My husband is a magnet for birds. Big ones, small ones, sea-and-inland fliers, birds sent to him on wisps of air as if they’ve materialized just because he’s standing there. They find him and follow him, presenting themselves like revenants, descending and appearing from a blue or gray or pink sky, tracking him.
He’s not a birder in the hobbyist sense of the word, he doesn’t go on bird watching treks or join clubs to seek out the season-peak moments of special wingspans or rare-bellied species.
They simply descend into his space, these flying creatures, and land in his path.
It started with ducks.
For years, he worked at an elementary school less than a mile from a huge bay, a northern California town populated by lagoons. The school, built in the 1960’s, was pod-shaped, several roundish buildings plopped down around a ground-granite courtyard and surrounded by a grassy field, a few hop-leaps from the lagoon’s sandy edge. There was a large patch of green ivy at the entrance of the courtyard, and inside, picnic tables where the kids ate their lunches in loud and raucous pandemonium.
One day, early in March, the man I love showed up for work early, and two ducks were waddling their rear ends in the ivy—a patch just fifteen feet long and six feet wide. He stood and stared, chatted to them. “Want to move? This isn’t the best place for a nest.” It was hardly a protected spot. An hour later, kids were running into the courtyard, randomly dropping backpacks in the ivy, shoving each other this way and that through the green leaves, bumping through metal-framed doors to their classrooms and to the wooden picnic tables.
But the ducks didn’t budge. They sat, throne-still, on their perch. All day long they took turns bringing little twigs to the butt-imprinted spot they had marked for themselves; sat there, then flew back and forth to fortify a nest. A day later, the female laid eggs.
Mike, my husband, guarded them. Each morning, he’d come to work, and there they’d be, the hen warming the eggs with her body heat, the drake flying in and out with bits of detritus to shore up the edges of her perch, a worm or some seeds shared with his mate. The female sat, the male swooped in to bark and squawk at intruders. Kids backed away, skittish parents ran to the office and complained, “What about disease? Those birds wash in that mucky lagoon! They could be carrying something!”
But Mike stood fast. “Nobody touches the ducks. They stay until their babies are born.”
Standing, he’d chat to them, watching. They’d stare, docile—no fluttering, no barking—understanding something; a pact somehow, a knowing. He had chosen to protect them.
He began to feed them; a bag of pet store duck food.
In the mornings, he’d jump out of our morning sheets early, well before six, ready to zip into work before anyone else showed up.
I’d roll over, a bit of pique in my chest at being awakened too early from my hypnogogic sleep-float; my brain immediately rushing to the tick-tick-tock of whatever I had to do that day. But he’d tiptoe ’round the bed, tickle his warm lips on my forehead, then let them slide down to my mouth, gently pressing. And I’d remember the softness and strength of him, the kindness and resolve, the reasons I married him.
“How’re your ducks?” I’d whisper.
“Getting close. Babies are almost hatched.” He’d say it seriously, as if the world’s very turning depended upon the arc of this birth, these chicks awaiting the pop out of encrusted casings.
Early in our dating, I’d be chatting away about something, walking down the street with him, deep in some topic, and he’d pause and touch me on the forearm. “See the light coming through the trees? Lovely, isn’t it? Do you see those sparrows perched there?”
I’d pause and catch my breath, notice the sunrays piercing the fingers of branches above our earthbound bodies, witness the birds. But mostly, I noticed him. The quietude in him, his care for the crisp and dew-laden air, for the illuminating blue-blue of the sky’s dome, the arching tree arms covering us, his delight in Nature’s fingertips waving at us. Then we’d walk again, quiet for a moment or two, him softly humming until I spoke.
In the house I grew up in, I learned to think and talk and form ideas—to live in my head—and half the time, even now, I’m only vaguely aware of my surroundings. My husband has a joke about me: “You’re so smart, but you can’t cross a street to save your life.” He’s right. I’m only half-paying attention, often in my own word-fed world of seed-popping ideas. Many days I need to have what’s right in front of me pointed out. “Hey! Watch out!” he’ll say, yanking me back to the curb.
