by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

I had made a donation to the World Bird Society; they told me on the phone that at my donation level it looked like I’d be adopting a songbird, so the next day a Bewick’s Wren, T. b. marinensis, showed up at my house.

Her singing was delightful. Wracked with guilt, I raced over to the bird store and bought a feeder, the best one they had, the kind that shot lasers to deter the squirrels. But it was worth it to see the delight in my wren, as she hopped from perch to perch, trying all the different sorts of suet. She leapt and circled in her flight, settling right in the corner of my roof.

“That’s going to be your home,” I yelled out. “I hope you’ll like it here.”

That night I went to bed with a song in my heart, and that song was exactly the same as my adopted wren’s. I started thinking of names to call her, but nothing seemed right at the time.

The next morning I got up super early to see what my wren was going to do. Would she hang out at the feeder, or maybe go hunting for insects? How about a quick flight around the block, get a lay of the land? Instead she just sang, which was fine by me. Maybe more wrens would stop by, and we’d have the start of our own little flock.

My neighbor looked over the fence. “Nice wren,” he said, most enthusiastically, telling me all sorts of avian trivia. I told him how I adopted her, how she came with my donation to the World Bird Society.

“That’s awesome,” he said. “Maybe I should make a donation too.”

“Do it,” I said. “You’ll never regret it.”

A couple days of wren bliss passed, and then one dusk, while the wren was pecking away at the feeder, I heard the soft flap of wings. Out of nowhere, an owl, one talon around the wren. In one or two bites my wren went away forever. There was hardly any time for it to even flutter.

I watched the bird feeder swing back and forth, wondering why the lasers only worked on squirrels.

The next morning I ran into my neighbor, and he was going on and on about how amazing the World Bird Society was, all the good it was doing in the world, how moved he was by all the encouraging things the operator said when he called to make his donation, that he decided to get the upgraded membership right there on the spot, and that’s how he adopted his owl.

“Her name is Tilly, she’s a great horned owl, which is common across North America, but I think she’s really special.”

*

I did not burn my neighbor’s house down; I never even touched his owl.

But shouldn’t an organization as knowing about birds as the World Bird Society, one that truly cared about them so much they set up this amazing adoption program: how could they not remember the wren they’d placed with me? What sort of bird organization would home an owl right next door to a wren?

I called. I asked to speak to somebody. I described what happened, and they put me on hold. The music they played while I waited was unmistakably the song of wrens.

When someone finally answered me, all I could ask was how, in as many different ways I could think of, to make it make sense. And each time the person on the other end of the line told me about nature, the ecological web, of how rich the world is because there is a balance between songbirds and the birds that eat songbirds.

“We believe in nature,” the voice said. “And deep down, you believe in nature too, and your neighbor must also believe in nature even more, otherwise neither of you would have so generously supported the World Bird Society and its wild bird adoption program.”

“Well,” I said. “I believe in nature too. But you didn’t have to do what you did. You could have given that owl to someone who lived a hundred miles away from me. She would have been just as much a part of nature, eating birds and mice over there.”

They didn’t tell me they were sorry for my loss, they wouldn’t, they said, because surely nature wouldn’t apologize for any mouse or wren my neighbor’s owl happened to eat, and as a member of the World Bird Society I needed to understand that.

That’s when they told me about the additional donation levels and the benefits that came with them, not just whole flocks that would know who I was, but protection for those flocks as well, in monthly installments.

I could make so much more of a difference, they told me. I could donate in the name of my deceased wren.

“Did you give it a name?” the voice on the phone asked me.

And that’s why I came to be banned by the World Bird Society, the root cause, not just the consequences of me crashing my truck through their office.

Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s prose can be found in X-R-A-Y, The Pinch, Invisible City, Heavy Feather Review and The Offing. His short story “Taylor Swift” won the Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast, and his story “Goodwill” was picked as one of the Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions. A collection of prose poems and microfiction, Animal Children, was published by Nomadic/Black Lawrence Press. He lives in Barcelona.