A strangely spiritual and evocative bird rescue today, one that brought up the spectre of Gus and his death in a surprising way. Maria was working in her studio today when a very young chickadee on one of his or her first flights sailed right into the glass on the North Side of her studio, hitting it hard and falling to the ground stunned.

Both of our barn cats were out prowling around near the studio and the chickadee would not have lasted long. Maria went outside, picked him up and held him and brought him into the house to show me. Maria is not one to turn away from an animal in need of help.

She had already contacted a friend familiar with bird rescue and we were told to keep the bird warm and in an enclosed space. If he was okay, he would recover and start to move around, if not he would die. She brought a dog crate into the kitchen an placed a long twig in it. She put the chickadee onto the twig, he sat there comfortably, blinking and occasionally shaking his head.

In a half hour, when she checked again, he was moving around the crate, active and alert. She reached in and took him out gently and we went into the back yard. She opened her hands and the chickadee flew off and up into the maple tree. A success.

Maria looked a bit shaken and I asked her what was wrong. She said the thought Gus when she saw the black and white bird. She felt like the bird was a symbol of Gus, some kind of message that everything was okay, there is death and life in the world, and this story had a happy ending.

I knew what she meant, that feeling made sense to me, and once she mentioned it, I felt it also even down to the black and white colors of the bird. It wasn’t that Gus had come back to talk to us, or that he was trying to tell us something. I can’t go that far. But there was symbolism for us in the successful rescue of this little bird, who surely would have perished without our intervention.

In our time with animals, we seen much loss, and much life, from the dogs to the lambs to Simon and Gus. One goes with the other. It was lovely to see this success, this saving of a life. We both did think of Gus, and as the afternoon wore on, I wasn’t 100 per cent sure that we weren’t getting some kind of message.