Mike is quiet, a man of few words if he can get away with it; a sensing human being. The mist rising from our suburban cement and bladed front yards, the clouds sweeping or streaking with pink tinges, the landscape still or busy with growth—all of it lands on his heart as mystical substances and movements, illuminating his path. His heart is in an interior stillness, the pause of how to live and love.
Finally, the day of the egg-hatching came. The babies were out. Days passed as she fed them, nourished their scraggly, mottled bodies.
Mike watched, wondering how the mama duck would get the babies to safely move from their birth site. To get to the lagoon they’d have to traverse a long parking lot and cross a busy street. To fly—and they weren’t ready to fly yet; not for weeks—they’d have to duck the huge wooden awnings and the invisible fishing line that the PTA had crisscrossed over the lunch courtyard to keep the seagulls from dive-bombing and snatching little kids’ lunches. It worried him. How would they get to the water?
When the time came, the babies pushed out from under Mama hen, their prickly silver feathers flitting under her form. It was dangerous now: no wing strength to fly, but still skittering around the nest near running children.
One morning, Mike showed up and fed Mama, then tried something. By that time, she had come to trust him, would step off her throne and come close—way close, really, for a bird in the wild—almost eating from his hand. So, this morning, he leaned in near and said, “Come with me, Mama.” He said it calmly, with serene authority.
Miraculously, she did. She got up off the nest, the little bobbing heads of her chicks surrounding her, and they trot-trot-trotted with their webbed feet down the short sidewalk through the parking lot. It was morning, the kids were being dropped off for school, and their yelps of delight shouted out. “Look, Dad! The ducks are following Mike!” “Mom, see that? There’s a whole row of them!”
At the end of the parking lot, my duck-loving husband paused, cars flying on the busy street. A crosswalk, yes; but one that was easily blown through by drivers with early morning caffeine in their veins, pulsing their way to work. But Mike was there, stopping traffic with both hands, then walking—Mama and seven babies waddling and trotting in a line across the graveled road. Folks stopped short, rolled down windows, got out of their cars, snapped photos.
Four minutes later, he’d waddled the whole duckling family across the sand and to the lagoon’s edge. The mama stepped in, wet stuff pooling—a substance these babies had never seen before—and she plopped her rear end into the super-shallow edge and floated. The chicks, fascinated, hopped closer, testing—a splash, a shriek, a circle of siblings plop-plopping, then alighting on the rippling, baptismal surface of this otherworldly stuff, this thing called water. They plowed their heads under, fluffed their barely-there tufts of feathers, rolling.
A squawk from Mama, a sharp look upwards from seven tiny heads, and then, they paddled away like characters lifted off the pages of a children’s picture book.
Behind Mike, a small crowd of kids and drop-off parents had gathered, and they cheered. Two seven-year-old twins cried out at once, “They’re gone!”
It was big news at the school: “Mike’s ducks have hatched!” Photos were passed around and posted of my brawny husband trailed by his mama duck and her babies, guiding them into the lagoon.
The seasons came and went: summer descended and the school sat flat and empty; fall arrived with its noisy return to full classrooms and antsy children; then winter came with its skin-biting chill freezing the big, grassy field.
The following March, my husband went to work one day and sat in his little office off the lunch courtyard like he usually did, and preferring the cool air, he left the door open. Then he heard something. A gurgling sound in the throat of an animal, a rumbling—low—of a bird’s voice, a quiet squawk.
Standing, he saw them come in: the ducks—Mom and Dad; same markings, same birds—waddling into the courtyard, greeting him at his office door.
“Oh my God,” Mike said out loud. “It’s them!”
He named them. Gertrude and Bert. The parents. The birds that had come back to him, for a simple kindness he had offered: protection.
