Magpies are made to fly

How Cheepy came by

Nature can seem so cruel to us, so unfair disguised in its gorgeous flora and fauna colors and everything in between. Perhaps it was the wind from that intensely purple sky that blew down the black and white baby magpie from its nest that day when I, by chance, saw it hopping away from our cat who was ready to pounce on it to have a happy meal. When I cupped the bird in my hands it turned its head to look at me and I spontaneously said, No, I’m not your mother. I’m a human.

I had been noticing how the adult magpies hovered in the tree near where our outdoor cats would be eating, how those huge birds waited for the cats to go sleep in the shade so they could feast on leftover cat food. I put little magpie Cheepy in a cage and hung it on that same tree’s limb. I fed it with pointed tweezers that pretty much seemed like a good substitute for a mother's beak to shove food into its wide open mouth. I gave it what I had seen the adult magpies eating in our yard, mostly mulberries and cat food. I couldn’t believe how a whole mulberry could go down the throat of that little feathered creature. It seemed to be content, and I could tell  by the huge white poop blobs on the ground below the cage that an adult magpie, perhaps the mother, had perched on top, maybe to feed Cheepy or just keep it company. 

I  would often bring Cheepy inside away from the cats to exercise its wings in our kitchen and living room. Though it was exciting to see its first winged leap from finger to kitchen table, I knew there was still a ways to go.  After a few weeks and after it had taken a few longer flights – kitchen sink to window ledge to flapping on the glass – I knew it was almost time.

So the other day I opened the cage, and while it waited to perch on my finger, I kept my finger out. It jerked its head from side to side questioning, then clumsily flew out of the cage to the first limb it found. I clapped and said “Good job Cheepy!”, and it flew upward towards the thick woods away from the cage. Away from our yard and cats. Away from me — what I  thought would become its mother. 

I heard a familiar cheep in our tree this morning. I’ve heard that magpies return to the place where they were saved. Maybe so, and maybe one of those adults that hover in our tree waiting for the cats to disappear is Cheepy, but it doesn’t matter. They’re all part of the oneness of it all – the tree, the mulberries, the white poop, the cats and their cans, my coffee and yard and all of it on this planet. All part of nature. 

There is no philosophy to attach to nature. No good nor evil, no just or injust, no imbalance. It is what it is beyond anything we humans think we can possess or change. We are part of what the world is all about and all its changes. What we do on the planet is all part of our nature and nature in general. We can beat ourselves up for how we’ve evolved or devolved, we can call it our rotten nature looking at our calculations of animal extinction, we can desperately recycle because of all the plastic in the ocean, we can vote and protest against genocide and war, we can try to fix the ozone and limit Co2 and we can save a little magpie from being eaten by a cat. But if you think about it, it’s all part of nature, and nature will do what it wants with us and with all its flora and fauna. Nature has no opinions. It’s all a matter of survival in order to change how nature wants us to be. Like Frida Kahlo once said, “Everything changes, everything moves, everything evolves, everything flies and goes away.”

(Kahlo’s quote appeared serendipitously in Poetic Outlaws today!)