The Dustpan of Life

It’s been raining for days, which has been a welcome relief from the incredible heat we’d been experiencing before that. It’s been a pretty dramatic switch, to go from boiling hot days to gray and rainy all the time, but I prefer it this way. It’s actually bordering on chilly at times, last night I went back to my winter habit of wearing two pairs of pajama pants (since I don’t have a blanket, just a sheet) and today I risked electrocution to take a shower with warm water, whereas for the past months the unheated water has been such a relief at the end of the day. And everything is damp and nothing dries out. All my money bills are slightly moist to the touch. Anyway, I was at home on Sunday preparing for going out to the park on five days of field work this upcoming week when I started to hear the sound of thrashing about in water. Most houses, including my own, have a big cement sink with three basins, called a pila, outside on the patio or in the yard. They’re actually pretty handy, they make hand washing much easier. I just assumed I could hear my neighbor splashing around in her pila while doing some cleaning, but then I did become curious because it sounded closer than my neighbor and was coming from a slightly wrong direction. So I went outside and peered in my landlady’s pila, which is unsheltered (unlike mine) and had filled up with rainwater in the central portion. It was a little bit difficult to get a good look inside though, because there is a big, wet lime tree hanging close over the basin, so I could only easily see the far corner without pushing the lime branches out of the way and getting soaked in the process. So when I saw the frog in the corner I assumed that was it, but then the thrashing continued even though the frog was perfectly still so I peered in closer and there was a big blackbird submerged up to mid-wing and not able to propel itself out of the tub. So I got my camera, duh, then I got my plastic dustpan and it turned out to be the easiest thing to get it out. I just hooked the pan under the bird and it was like I’d announced to the bird “going up!” because it just held on and I raised the whole thing out of the water very smoothly. I put the whole thing in the shallower basin, and we looked at each other for awhile. It actually didn’t decide to move for awhile, and even though I didn’t want to freak it out after waiting about 10 minutes I came towards it a bit to motivate it to move so I could see if it was actually hurt. I have to admit that I did have some fantasies of me and my new best friend the blackbird living in harmony, it hopping cheerfully towards the front door when I came home. They’re supposed to be really smart animals. I just happen to have a National Geographic on animal intelligence and it says the blackbirds not only can use tools to reach food stuck in a recess, they can take a material and create an apt tool (like fashioning a hook on the end of a straight wire) to grab the food. But I knew that plan would never work because starting tomorrow I’ll be away for 5 days so I couldn’t be there to take care of it. Happily, it hopped away from me (almost falling in the washtub again), and chilled out for awhile longer protected by the limbs of the lime tree. I looked again at the frog, which looked dead, and then I realized it had a long tail so it was actually a lizard, not a frog. The way it’d been floating in the water looked very frog-like. But I left it there because I didn’t want to freak out the bird again and I figured I’d fish it out later when the bird had recovered a bit, striking a balance between not hassling the bird and letting a dead animal decompose in my landlady’s washbasin. Next time I went out, the bird started hopping from limb to limb in the tree, seemingly mostly recovered, and I used the dustpan to get the lizard out, which turned out to be alive. I put it in the same place I’d put the bird and I guess the extended soak in the water made the lizard sluggish because it didn’t do anything. After a few minutes I decided to move it to a more sheltered place, since it was still sitting in a bit of water and I figured that the bird trying to eat the lizard is probably how they’d both ended up in that mess to begin with, so I put the lizard under my own pila where the ground was at least dry and it scurried to a more covered spot. So there you have, the dustpan of life safely escorting two animals from a premature demise.