By Laura Barbour
In the year my son was born, there were six eggs. Five were kestrel eggs, a cluster of them laid in a nest box mounted to a pole that stood in a field below my parents’ house, my childhood home in southwest Idaho. The field (we called it The Pasture) was a rough rectangle, a prickly grassy sweep that had probably, at some point, provided forage for livestock. It had long been abandoned, however, and cheatgrass and tumbleweeds were vying with the alfalfa and pasture-grass. After it became our Pasture, my parents began to pick away at it, pulling weeds and planting wildflowers–a painstaking, gradual transformation that pervaded my childhood and continues to this day. My sister and I spent long summer days at the bottom of The Pasture, braiding cords of milkweed fibers and laying plank bridges in the flat marshy areas where irrigation overflow used to make a little flooded wetland. It was a breeding ground for kestrels even in those early years. Unlike their larger cousins the peregrine falcons (who exhibit a flair for city life, nesting on the ledges of skyscrapers), kestrels are rural creatures. They love open, grassy fields: the margins of agricultural areas, buzzing with insects; meadows bordered by the stumps and snags of ancient trees; windswept spaces where mice and voles burrow among the shallow roots. That, perhaps, is why they are so common, and also why they are widely declining. These types of quiet, overlooked spaces are not so common as they once were, even in rural southwest Idaho. The farm fields have swallowed the river-meadows, and now the houses are swallowing the farm fields.
They are small birds, kestrels–no bigger than a mourning dove but much more vivid. They are fierce and fiercely beautiful, arrayed in the colors of desert soil and sky, rusty orange like wind-scoured basalt and clean, bright blue. The females are a little larger than the males, while the males are a little showier, all slate-blue and copper. Both sexes have yellow-rimmed dark eyes beneath a blue cap, and two heavy dark slashes on each side of their face, through the white of their cheeks. They are cavity-nesters and, during courtship, the male seeks out a cozy crevice or hollow tree and draws the female with food offerings and displays of aerial acrobatics. When they nest, their shrill, insistent screams dominate the soundscape of spring, ringing out stridently over the chatter and trilling of songbirds. Once the nesting grounds are established, they defend their territory with reckless zeal.
The number of eggs the female lays (typically between three and six) is determined by the amount of food they can glean from their chosen nesting ground, an adaptation meant to ensure there is ample nourishment for the chicks once they hatch. But springtime in the desert can be unreliable and an ecosystem built on short-lived invasive plants is a treacherous thing. Opportunistic cheatgrass flares up lush and green at the first hint of moisture but shrivels into shreds of kindling just as quickly when the dry spells settle in with relentless heat. Populations of prey, insects and voles, come crashing down too amid the ruins of the promised bounty. Warm, wet springs have become common, cut short by early summers. Kestrel eggs take the good part of a month to hatch and in that time the green Pasture can fade to dusty brown. Eggs optimistically laid at the height of spring’s abundance may hatch into scarcity, the baby birds emerging from their shells to find the landscape already withered around them.
The sixth egg was mine and its incubation, though equally precarious, was a longer process. It took hold in a dark secret place, a place that until that moment had been my own. It was a place as familiar to me as The Pasture, and, it turned out, just as subject to transformation. The little egg burrowed into my body, and in its sprouting and swelling made me into something new, something fraught and liminal. I was consumed with anxiety, with watchfulness and “what ifs.” My mind felt constricted, awareness centered on the doubtful point, deep within, where egg was becoming embryo, and embryo fetus. My body, on the other hand, was expanding, until the skin of my belly felt thin and taut as the crust of desert soil, a crackling of clay over bedrock.
At that time my husband and I lived in Boise, Idaho’s largest city and capital. In our little house, to the backdrop of freeway noise, we nested too. Books and bouncers and bassinets waited in corners that had once held spindly shelves or houseplants on scrolled stands. Breast pumps nestled beneath our kitchen island, along with every kind of bottle: baby bottles with bulbous shapes and slow-flow nipples that were supposed to be breastfeeding-compatible; bottles for milk storage; wide-mouth bottles and narrow-mouth bottles and bottles with special attachments for connecting directly to different kinds of pumps. We went to doctor appointments and attended the entire catalog of classes on the “Having a Baby” section of the website of our local hospital. I wanted, desperately, to be prepared, to know what to do when the time came. I soon discovered that the birth plans we developed, the detailed feeding patterns we studied, were no safer than the kestrels’ instinctive egg-laying, based on projections that might or might not hold true. I, too, was subject to uncertainty, to variables beyond my control.
