat on Debi’s shoulder or the shoulders of passersby. Inside the house she crawled up under Debi’s long, thick blond hair and slept on her neck. Most mornings Meep sat on Debi’s cereal bowl. Most nights Debi played Pinnacle and Meep dragged the cards around.
A year later, Debi’s husband returned from Vietnam and Meep traveled with them to Fort Worth, Texas, where he was stationed and where Debi would assume her role as an officer’s wife. “Hold onto your pants,” Debi said when she explained this part of her life to me. At age 68. Then she spent another dollar to buy Peterson’s . When she was a kid at Girl Scout camp she met a counselor who knew the name of every single tree. Debi, then, wanted to learn the name of every single something. Maybe she should finally fulfill that dream? But alone with the books, Debi still couldn’t identify anything other than a Turkey Vulture, and to be honest, she wasn’t too sure about that. So she followed Barton’s advice in : Find the nearest Audubon club and sign up for a field trip. Debi drove 70 miles, to Austin, to join up with a Travis Audubon Society excursion. She arrived five minutes late and the group had already left.
