RIP, Horace
Let me tell you a story. I am currently in residence on the south coast of the UK with my father. It has become our practice while staying here to feed the birds on the terrace and on the lawn beyond, only because it means that we benefit from having a small aviary-worth of little (and not so little) beings that arrive to feed and thereby become a source of amusement, diversion and/or interest over the course of time.
The varieties that attend include pheasants, French partridges, sparrows, starlings, woodpeckers, blackbirds, jays, jackdaws, magpies, crows, pigeons and doves. There may be others that I do not recognise or which I am not able to distinguish from any of the above.
Sometimes we even get the occasional squirrel, rabbit and/or (at night) hedgehog.
The day before yesterday I first noticed a largish starling – amidst the dozen or so who swoop down in a semi-squadron-like formation from time to time, until they get spooked by something and fly off (still in formation) again – that was feeding upon the mealworms that we buy at huge expense (£20 per pack) from the local garden centre. He – or she – was remarkable only because he kept his beak constantly open wide.
Yesterday he was back again. I pointed him out because of his ‘open beak’ distinction. She Who Must Be Obeyed – a fanatical animal lover, she prefers wildlife to human beings – was immediately concerned for said starling, whom by now I had christened Horace. She was convinced that all was not well for Horace and that he might be in mortal pain and/or danger because of his affliction.
All comments and advice that she should not worry – or that Nature would and should take its course – were dismissed out of hand. Shortly afterwards SWMBO was on the phone to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds to report the situation and ask what was best to do.
[One could imagine the scene at RSPB headquarters. Bored but smiling RSPB staffer places hand over phone microphone and whispers to colleague “Got another scatty lady on the line here, George … run that tape machine, I think we’re going to have a recording we can play to amuse the troops at the Christmas party after this call!”].
It was apparently explained that there was nothing the RSPB could do unless we could capture Horace and bring him in.
An hour or two went by. Horace was not a retiring creature. He jumped onto the terrace and stood on the water bowl, sipping and lifting his head (as all birds do) to swallow the water … but all the while with his beak wide open.
SWMBO rang the RSPB again – “I think [Horace] may have lock-jaw, or something”. The man at the RSPB said he had never heard of a bird having lock-jaw. Again, the same advice – unless we could catch Horace there was nothing they could do.
Human discussions continued on the terrace. Another hour or so later and Horace seemed to understand that we were trying to help. He probably achieved this understanding by noticing the badminton net, blue towel and wine box with which the three human present were stealthily approaching him from three different sides as if we were lionesses stalking a wildebeest on the African plains.
The funny thing was, we were getting closer and closer.
It took about forty-five minutes of stalking … and Horace quietly jumping out of the way again and again, but gradually letting us close in on him … before he was captured in the blue towel and – after another rushed and ultimately fruitless call to the RSPB who said they could not arrive for three hours – we decided to take Horace to the local vet in an empty wine box.
The vet soon diagnosed that Horace had a gob-full of something and – after working with an instrument – pulled out a range of gunge … and then a baby crab – from his gullet. We were told he was either going to survive the traumatic ordeal of this day … or he was not. One big plus was that his beak was no longer fixed wide open, it was fixed only partly so.
We brought him home and ‘let him out’ of his temporary accommodation (the wine box) onto the terrace, He was disoriented and very unsteady on his feet. If I didn’t know better, I’d have said he was drunk. He kept falling over, and indeed forwards, as if he was a WW2 Spitfire that had developed a problem with his undercarriage upon landing.
I went over to look at him an offer a few mealworms. He looked at me. I looked at him. After a bit, I picked him up. He seemed relaxed – or was it resigned? … this after previously having panicked when being picked up in the blue blanket. We fed him water through a pipette, which he seemed happy to take.
We put him back in the wine box for a period, after which we let him out again. He staggered to the edge of the terrace and comically fell off it onto the grass, thereafter waddling into the nearby undergrowth. SWMBO collected him from there (he’d got tangled up in a bramble) and we put him back in the wine box to rest, placing the blue towel over the top to keep him in the dark and ‘quiet’.
About fifteen minutes later he fluttered about inside the box as if trying to escape. We left him be. Another twenty minute later, one of us went to see how he was. He was dead. He was no more. A stiff starling. A former starling. What’s more, a stiff starling with his beak again wide open.
SWMBO was immediately and –after her all-day efforts – understandably upset. She wondered what more we could have done, indeed what better we could have done.
The answer was nothing. Nature had taken its course. These things happen.
Hopefully Horace gained some appreciation during his final 24 hours upon Earth that not all human beings are shits.
To some extent, I felt I did.
