Your mileage may vary (literally!)

Last weekend (as in, two days ago) we only got The Call* once. There was a common murre in need of a ride, in the Oceano Dunes State Park ranger's station's "bird shed."

Bird shed calls are easy for us. We go to the shed, collect conveniently packaged birds (already in carriers!) that were captured by the rangers, log out the bird(s), turn off the heat lamps, and drive them to Morro Bay (about 45 minutes each way.)

This little murre was miserable, bedraggled and shivering, covered in greenish poo from stem to stern. He** was not interested in us, only in his own presumably intestinal discomfort. The description on the log said "weak." He seemed weak.

We drove him to Morro and he seemed rather revived on the Morro end of the trip, a little more energetic, a little less shivery, and no longer pressing his eyes closed in rhythmic bouts of suffering. Good luck, murre.

The weekend before was a different story. We got The Call once on Saturday morning, and went to capture a tired, droop-winged juvenile Brown Pelican at Pismo Beach, just north of the pier. It was a masterful capture, if I do say so myself. We walked up and I spread my arms at the bird and said "look at me, I'm scary" to distract it, and Pat dropped a lap blanket on its head and picked it up with one smooth gesture. In so doing, he very much impressed the hunky fire department lifeguards who had come to protect the bird from curious tourists. That's always a nice feeling. Then we hustled the bird into a carrier at the Oceano Dunes ranger station, and took it to Morro, along with another, very aggressive pelican with a droopy wing, and a miserably injured seagull. We got another call just before the Center closed -- could we give a pelican a ride from the Dunes? After conferring with workers at the Center, who said they could do nothing more before they left than provide heat lamps, we decided to let the pelican rest under the heat lamps at the ranger station and would go first thing in the morning.

On Sunday, we took the pelican to the center. He hadn't had a net under his feet and was awash in poo, but he seemed all right. He had a droopy wing but pulled it up nicely when bothered. When we returned home, we sat down to eat breakfast and play video games, and got The Call again. This time, it was a bird (reported to be a seagull) tangled in fishing line on Pismo Beach, somewhere north of the pier. (It turned out to be about a mile or more north of the pier, actually.) We went to the pier and looked around, and didn't see the bird. We asked the hunky lifeguards if they had seen the bird. They communicated amongst the stations and told us yes, but way up the beach. So we got in the car and went up the beach, down some cliff stairs, and about a half mile of beach. No. No bird. When we returned to the car an hour after starting and called the Center, the phone "vol" told us that the hunky lifeguards had captured the fishing-line-entangled bird.

We called the lifeguards. They arranged to meet us at a parking lot with the graciously captured and boxed bird. It took probably 45 minutes to coordinate, but eventually we had an agonized pelican in the car (not a seagull at all). He had two fishhooks in his breast, and fishing line around parts of his wings and feet, drawn tight. He looked like a poor avian cenobite with huge, unhappy brown eyes. Pelicans have expressive, mobile, beautiful, movie-star eyes. They're wonderful birds, like soft, pillowy, feathered pterodactyls with (usually) mild manners and grave dignity.

I called the phone vol who had helped us coordinate to ask her to inform the center that it was a pelican on the way, and one badly entangled with hooks and line. She was glad to hear from us. Could we pick up a bat that "couldn't fly" at a private residence in Arroyo Grande "on the way?"

Oh, the bat. Poor little devil. The people who had called had evidently panicked because it hadn't left the eaves of their home before 10 a.m. (never mind that bats are nocturnal) and had taken a hose to it. They hosed it down from the eaves, all the way down their porch stairs, and 10 feet from the porch. Then they called us and asked us to come save it. The whole time we were there, Pat going to recover it because my cheap shoes had shredded in the beach sand of the pelican capture adventure, and I was heavily blistered and barefoot in the car, the man of the house seemed to want Pat to sympathize that he hated bats and found their guano objectionable, and was going to call an exterminator.

I am partially sympathetic. I wouldn't be happy about mammals that sometimes carry rabies on my porch, near my dogs & family. The man was new to the house and didn't know what to expect from the wildlife. And city folk who move to the country are quite typically this kind of menace, ignorant and hostile to animals that they are first encountering. (Q: "damn coyotes keep eating my cats!" A: "keep your cats inside." Q: "this bat hasn't flown off by 10 a.m., shouldn't the lazy bastard get moving?" A: "no, it is nocturnal and was up all night eating your West-Nile-Virus-carrying mosquitos.") But... once I had savaged a wild animal would I call a wildlife rescue organization and beg them to save it? And then talk exterminators when they arrived?

Eh. What. Ever.

A wet bat looks pitiful -- curls of golden-brown hair gathering damply and exposing mostly naked skin, lying facedown with wings splayed out like a dressed chicken on a cutting board. He also smelled horrible, like "skunkolyptus," seriously, a wet bat isn't for the faint of heart to sniff. But he was adorable (although shocky and chilled and terrified). At first he didn't move much except to open his toothy snout and look menacing, and pant. But by the time he'd enjoyed the heat of my leg and the sun through his shoebox all the way to Morro, he was scooting all around the inside of the shoebox, skreeking softly. (There was no way I was peeking, just in case I ended up turning him loose in the car whilst Pat was trying to drive. Besides, he'd been through enough stress.)

So some weekends are demanding, and others are simply rewarding. And of course, many weekends we never even receive The Call at all.
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*The Call only comes in when you are sleeping in/making love/planning a day trip somewhere/doing something complicated. Or when you've just gotten back from the aftermath of the last Call.

**I can't help it -- the English neuter male pronoun has me in its grip. Unless I can tell it's a she, I usually call it a he. All you politically correct neo-hippies can try to educate me, but I've got my habits.