Baboons Put Me to Shame

I came into work today and there was a bird trapped in the office. For reasons never quite explained to me, we leave the windows open and the lights on around here, but until today the only wildlife we attracted was a sizable variety of moths (and let me tell you, Chelsea has some crazy moths. Orange and purple and rainbow. I even found the carcass of a dragon fly once). So when I unlocked the office door this morning, my first instinct was to duck and cover. Something large was flapping around, something not at all small or dry or insect-like, something filled with blood and muscle. I braced myself for a rabid vampire bat. Or a freakish New York City mutant mammal never seen before. But it was just a bird.

A pretty bird, too. Not the usual pigeon or sparrow or even one of the red-headed house thrushes we're used to seeing around our bird feeder at home. This bird had a long, skinny beak and a white throat. It was decent-sized, maybe as big as my palm, and it was utterly terrified. I tried not to alarm it with any sudden movements or direct eye contact, but it was having none of me. It battered itself back and forth against the ceiling with such force that I stepped back out into the hall to give it a break.

I didn't know what to do. I'd never dealt with a bird inside before. I have a long-ago, fuzzy memory of a bird flying into our Eagle Rock house once when a babysitter was watching Kyle and me. I don't remember what happened, just that it involved brooms and towels and neighbor boys whooping through the living room, and that Ky screamed every time the bird swooped down to his level.

I considered calling the building's super. Surely he'd dealt with this problem before. It's a tall building. Hard for birds to miss, I imagine. He might even have a net of some sort. But I hesitated. I've noticed that the average New Yorker is not overly appreciative of the native wildlife. You should hear the way they talk about pigeons. I worried that if I told anyone about my dilemma, they would get the bird out by any means necessary. And it's not the bird's fault we leave the windows open.

The problem was that the bird refused to come down far enough to get back out the way he'd come in. Our windows open from the bottom and the top, so I let myself back into the office, slid the lower panes closed, and opened the upper ones. This seemed like an obvious solution, the bird only had to come down a foot or so now to get out, but its terror only increased as I balanced gracelessly on a rolling office chair and reached up to the top panes. I tried calm the bird down. I spoke in low tones and explained what it had to do. I attempted to translate English into birdsong. I mimicked the desired flight path with my hands, fluttering them in panic across the room before swooping them, victorious, out the window. The bird was not a quick learner.

Finally, I just left it alone. I had editing to do. If the goddamn bird wanted to kill itself against the ceiling, fine. As long as it didn't shit on me, I didn't care what it did anymore.

I started working on an analysis of Gazprom's post-2008 strategic possibilities, which is just as titillating as it sounds. It seems that much depends on how Putin transitions out of his presidency and whether or not his oligarchs strip the company of its assets on their way out the door. And then, just as I turned the page, eager to see what other international energy company secrets I would be privy to, I noticed the quiet. The bird had stopped beating the ceiling. I stood up, expecting to startle it from its perch, but there was nothing, no sudden flutter, no burst of wings. The bird was gone.

I have to say, I felt a little disappointed. Here I had spent a half an hour trying to save the damn thing, and I'd missed the moment of glory when it realized it was free, had been free all along, and burst out the window into the high morning sky. That's small-minded, isn't it? To resent a bird finding its freedom just because I couldn't watch? I'm like one of those people who donates a bunch of money to a cancer ward, on the condition that my name is printed on the building in five-foot-high letters. I want to do good, but by god I better get something out of it, too. Apparently, the altruism gene doesn't ping quite as strongly in me as it does in others.