For as long as I can remember, my kids have been dragging home stray animals.
During summer vacation this year, my daughter Christie scratched her arms while rescuing a baby magpie that had fallen out of his nest into a thorny bush where he hunkered down, trying to make himself invisible. The trick would have worked too, if he hadn't risked squawking for his mother at the exact moment Christie and her brother Matthew happened by.Hearing the hoarse screams of the frightened bird, the two children flattened themselves against the ground. Matt gave directions while Christie groped this way and that, until her fingers finally closed on a pouf of black-and-white down.
"We'll never get him back into the nest," Matt said, pointing to a disorderly clump of twigs crammed high overhead in the crotch of a tree.
"I guess we'll just have to keep him then," Christie decided, looking me straight in the eye as I came upon the scene.
"Oh no you won't!" I exclaimed, thinking of the vast menagerie we already had at home. "If you bring one more creature into our house, I'm going to move out."
I knew I'd made a grave mistake the moment those words left my mouth. Matt looked at Christie. Christie looked at Matt.
"That might not be a bad idea," they said, laughing.
In the end, the bird, who later became known as Dale, stayed, and I stayed, too. "After all," the kids appealed to my maternal instincts, "his mother is nowhere in sight! We can't leave him here to starve."
Reluctantly, I allowed my children to carry their new pet home on the condition they take total responsibility for his care.
"If we're patient enough," Christie said hopefully, "we may be able to teach him to talk."
As it turned out, though, patience was the wrong word for what my youngsters invested in their feathered friend over the next few weeks. Endurance test was more like it.
Whoever described a shark as the ultimate eating machine had never met a growing magpie. It would be an understatement to say Dale kept his benefactors busy. All day long, they stuffed boiled eggs down his throat, hunted bugs and gathered table scraps.
When they got really desperate, they filched bits of raw hamburger from the refrigerator meat compartment and stole grapes from the fruit bin. At lunch, if Christie offered to share her tuna sandwich with the greedy bird, he demanded the whole thing. And with all that food going down his gullet, the ravenous magpie stood there with a gaping mouth expecting more.
The nights were especially hard on Christie, who had the dubious honor of having the bird cage in her room. Dale loved his midnight snacks, not to mention 2 a.m. tidbits. At 3, he hollered for treats and then again at 4. By 5, he was absolutely starved.
"Now I know what it's like for a mom with a new baby," Christie yawned one morning after a particularly demanding night. That was the day she announced there was no way on earth she was ever going to teach that bird to talk.
"What's the matter?" I asked. "don't you think he's smart enough?"
"Oh, he's smart enough, all right. Too smart! And that's what I'm afraid of - if he can boss me around this much without saying a single English word, can you imagine what it would be like if he could speak?"