Please understand that this is completely a work of fiction and no offense is intended.
I live in the “O” in Osco, as in the Jewel Osco on Pulaski and Foster. Now don’t look so confused; my home is no different from yours. It’s not very large, just big enough to fit the five of us: my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Lightwing, my cock of brother, Robin, my chick sister, Jay, and me. Sure it’s no five star hotel (although I once knew a sparrow who lodged at a Hilton) or snazzy mansion, but I’m glad to have it. When we were misbehaved chicks, Mama would puff herself up and say, “Be grateful for what we have fledglings! Do you want to live underneath an air conditioning unit that rumbles all summer long and drips on you all night? Do you want to live in some rusty old gutter, where the lightest gust of wind could knock you out of the nest?” At which point we would shiver in fright and shake our heads so fiercely we might be owls.
These horror stories have stuck with me. I know Mama was telling the truth about them for even she has nightmares of them, waking periodically in the night and squawking, “No! The height! The pavement! My dear eggs will become omelets!” Then she sees that it’s only a customer leaving the store in a hurry and dropping her carton of eggs below us. When she sees that we are all sound in our “O,” she finally settles down again and we can go back to sleep.
Yes, I love our home. Mama and Papa built the nest with their own two beaks, laboriously lugging twigs from the park behind the building to our “O” one by one, then weaving and packing them together with mud. They used only the sturdiest branches for the frame and the nicest smelling pine needles for the floor. Feathers Mama plucks out of her own breast make our downy beds and she always keeps the space clean and tidy. Because we live in the “O,” the top arch shields us from the rain, like it’s giving our nest a big, protecting hug. A family of pigeons once tried to build in the “J” but found that without that top of the “O,” they were often drenched and unhappy. That’s pigeons for ya…
Don’t realtors say location, location, location? Because that’s another bonus to our nest. The park and the river behind us are perfect for communing with other fowl, especially the Great Heron who guards the river from those too foolish to keep clear of the toxic waters. That’s life lesson number two, according to Papa. Never drink the river water because if the sewage doesn’t kill you, a crayfish will pop out and snap off your beak surely. Life lesson number one, of course, is the most sobering and important lesson a young birdie can learn: when you sit to roost on the long wires between the big, tall poles, takeoff and fly, don’t return to the ground right away, else some alley kitty is going to have fried drumsticks for dinner.
My life is rather cushy. We are never in want of food. The Salvation Army lady always takes off her red apron, puts down her bell and sits on the curb at twelve o’clock for lunch— always a sandwich, usually ham and swiss. If I perch on her collection box, look up at her hopefully and give a little tweet she’ll usually give me some nice crust for a snack. I’m a pretty chubby thing, it’s not down, trust me.
Robin drives Papa crazy with his singing. He’s learned all the Jewel jingles by heart, and even likes to imitate the checkouts beeping. His next goal is to mimic the self-service counters. “Please place all scanned items in bagging area,” we hear all day. He thinks he’s so cool.
Mama is ready to teach Jay how to fly and I’ve been helping her along by building up those wing muscles of hers before she has to rely on them for survival. I don’t know how soon it will happen, she still makes Mama and Papa feed her seed from their mouths even though she’s a big girl now. All she needs is a little more time. But then something happened that spoiled all our plans.
It happened on the day Papa found out about Robin’s random acts of vandalism with a flock of unsavory downtown pigeons. It wasn’t that Papa minded what Robin did— for he’s almost full grown and Papa knows Robin will fly away from home soon— but where. Robin defaced private property.
“I can’t believe you went out defecating on fancy sport cars!” Papa shouted.
Robin just bowed his head and sulked. “All the other birds do it! It’s cool, it teaches the humans who are boss.”
“Don’t you see?” Papa groaned, “We are in a very delicate situation here at the grocery store. We have a sort of unvoiced agreement with the managers. They let us live here. We don’t have a poop party in the parking lot! I just hope no one important had their shiny clean windshields mucked…”
Robin blushed at this, for he had been aiming at the shiniest, cleanest cars in the lot. Unfortunately, one of the victimized cars was a silver Lexus belonging to a much peeved health inspector. We saw him sniffing about the premises with his clipboard under his arm, pens in ears and reading glasses on nose— not the cheap kind from here at the pharmacy, but the fancy designer ones by Calvin Klein or somebody else who thinks their name is so clever they have to put it on everything. The manager, the chief butcher, the baker and the florist were shuffling behind him. The butcher wiped his hands incessantly on his stained apron, until he realized it wasn’t making his hands look any cleaner and he started using the baker’s apron instead.
As we looked down at the scene below us, we could see the tension in the manager’s face ease as the inspection continued. It must have been going well. They were talking now. Or rather, the inspector was talking and the manager was nodding at all the appropriate places. We couldn’t hear what he was actually saying so we just interpreted the stifled smiles on the grocers’ faces. Then we heard the big “but” and it was with ellipsis— I could hear them in his trailing off voice.
“But?” the manager inquired anxiously.
“But you have some pests out here that question the hygiene of the establishment. These winged rodents for instance.”
Now our whole family was listening carefully. “Rodents? Winged?” Mama snorted. “I’ll show him, calling us rodents!”
“He’s probably just talking about the pigeons,” said Robin. “Everyone knows pigeons are the vermin of the air. They’re the ones causing trouble.”
“Robin…” Papa snarled. “What did I tell you? I don’t want to hear anymore of these racist remarks! A pigeon is just a dove with a little coloring.”
“Hush!” Jay squeaked. “I want to hear what they’re saying.”
Below us, the inspector was practically on his knees before the health inspector. “We’ve never had a problem before, sir.”