This year, they prepped a nest once more, laid eggs in the ivy. Again, he fed them and guarded them. It was a thing now, Mike’s ducks. More four-by-six photos showed up on the school’s bulletin board. Parents stopped in the parking lot and chatted with my husband, asking about tips to bond with birds.
One day, the maintenance staff showed up with a crew. They would root out the ivy and replace it with rocks. They came with hoes, weed wackers, shovels; blowers and heavy-duty gloves for pulling up the fat green vines.
Kids came running to Mike’s open door. “No! The men are here! They’re taking the ivy!”
Mike hopped up fast.
In his calming tones, he told them, in no uncertain terms, that they could not dig. “Yeah, guys—sorry. But this patch of ivy stays. It’s a bird-birthing spot. They’ve imprinted here—they’ll come back next year, too.” How my suburban husband knew about imprinting, I have no idea. And, should I have tried to stop these guys with their arc of clean-up progress, I surely would not have done it well, stepping on their toes certainly, my natural sense of injustice flaring, annoying everyone. But Mike spoke three sentences and the guys were gone, to the other side of the school, no mention of digging up the nest area again.
There were, of course, kids who wanted to wreak havoc—it was a school after all—little devils romping by, wanting to prod or poke at the birds. Mike kept watch, took the children closer to see the magic—life unfolding in its amazing cycles, eggs and babies birthing and the lot of it, close-up for them to see.
Soon, the hen and the drake didn’t wait for him in the ivy. They met him in the parking lot—knew his car by then, a classic, clean and restored red-orange VW bug from 1973; not a threatening thing about its putt-putt rattle into the lot each morning—and they toddled out to stand by his door until he emerged. He’d feed them, they’d nest, Mama would sit, my husband would nourish. The annual march to the lagoon became a thing, a neighborhood witnessing of the ducks who loved Mike, who came every year to birth their babies in his ivy patch, under his protective gaze.
Seven years passed, generations of birds—the same family, it had to have been—and each March, there they were, waiting by his red car door, ushering him into the courtyard, eating his feed, conversing in quacks and squawks.
They had imprinted on him, surely, and why? Because they knew something heart-centered about him, beyond language, beyond species.
Now, my husband’s bird-love goes everywhere we go. It’s as if, somehow, the ducks got the word out. When we head for a far northern California town, bluebirds come out of the trees and sit at my husband’s feet. When we visit my aunt and uncle in Colorado, eagles sweep our way, close. When we traveled to a lake town this past summer, on the day we got there, starlings built a nest in the archway where we were staying. Mike stood conversing with them each morning, and sure enough, the babies hatched and hovered nearby until they could fly. No fear. No skittishness. Just a knowing that another soul was rooting for them, holding the light.
There’s an old adage that reads, every soul has angels who stands above it and whisper, grow, grow, grow.
If I could bottle that energy, if I could claim it for myself, I would. Being at one with the heartbeat of the earth regenerating itself, the gentle growth energy available for all of us to feel, if we can; the delicacy of being my husband clearly possesses.
As it is, I will never achieve his exquisite equanimity, but I do get to live with it each day, a tender humming in the soul of the human I love best, a man who loves the living world, who brought it to our doorstep in a story of ducks—of a mother and a father, a hen and a drake and their babies, who came to nest near him because of the kind, masculine beauty of his heart.
A story of birds who loved him, who chose him. And, as I watched these long years, a story of a wife choosing him, too.
Author: JoAnneh Nagler is the author of the award-winning fiction collection, Stay with Me, Wisconsin, How to Be an Artist, Naked Marriage, The Debt-Free Spending Plan, and two Amazon Top-100 titles. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, The Huffington Post, Essence Magazine and in many literary journals. www.AnArtistryLife.com
Beautiful story. Language, mood, humor -- it has it all. Thank you!
What a sweet and heart-warming story. It made me smile