The female kestrel laid her eggs in the spring, while my pregnancy was still an early, delicate thing. Her eggs came one after another, every other day, pale brown and speckled. My dad had mounted a video camera in a corner of the nest box and we watched the birds obsessively, on our phones and laptop screens. The mother bird came and went frequently, leaving the first eggs open to our view for short periods of time, gleaming and vulnerable among the wood shavings. She knew, perhaps, that this was her last chance to take care of herself. She waited to start incubating until the third egg had been laid, a delay meant to ensure they would all hatch at close to the same time, giving the later-laid eggs their best chance of survival. When she settled in for the long haul, warming them to her body temperature, they began to develop. Then she sat so tightly that it was difficult to catch even a glimpse of her clutch. She stirred only briefly to receive food from her partner or to tuck the newest eggs into place with her beak–four, and finally, after a little longer delay than usual, a fifth. When the eggs began to hatch, they did so day by day in the order they were laid, one after another after another. Soon they all had hatched, all but one.
The last egg, as often happens, was paler than the others; perhaps a little smaller. The creature wedged inside, having completed the egg-bound portion of its development, squirmed and wriggled. It tap-tap-tapped, piercing the shell with the egg tooth on its beak again and again until suddenly a section gave way and it emerged. As I watched it scramble out into the slanting sunbeams and floating feathers of the nest box, I felt a surge of sick anticipation, the same feeling that had troubled my early pregnancy: hope and love and potent helplessness, and, looming in the background, a foreboding of disaster. It struggled to its sticky feet amongst its four siblings, soft talons digging for a hold as they bumped and jostled, little beak open like theirs. But it was already too late. The egg had taken too long to hatch and the tiny nestling would never catch up to its brothers and sisters.
That was in spring, and in the fall my son was born. He had cloudy blue eyes and a headful of blond hair, soft as any nestling bird. My first sight of him, as the doctor held him up by the scruff of his neck, was of his mouth wide in a gasping scream, his pale hair damp and darkened. His tongue was glued flat in his mouth, completely tissue-tethered. He could not lift even the tip of it, nor extend it over his bottom lip. Doctors, nurses, lactation specialists came and went day and night as I carefully, awkwardly, lifted him in my arms and latched him on as I’d practiced in the breastfeeding classes (head tilted back, chin-first into my breast, then brushing my nipple over his nose to get his mouth to pop open as though spring-loaded). They watched intently, shrugged their shoulders, and repeated variations of “wait and see.”
Kestrels emerge from the egg with their eyes shut, draggled and limp, sprawling facedown in the wood shavings and the shell fragments. Their yolk sac, absorbed during hatching, gives them a brief buffer, a short window of time before they must be fed by their parents. They grow ferociously, transforming between camera-views into hunched feathery things, bumbling and awkward, with a scant month in which to become larger, to become sleek and taper-tipped and airworthy. They are messy, streaking the walls of the nest box (and occasionally the camera lens) with sprays of white birdshit. During this time they eat ferociously as well, forcing their parents into a frenzy of hunting and beak-filling.
By the time the fifth kestrel emerged, its siblings were on their feet and active. Days passed and it remained laughably–pitiably–smaller than the others, who had put their head start to good use. Its head barely came up to their shoulders. The dark streaks of primary feathers were showing on their wing-tips and he was still a small bundle of white fluff.
The parent birds were strained. A wet spring had turned dry early and the grasses had withered. Voles were scarce, and one bristling beakful of grasshopper did not go far among five voracious chicks. Their beaks seemed perpetually gaping wide, blunt tongues protruding as they screamed for food. The male, scouring the Pasture with grim resolve, shrieking from the treetops to signal success, paused only to transfer the food to the female before returning to the hunt. She dismembered it and parceled it out to her young, piece by piece by piece. Though she bobbed her head from beak to beak while feeding, trying to spread it around, the littlest one never seemed to be close enough to get anything. His open mouth was too low, overshadowed by his siblings’, into which their mother popped the food. He was trampled, overlooked; shunted to the back of the box as the others fought over the scraps.
When Jack was a few days old, our pediatrician used a small pair of scissors to snip the tissue below the tip of his tongue, the lingual frenulum that should have dissolved before the end of my first trimester. “Sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn’t,” she said. One theory, she told us, is that when an infant’s tongue is immobilized in utero, the muscles for the strong sucking motion that is essential to breastfeeding don’t develop properly. This seemed to be the case with Jack. Even after his “release,” he nursed agonizingly slowly and (it soon became apparent) inefficiently. Over the next several days I watched the bit of fat he was born with, the roundness in his cheeks and softness around his wrists, wither away. I fed him for hours on end, sessions that only ended when he, exhausted from fruitless struggle, fell asleep for a minute or two–and still he would be hungry, and still my breasts would be hot and swollen. “Cluster feeding,” said the lactation specialists over the phone, said our friends, said the pediatrician. Babies, with their merciless instincts for survival, feed more frequently during stretches of intense growth to increase the mother’s milk supply.