“So far you haven’t… Animals carry diseases and —let’s face it— they’re troublemakers. I doubt your customers want a hungry bird to snatch away a loaf of bread they just bought or, just as they open their trunks to put away their groceries, to get a hand full of bird feces! It’s just plain nasty.”
Then his sunken gray eyes turned up towards our nest. We instantly ducked our heads in fright.
“The premise needs to be sprayed and trapped,’ he announced smugly, “The bird nests and beehives, whatever’s making its home in your building, removed. And I insist you install those pointy things on your sign to keep the pests from returning.”
In that moment, we knew we were done for. Our happy lives would have to take a dramatic turn. We were going to lose our home! There was no use in blaming Robin, for we needed to face the challenge as a family, not argue. Something that once before would be the subject of a serious family meeting was now reduced to silliness.
Mama and Papa went out in turns to discuss the health inspector’s verdict with the other neighborhood birds. The Finches were happy in the park, the Mallards in an alcove of the river beneath the bridge, the Cardinals in the drainpipe of another nearby building… With great sadness, we realized our only choice was to find a new home and take off.
Mama and I toiled hard to get Jay flying. Wherever the move would be, it would involve forcing her out of the nest and we worried about how she would fair. Papa eventually came back that night with word that he had found a nice spot in the cemetery to start building a new nest, but it was a long way for never-before-used little wings. While Mama, Papa and Robin went to check out the tree Papa chose and to start twig gathering, I stayed home with Jay and drilled her on flying.
I don’t know how we thought we were going to do it. It was just cruel how we were being evicted without notice and without time to prepare, for the next day a big truck pulled into the lot and parked right below the “Jewel” portion of the sign in the fire engine lane. It had a big crane on the truck bed with a little box attached for a person to stand inside while the machine erected the crane. What strange contraptions humans come up with to compensate for their lack of wings! Personally I’m terrified of their metal monsters in the sky, especially after Great Uncle Raven meet his grave in one’s spinning mouth. Anyway, by six thirty in the morning, a worker was already in the little box, up high by the “J”, cleaning the signs and installing painful looking spikes on the edges. I had been planning to let Jay sort of “hop” her way to our new home in the cemetery with a few, short, quick flights to make it easy on her, the first of which would be from our “O” to the lip of the “L”. I guessed that idea was for the can now…
“Hurry, Jay,” I said. “We’ve got to go soon or they’ll come and get us!”
Jay was almost tearful. “I can’t! I can’t! My wings are sore from trying so hard… I can barely flap them.”
I tried to be encouraging. “You can do it, sis. Just watch me again.”
I took off from the nest, flew a loop-dee-loop and landed easily on the curb below her.
“See? It’s easy,” I called to her.
Then I heard her squeak in fright, for a shopping cart nearly ran me over. Fortunately, the shopper stopped the cart in the nick of time and looked down on me. Honestly, I was too scared and too shocked by the close encounter with death to move out of the way.
It was a woman with skin as speckled as a robin’s egg and sandy blonde hair splaying out of a ponytail. She put her cart aside and crouched on the ground before me.
“Are you ok, little guy?” she said with the biggest blue eyes all sad and worried.
I stood still, staring at her. I had never been so close to a human before, not even to the Salvation Army lady, and I didn’t know what to do. I could hear Jay squeaking wildly at me to fly away but for some reason I didn’t. Then I noticed the green pins on the lady’s jacket, “Save the Rainforest”, “End Animal Cruelty” and most importantly “Bird Watching Rules.” I realized I might have a chance here…
“Poor baby,” she cooed, “Did you fall out of the nest? Did you hurt yourself?”
Lights clicked on in my head —you can’t believe everything you hear about birdbrains. I began to hop stiffly. I let one of my wings hang limply and bent at my side as if it were broken.
“They did hurt you!” she wailed. She rummaged through her eco-friendly, reusable, shopping bags I was half expecting to read, “My other grocery store is a local, organic farmer’s market,” and fished out a jar of sunflower seeds. She poured out a little in the palm of her hand and held it out to me. I wobbled lazily into her hand and started pecking at the seeds. She giggled at the ticklish feeling of my beak against her skin. “Wow, aren’t you beautiful…” she breathed in my face with wonder.
After I had had my fill, she cupped me protectively in her hands and shouted at the workers cleaning the signs again, “Hey! What are you doing up there? You’re destroying bird nests!”
“Don’t look at us; we do what our boss tells us…” the guy driving the truck shrugged at her, “And the boss said we needed to get rid of the pestilence here.”
“Stop at once! These birds are a very rare native species that has grown increasingly endangered in recent years. You are defiling their government protected habitat!”
“Says who?”
“Says an agent of the Environmental Protection Agency!” she stuck her chin out at him. “Now can you get me the number of your almighty boss?”
I don’t know about our family being a “very rare native species,” but it was nice she thought so. I think anything that isn’t a human on this planet is a very rare species. I let her continue, after all, I don’t think our home is any more or less valuable than another bird’s home, or a human’s home. And that was it. My chance encounter with the bird watcher and nature enthusiast ended up rescuing us from peril. She heroically whipped out her cell phone and began to make calls, giving our health inspector quite a talking too in the shame-on-you voice I know much too well from Mama. By the end of the day, the truck was cleared out, the Jewel freed from the pestilence decree of the health inspector, and our home declared a nationally protected wildlife refuge. Mama, Papa and Robin were so pleased to hear the news when they returned. We wouldn’t need to move at all, moreover, our nest was safety assured and soon the Lightwings would get new neighbors. All the birds in the city want to take advantage of the new refuge now. Yes, I think the “O” in Osco is going to be the perfect bird home, not just for us but also for our own chicks in many years to come.
