mallorys_camera | Bird rescue

Pissy week. My big mitzvah: rescuing a cormorant.

Unless it's raining buckets, I always take the dogs to the beach when I stagger home from Bartleby, Inc. I feel sorry for them, cooped up in the house all day, and of course, it doesn't take a PhD in psychology to understand that I'm projecting here and the animal I'm really feeling sorry for is myself.

So the dogs and I were walking in a light drizzle along the ocean's edge and it was one of those low tides where the horizon seems to merge seamlessly into the horizon. I was getting rather tired of throwing sticks for Milo. I don't throw very well (having been phobic as a child about all sports that required hand/eye coordination) and he is insatiable. I was thinking about the Pope – an intelligent man, and an athlete, and narcissistic enough in his youth to have starred in stage plays. How did he end up becoming a priest? Did he really believe in God? How can an intelligent man believe in God, any God, let alone a God whose sexual turn-on's include long white nightgowns and Immaculate Conception? A great mystery. I kicked the sand.

An even greater mystery: where the hell had the dogs disappeared to?

That one was more easily solved. They were standing on a dune about fifty feet away near what appeared to be a small penguin. Xena was growling menacingly. Milo was in pre-lunge crouch. The bird wanted to get away but it couldn't seem to open its wings so it was trying to run, or to be more precise, waddle quickly. It wasn't going to succeed unless I did the deus ex machina thing.

Poor thing.

"Get out of there, Milo," I snarled, the Bad Dog voice, and Milo looked crestfallen. It's just my nature, he might have been saying. I threw a stick as hard as I could and the Pope must have been waving "Hi!" from heaven because the damn thing flew forty feet and off the dogs bounded.

How the fuck did a penguin end up on Del Monte beach? Did it escape from the Aquarium, tiptoe out the back door when the staff was preoccupied with letting the Great White Shark free?

"What's the matter little birdie?" I crooned.

The bird cocked its head and studied me with its beady black eyes, backed nervously off. It was probably chock full of mutating viruses, just aching to break out in full antigenic shift boogie in my blood stream.

Ran the dogs back to the car. begged a cardboard box and a plastic milk carton from a nearby store, trapped the bird.

Called the ASPCA. Was herded through a dozen voice mail loops before finally hooking up with the wild life rescue folk.

"It's a penguin," I said. "A small penguin. I don't know how it got here, but that's obviously what it is because it can't fly, and –"

The man laughed. "It's probably a cormorant with a broken wing. I can be there in half an hour. Can you stay with it?"

The rain was really coming down now but it only took the guy ten minutes to get there. He was not what I expected. No flannel shirt, no scraggley Jesus hair. As clipped and gray and clean-shaven as Ken Lay on a day when Enron shares were trading at 80.

We did the hostage exchange and that was that.

I didn't feel particularly virtuous. I felt kind of stupid orchestrating my human powers of empathy and projection. Did Animal Control really have the resources to nurse this little animal back to health? Nature, cruel in tooth and claw. One way or another, the cormorant was probably going to die – ripped apart by dogs on the sand dunes or humanely put to sleep by Animal Control. Or maybe it would just go into shock and shut down by itself. Realistically speaking, there had never been anything I could truly do for this little creature.

But that didn't mean I didn't have to try.