But although I breastfed him with little cessation, my own milk supply was not increasing but drying up. We were awake together for hours on end, three or four or five. With one hand I held him tightly against me while with the other I squeezed my breast, wringing milk into his mouth one painful drop at a time. The effort was exhausting us both, and dark shadows began to spread under Jack’s red-rimmed eyes. The lowest point came in the pediatrician’s office, when, after eleven days of this despairing struggle, I watched my tiny, famished son guzzle an entire sample bottle of formula in two minutes flat, and then immediately throw it up all over my shoes and the pale, speckly floor.
The youngest kestrel had withered, too. I watched on the nest box camera as he threw himself into the fray, shrieking wildly, with each arrival of food. Each time, he came away unsuccessful. His larger siblings shoved and jostled him, holding their own scraps of food high above his reach. He did not grow bigger; did not develop. He hurled himself against his siblings with increasing franticness, bouncing off their impervious backs. And then, inevitably, his efforts grew weaker. I turned off the camera feed one evening, fighting a sharp sudden urge to intervene–to drive over there, climb a ladder and snatch him away. When I looked again the next morning, there were four bright-eyed broad-shouldered babies thrusting and rustling and stretching their wing-feathers. The camera feed was grainy in the low light. On the floor of the nest box at their feet, among the wood shavings and fallen feathers, lay something pale and still and strangely flattened. A small scrap of something, crumpled and discarded. A sad shape that, only hours before, had desperately wanted to be alive.
Another food delivery arrived. The chicks had grown so large that the mother could no longer fit in the nest box with them. She broke the food down outside and gave it to them quickly, head and shoulders darkening the opening briefly, and then she was gone. I turned the feed off permanently after that, so I don’t know if the little bird was torn up and fed to his siblings or if he mummified there, overlooked among the nest debris. And I did not watch as the survivors, two weeks later, made their fledging flight: one great leap into a world they’d only seen through a hole three inches in diameter, leaving behind a filthy, shit-streaked nest box and one little ghost.
During Jack’s first spring, another clutch of kestrel eggs was laid, five of them again. Again, four of them hatched in quick succession and, again, the fifth followed after a short delay. This time, I did not watch them on the camera feed. The immediacy, the urgency of their nesting drama was lost on us, consumed as we were in our own feeding struggle. The scorching heat of summer came ahead of its season, but in May my dad reported that all five baby birds had survived to fledge.
It has been well over a year. Soon, the kestrels will begin to stir themselves to head north, leaving the warmer wintering regions to return to their breeding grounds. One morning, my dad will see the first male bird alight on the pole and rustle its tailfeathers, sending birdshit plummeting. In the spring breeze, it will sweep its dark bright eyes over the green field, surveying. A glint of blue–flax petals flutter onto a gopher mound. A burning orange–globemallow smolders among the grasses. A vole trembles, darts beneath a thatch of last year's cheatgrass. A grasshopper clambers stiffly up a flower-stalk into the sun. The kestrel cocks his head; watching. He thrusts his head forward and raises his wings, dropping into a swooping glide. Then he folds his wings and stoops, plummeting headfirst towards the ground with talons splayed.
Last summer, when Jack was nine months old, we moved. Several years in Boise had taught us that, like the kestrels, we are rural creatures at heart. Perhaps it was something we’d known all along, but Jack’s arrival made it seem more urgent. When the chance came, we left the city and found a home in the high desert among the bunchgrass and the sagebrush and the clustered cottonwoods of the old farmsteads. Our new home has a Pasture too, a place where Jack will build forts and twine grasses, and, maybe, watch kestrels feed their young with dogged devotion. Here, two hundred miles east of my childhood home and two thousand feet higher, winter is still withholding the landscape from spring, staking its claim with a scattering of snow. I watch Jack run around in his own small fledgling body, leaving a trail of footprints, small but insistent.
The first months of Jack’s life were an all-consuming cycle: sleep and feed, sleep and feed. My mind shies away from the thought of what would have happened to him (or me) without the intervention of outside help and infant formula: interference I did not want to accept. Failure to thrive, a faltering growth curve; withering. For kestrel chicks, there is no outside help. They thrive or they die, and they do it on their own. The details of those early days with Jack are blurred and dark, the memory buried in a place where a dead kestrel chick also lies. But when I think back to breastfeeding, I see not Jack’s open mouth with its heart-shaped tongue, but a bird beak stretched to its widest. When I close my eyes, I hear not the ragged squalling of a newborn baby, but the keening of hungry kestrels.
Laura Barbour has a graduate degree in Natural Resources from the University of Idaho’s McCall Outdoor Science School where she studied place-based education. She lives on a nature preserve near Picabo, Idaho, with her husband and young son.