A Blooming Hill Vineyard

If you have been following the story of Wilbur, our pigeon - here or on Facebook - you saw a reference to a bird I once got drunk on brandy.  A few people wanted the back story so here it is.

A thousand years ago when I was living in Snedens Landing on the Hudnson River and Charlie was four, we were all sitting out in the lovely backyard when a bird flung itself into the glass patio doors.  It was a little bird.  It made a loud smack and then fell to the ground.  I ran over and there was the poor little thing lying there looking done for.  Something made me touch its little soft body and I felt heart beats.  “It’s alive!” was my happy cry, “What should I do?”  I was not then, nor am I particularly now, the outdoors type so birds were either in the zoo, in a cage in my apartment or pigeons walking around the streets of New York dining on discarded prezel pieces and hot dog buns they retrieved from sidewalks.   I once took one I found bleeding on a heating grate to the vet, wrapped up in my cape, but what to do about ones in the wild was not in my skill set.  Not that we lived in the wild; Snedens is a quite sophisticated place only 20 miles from NYC.

Don, my husband then and Charlie’s father, suggested a good idea would be to wring the poor thing’s neck and put it out of its misery.  That was out of the question.  I love birds.  My first pet was a parakeet named Tweetie who could speak (really), ate corners off my homework and fished out the guppies in the fish tank until we discovered that and protected them.   Years later I had a parakeet in an apartment I lived in on West 75th Street who flew out of the window.  It was the former parlor of the brownstone on the second floor in the front.  I was heartbroken.  A week later, I heard a bird chirping in my neighbor’s apartment in the back.  I knocked.  They had found a bird flying in the hallways, captured it in a sheet and taken it in.  It was my bird!  Reunited, I bought two more.  The three parakeets would fly around the small apartment.  When my soon to be mother-in-law would visit, the birds would rest on her head.  She was a small woman – not five feet tall – with sparse, gray hair.  They must have thought it was nesting material.  She was always a good sport about it.

So you can see why ending the little thing’s life was not even a consideration.  Then I had the idea to try and revive it with brandy so I got the brandy and an eyedropper.  Charlie was fascinated and very much involved in the dispensing of the brandy into the bird’s beak.  How much to give it?  Didn’t even try to figure it out. I just dropped a few drops in and watched.  Sure enough, the bird perked up.   Then he stood up and staggered a few steps.  Then he plopped down.  Then I gave him some more brandy.  Same routine.  Finally, he attempted to fly and executed a short if whirlpool flight – a little like Wilbur’s early short hops as his feathers were growing back.  The next time he tried to fly he made it to the low branch of a tree and swayed back and forth, mercifully anchored as birds are by their toes.   Honestly, the other birds in the vicinity all flew over and it looked for all the world as if our bird was telling his story.  Maybe recommending the brandy.  Who knows.  Brandy, wine – it’s all good.  Maybe we should give Wilbur a little send-off Pinot Noir when we release him.