Embracing (Apparent) Contradiction
Moving heaven and earth to save a baby dove, literally days before hunting the dove opener, makes more sense than it would appear.
Our neighbor Norbert found a flightless baby dove in his yard on August 28 and didn’t know what to do about it. He peered up into his palm tree to see if he could perhaps find the nest and return the little guy, but it seemed awfully dangerous. Besides, sometimes flightless baby birds just jump right back out again, their instincts out of sync with their development.
The little dove had another very young dove that could fly hanging out near it - a sibling, perhaps? But without the ability to fly, this one was going to be awfully vulnerable to the raccoons, ’possums, skunks and even the occasional coyotes that cleanse our neighborhood nightly of defenseless creatures and unattended pet food.
The correct, science-based response to this situation was to let nature take its course. Natural selection isn’t pretty, but it gets the job done.
I did not respond correctly.
I took him home in a small cardboard box and named him Gilroy. He was actually too young for his gender to be apparent, but I went with “boy” because I figured the day or two I’d have him wouldn’t irreparably scar his sense of gender identity if I’d gotten it wrong.
I loaded up a syringe with water and started popping beads of water on his beak, which he readily drank. I pulled out some dove bait leftover from banding season and put it, and him, in a cat carrier. The irony was lost on him.
Hank and I couldn’t tell if he was eating the seed in his cage or just scattering it, so we mashed some up in a molcajete along with some rolled oats and made a paste that we fed to him with a syringe. He ate a bit. We hoped it was enough.
Our kittens, Xochi and Mapache - who are too old to be called kittens but to us they’ll be the gatitas forever - were keenly interested in Gilroy, so at the end of the night I locked him in Hank’s office, out of their prying reach.
I didn’t know if he would survive the night, and I wouldn’t be the one to find out, because I was getting up and leaving well before sunrise.
To go scout the place where I’d be hunting doves with two girlfriends on Sept. 1
My scouting trip was a huge success: I found a spot on public land that had a good dove flight. Maybe not three limits’ worth, but good. And at some point while I was driving around, I got a text from Hank saying that Gilroy was alive. It was a good day.
By the time I got home, Gilroy was getting pretty agitated about being in that cage, so I brought him into my office and shut out the gatitas, and let him walk around on the floor. Then this happened:
He flew up to my desk, where he walked across my dove hunt map, which was right up there with finding safety in a cat carrier.
Now that he could fly and find safety in high places, I knew I needed to get him back into the world of doves as soon as possible, because wild birds should stay wild.
I called Norbert to tell him I thought Gilroy was ready to be released late that afternoon, after it had cooled down a bit. Norbert told me he had seen not only the young dove that had been hanging out with Gilroy the day before, but also two more doves.
I’d done enough reading in the past 24 hours to know that adults spend about two weeks with their offspring after they leave the nest. If his parents were still hanging around…
Well, maybe they’d been out there the whole time and would have looked after him, and maybe I shouldn’t have kidnapped him. But that was water under the bridge now.
The reunion was a fairy tale. I took Gilroy to Norbert's side yard and held him in my cupped hand, so he could fly at any time. He declined.
Then a dove landed on a power line overhead, and Gilroy visibly perked up at the signature whistle of wings. The dove, a female, looked down at me intently, then landed in the front yard with two others. We now had a hatch-year dove, an adult female and an adult male. Gilroy's family?
Norbert opened the gate for me and I held Gilroy out so he could fly to the other doves. He flew, but badly. The wrong way. Close to the street. I picked him up again and edged close to the other doves, all three on the ground. Gilroy began cheeping urgently, then flew to them.
He landed next to the adult male and began flapping his wings in that baby-bird feed-me way. The male - clearly papa - responded by feeding Gilroy from his crop.
What are the odds of such a perfect reunion?
We watched the bird family for a time. Gilroy and his sibling hung close to each other on the ground, and the parents flew up to a power line where - I kid you not - they played kissy-face, then mated.
Yes, it was a happy ending with a happy ending.
I watched a little longer, then went home. Norbert reported that the baby birds sat on the ground together for quite some time, but when he went outside at 8:30 p.m., they were gone.
Did the parents coax Gilroy into a tree for the night, or was that randy little couple already focused on their next brood? As is the case with the fate of most bird families in our neighborhood, we’ll never know. By now, Gilroy - if he made it - will look like every other young-of-the-year dove.
I went on with my business, too. I hunted as planned on the opener three mornings later. I killed my 15 doves by 8:15 a.m., came home and plucked them on a grievously hot back porch, and shared the heads and feet with Harlequin, the senior feline in our family, who enjoys the heads in particular. The gatitas, for all their interest in Gilroy, didn't partake.
I went through this whole sequence of events both deeply aware of, and entirely comfortable with, the bifurcation in my mind about saving one bird as I planned to kill more than a dozen of his brethren.
Both acts - nurturing defenseless young and hunting to feed myself - were hard-wired into our ancestors long before we became human. And the urge to protect defenseless young is not limited to young of one's own species: Witness the leopard that killed a baboon, then began caring for her day-old baby.
The truth is that life and death go hand in hand on this beautiful planet of ours. Across species, we all - directly or indirectly - kill other living things to eat, or at least acquire nutrients from dead things.
The very act of living creates unintended ripples of destruction, especially human living. I write this in Salt Lake City, en route to Wyoming for a grouse hunt, and in my 16 hours of total driving, I will have killed hundreds of insects merely by smashing my windshield into them at 80 miles per hour. I’ve pumped out pollutants that will kill living things and contribute to the planet's accelerated warming, which will also kill living things.
We humans build mental walls that allow us to accept all of this killing, even as we declare other forms of killing off-limits. The only question is whether we choose to delude ourselves about it.
Hunting, for me, ripped away that delusion. But its loss didn’t cause me to abandon acts of kindness; it made me appreciate them even more, knowing they are part of the balance and beauty of our world.
As always, I look forward to your comments and the conversations they spark, but please forgive me if I don’t respond quickly - I’m traveling and hunting this week and have no idea how much connectivity I’ll have.
Damn that's the best piece of writing I've read in a long time! I absolutely loved it! I would have done exactly the same thing. I don't know how we can explain to people that we are capable of nurturing small animals and also slaughtering and devouring them, but we do. It doesn't seem like a conflict at all to me, but during dove season many people - especially my lovely wife- seem deeply sad at the prospect of hurting the poor little lovie dovies, while I am ecstatically savoring this once-a-year treat. You did an excellent job of relating the experience of being a deeply irrational typical human being!
Well written Holly!