She takes birds under her wing with love
21.05.12
(Houghton Mifflin, 384 pages, $28).
She rescues them, splints their wings, feeds them around the clock and lets them land on her eyebrows.
Zickefoose — an illustrator, an author, a National Public Radio commentator and a wildlife rehabilitator who lives near Marietta, Ohio — combines a childlike sense of wonder with a grown-up sense of reality when she writes about nature.
Here she is describing what it’s like to raise baby hummingbirds that have been knocked from their nest by a thunderstorm and are temporarily in her care:
“It’s such fun to be in the company of four hummingbirds that have no fear of me, that come to probe at the bright flowers on my shirt and poke their bills in its buttons. They’re like fairies — fairies that poop constantly.”
She grieves openly over the one she can’t save, detailing its last frustrations in sharp prose.
“An injured hummingbird knows what it should be doing,” she writes, “and it will try again and again to do it, until it wears all the feathers off its wings and bleeds from the stubs, until it flips over on its back, buzzing like an angry bee, and has to be righted 10 times a day.”
Source: Columbus Dispatch