The Kestrel chick.

I first noticed the little bird hopping along the spine of rock that juts from the center of the island, with my cat stalking a little behind. My cat, Tucker, is a natural cat with all the cat instincts, and he’s a good mouser. You’d expect he would have pounced on this bird but instead he was just following and sniffing at it, fascinated and by no means deadly. The chick was all fluffy and round of body, but from the neck up it was all raptor with fierce hooded eyes and a meat ripper of a beak. Below the head was a fluff-feathered clown, round with huge yellow legs and feet. The cat came closer and I almost stopped him but all he did was look and sniff at this odd creature fallen from the treetop. How did it fall? Was it a too early try to fly? A sibling that pushed it from the nest? That’s the way with birds, the instinct is to get all of the food and we sentimental humans have a hard time with that. The chick in the nest gets fed, the one on the ground will live as long as its baby fat lasts or until something hungry happens along. That was the fate of this bird. The parent kestrels made a great display of dipping and swooping at anyone who came too close to the grounded chick but there was never any sign of them feeding it. They screamed and dove and the chick made weak little squeaks back at them, probably begging for food. We left that weekend fully expecting to find the remains of a few scattered feathers upon our return. So be it, we sighed, life is hard in the wild; we should know that by now. Next week laying on the dock with some friends the bird appeared again. No more a ball of fluff, it had the sleek lethal form of a falcon – wide shoulders, small hooked beak with hard hooded eyes. But the bird had no chest. No bird can fly without pectorals and these had been consumed to keep the chick alive so now that the flight feathers were fully developed there was nothing in the bird to power them. Our friend got his camera and took several photos of the flightless falcon. At first we stalked carefully but the kestrel was going nowhere. It clung to a log with his bright yellow feet and then it fell over. I’ve never seen a bird fall down. It flapped its wings and scrolled about on it’s back, then came to rest on its side. We left it to its private fate somehow wanting to be witnesses but not wanting to as well.

A while later the chick was on its feet again, and I don’t know why I didn’t try this before but I dropped a line off the dock and caught a rock bass. Swiftly filleting it I took the shards of fish and offered a small piece to the kestrel. The Kestrel stared at the fish. I teased its beak and it seemed to bite at it, then reached with its bright yellow claw and took the fish from my hand. And that was all. The bird didn’t know how to eat; the last food it had eaten three weeks before had come regurgitated from its parents. The critical bit of how to eat had been missed. Knowing it was a useless try I left the supply of fish at it’s feet, just in case. On the next weekend Annie announced there was something on the path behind the boathouse for me to dispose of. I found the bird at rest on its back in a nest of its own feathers. It had no eyes but the eye sockets stared black at me above the tight hooked beak. For the longest time I stared back but eventually I blinked. We can sentimentally reflect on the bravery of a bird, its tenacious refusal to die until it did. The truth is that’s just how it is. From the moment it fell from the nest it was doomed to starve or be eaten. The bird is buried on the island where it hatched and lived its short, horrid life and I’m sorry, but I feel like I’ve lost something, something that was never mine, I just came too close to its life not to care. As a good friend has often said, life’s not fair.