Ebony and Spica

By Janet Doolaege

I rescued two baby birds, a blackbird and a starling. Over time, first Ebony and then Spica became an important part of my life here in France. I describe their growth from helpless fledglings to confident adults, their antics, quirks and highly distinctive characters, and how I had to adapt my working life to their needs and demands. Birds are so unlike us, yet trust and affection can flourish.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Janet Doolaege
• Release date: Aug 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301247271

Janet Doolaege

I grew up in England but now live in France, not too far from Paris, in a village on the edge of a forest. Our house contains more books than I will ever have time to read.

Book preview

EBONY AND SPICA

Two Birds in My Life

by Janet Doolaege

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2013 by Janet Doolaege

All Rights Reserved.

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Cover design and drawing: Alain Perry

CHAPTER ONE

EBONY

BRINGING UP A BLACKBIRD

A tremendous commotion broke out in the garden nine floors below my Paris flat: screeching and a chorus of staccato alarm calls. From the balcony I could see a pair of blackbirds that seemed to be dive-bombing a shrub. Then I caught a glimpse of black and white fur. One of the several cats that used the garden for caterwauling in the evenings must have caught a bird. I rushed out of the flat and trundled slowly downwards in the lift, hoping that I wouldn’t be too late.

**********

I think I may have been a bird myself in a former life. Somehow, birds have kept cropping up. As a small child, I was fascinated by my father’s German cuckoo-clock, and then distressed by the pathetic dead baby sparrows that our cat, Timmy, used to bring into the house. Later, growing up in Dorset, I learned to recognize songs and plumage, chaffinch, bullfinch, wren and goldcrest, and on long country walks with my friend Chris we would look for nests, scrambling up into hedges to feel the warm eggs, but taking care not to leave the nest exposed. We had shouting matches with boys who were intent on stealing eggs for their collections. We sat in trees and watched parent birds coming and going with nesting materials and beakfuls of food for the nestlings. We kept anxious watch as fledglings left their nests, and neighbours’ cats were driven off with streams of water from old washing-up liquid bottles. We did what we could to protect these fragile yet tough, elusive and attractive creatures, flitting around so close to us in our gardens and parks.

When I moved to France and found myself living in a flat rather than a house, I missed the company of birds, and went to look at canaries, budgerigars and more exotic specimens for sale every Sunday morning at the Bird Market on the Ile de la Cité, near Notre Dame. I remembered my aunt’s blue budgie, Lucky, who used to recite bits of nursery rhymes, interspersed with exclamations of pretty boy! and who used to perch on the end of her knitting-needle, bobbing up and down as she knitted. Of course, I couldn’t resist buying some birds of my own to take care of. It made such a difference at the end of a working day to come home to bright-eyed beings hopping about, singing and feeding, rather than to an empty flat. If these birds had been born in captivity, it didn’t seem any more unkind to keep them in spacious cages than it would have been to keep, say, a cat in a flat. Nowadays, I would be more circumspect. Today, trade in exotic species has been strictly curbed, and rightly so. At the time, I believed that all those brilliantly coloured birds sold at the Bird Market had been born in captivity, but very probably some of the more beautiful ones had been caught in the wild and imported, together with many others that did not survive the journey.

There are few good reasons for taking a wild bird from its natural environment. But what about a very young, injured wild bird?

**********

In the garden surrounded on three sides by blocks of flats, the blackbirds were still scolding shrilly and the cat slunk into view. I ran at it, arms whirling, shouting, and after one startled glance it scampered off. I peered under the shrub.

It’s under the other one, said a voice above my head, and looking up I saw a neighbour on her second-floor balcony. The cat caught it but it escaped and went under that shrub.

Sure enough, under a laurel skulked a young blackbird, speckled brown and with only a stump of a tail. He was at the age when young birds hop after their parents, begging, as they search for food on lawns. They are particularly vulnerable to predators at this stage, as their reactions are slow and they draw attention to themselves by calling loudly and fluttering their wings. He tried to avoid me as I went to pick him up, but it wasn’t difficult to catch him. Holding one hand over his wings to stop him struggling, I examined him. There was blood on his back, and one eye was gashed. The other eye was the beautiful black liquid orb common to all blackbirds, and his beak still had the yellow hinges of babyhood. As I held him, soft and warm, he opened his beak and gave the loud, sweet begging call that is almost impossible to ignore.

Where had the cat gone? What was I going to do with him? He was hurt, and if I left him there, the cat would soon return and finish him off.

I took him back up to my flat.

In the kitchen, I inspected him. His injuries didn’t appear to be too serious. I bathed his back as well as I could through the feathers, and although he had blood in his right eye, he could apparently still see with it. One wing drooped slightly, and his right foot was a little deformed, with the thumb twisted forwards instead of backwards for gripping branches. I didn’t think that the cat had hurt his foot. It could have been crushed in the nest by his heavier brothers and sisters, or perhaps he had hatched like that. As soon as I had put him in a cardboard box, he squatted there trustingly, his large feet splayed, and demanded to be fed. He seemed not much the worse for his ordeal, and not at all afraid of me.

I was going to have to feed him, at any rate.

Most of my available wall space consisted of bookcases. Now that I had a full-time job as a translator, I hated to part with any of my books from the past. Luckily I remembered one that described what to do with rescued birds, and having consulted it I made a sort of paste with crumbled biscottes and water. (Later, on