Clarice

Some of you who follow me closely on Substack may know I informally and unintentionally adopted a baby bird on June 19, 2026.

On a hot June day, I visited my aunt at her assisted living facility on a Friday afternoon. Since it was my first time there, she and my cousin took me on a mini-tour of the facility after seeing her apartment. My cousins are doing a great job supporting and taking care of my aunt, and though I usually do not like assisted living as an arrangement for seniors, I felt my aunt had the best of all worlds where assisted living is concerned. Honestly, this is because my cousins are extremely wealthy and can afford the best assisted living center in town. It is not a place I could ever afford for myself or anyone else in my more immediate family. Whatever. I am glad my aunt has a nice place to live and that her kids and grandkids are constantly showing up for her.

It was a nice summer day, somewhere around 85 degrees, and only a bit humid. It was still somewhat cool though, so we went outside to see the gazebo area. I had that sense of "something is up, but I don't know what" the entire day. That sense expressed itself in the baby bird that came into my life under the gazebo.

One of the senior assistants was holding something in her hand with a look of panic and distress on her face. When we came out there, she told us she had found a baby bird on the ground and said the same thing had happened several times in the last few weeks and that six or seven had died. Birds were nesting in the crooks of the gazebo near the roof, and because there was very little support up there, the nests were falling apart and baby birds were falling to the ground and dying. Higher management, of course, could not care less about the predicament of the birds and would do nothing to prevent the nesting/falling situation from occurring despite the fact that falling and dying birds could be upsetting to residents.

She said that the bird looked like it was in a state where it might actually make it and asked if we could contact the local animal rehabber. We found the number, called it, and got no answer because the org is entirely staffed by volunteers and consequently overwhelmed. Despondent, she resolved to leave the baby in a large flowerpot. We all knew full well that meant the bird would be dead in days if not hours, and that's when I stepped up and said "I'll take it."  I asked my cousin what we should name the bird, and she suggested we name it Beaker.

The bird was scrawny and could not fly, so I put him/her/it in a paper towel and put her in my lap on the drive to my house. Not having saved a baby bird before and not ever having had a bird for a pet, I immediately went to the internet and called upon an online friend, a fellow blogger who I know only as MellowKat from Substack. I knew from following her feed that she had rescued baby birds in the past, so I DMed her immediately asking her what I could do to save the bird. Little birds need to eat every 30 to 60 minutes. She told me to give it a mixture of organic pumpkin, mashed up birdseed, and oil as we did not know what type of bird it was. I also texted the animal rehabber letting them know I had found an abandoned, nestless baby bird at my aunt's assisted living.

As soon as I returned from the grocery store with the pumpkin (I already had birdseed), I made the mash and put some on a chopstick. The bird ate it right up, making a grand mess. I just so happened to have a cat carrier at my mother's house, so I transferred the bird to the carrier and took her home at the end of the night, stopping and feeding her several times. 

I have six cats, three of which thankfully live outside as friendly ferals. I have zero business having a bird -- a prey animal -- anywhere in my home, so that is why I was conflicted about my decision. My husband, bless his heart, asked if I was having a midlife crisis. I replied "Maybe." I put the carrier on my small front porch, a space where I don't allow my indoor or outdoor cats to be. My husband, though not wanting a baby bird, went out and got powdered baby bird food from the local store. I was able to feed her with some pet syringes I had kept from years ago (thank the gods I am not a true minimalist) and the bird ate greedily and happily. And messily.

MellowKat, whose advice saved the bird in the first place, got back with some news. Her husband, also a wildlife expert, identified the bird as a European starling. Starlings are considered an invasive species in the US, and no animal rehabber will take them. It seems that even veterinarians refuse to treat them and will take them to be "euthanized", which is Bullshitese for culled, killed, and murdered. You cannot euthanize a healthy human or animal, that is not what that word means. Rehabbers in the area do the same thing.

Humans love to label other species as invasive because we are the ultimate invasive species. It's a form of projecting the shadow. If the bird's habitat was not so compromised (my state used to be 90% meadowland prairie, one of the rarest ecosystems in the world, and now it is below 1% because of humans) maybe her mom never would have laid an egg in a gazebo. Had European starlings not been introduced to America in the late 1800s by pharmacist and hubristic, ecological meddler Eugene Schieffelin, we would not be having these problems. Just saying.

The animal rehabber contacted me, repeatedly asking if I could send a picture. I  did not reveal the bird was a starling. I told her it was a finch, that we had returned it to the nest, and thank you for your concern.

The next day, I actually put her in my shirt and ate at Burger King without anyone knowing she was there. Apparently some baby birds can be very quiet when they want to be. 

In the beginning, I took her everywhere in the cat carrier because of her need to eat constantly. I took her to the music lesson studio where I work and I took her back to my mom's. Nearly all of my students met her.  Her first flight happened in my mom's living room between piano lessons -- she sailed right over the grand piano to the floor.

Starlings, though hated and maligned, are extremely intelligent creatures (all birds are smart, and that is one of the many reasons I don't eat animals or their secretions) who can mimic human speech, music, robot sounds, and any array of sounds. Mozart had a beloved starling for whom he had a funeral, despite being very poor. Keep in mind he skipped his own father's funeral. 

Against my better judgement and after much meditation, I decided to keep the bird. I gendered her and named her Clarice "Beaker" Starling Steele, and reluctantly, I committed to her lifetime care. I battled with this -- I wanted to set her free outside. Then I did the research. Starlings live 3-5 years in the wild, fewer than that if they don't start out with a bird mom and an actual flock like Clarice. My thoughts were "She might survive out there, and if she escapes as wild birds are wont to do, I hope she makes it."   In captivity, starlings can live 25+ years. I was planning to have Clarice when I was well into my 70s.

I bought her a big cage that is large enough to be called an aviary. She lived on the porch and seemed to enjoy it. I bought an air conditioner to keep the porch cool. If she was going to live with me, I was determined that she would live in high style.

She was feisty but she was also sweet. She fell asleep in my hand. She would close her eyes in bliss when I fed her and she let me kiss her. 

Around the end of July, she had a day where she seemed to be less feisty and more fatigued than usual. I had taken her to my lessons at a nearby music studio and she sat on my shoulder the entire time. She actually potty-trained herself and would not crap on me or students. Instead, she would hop off to the floor or another nearby table or surface and do her business. She was very intelligent. 

The next day, when I got out to the porch, she was struggling to fly and was on the floor of her aviary. She darted into her favorite place in the world: my hair. She continued to struggle and would not take food. Then she began to seize. She died within a minute, fighting to stay alive while having seizures. I felt the spirit guides come for her and I knew it was her time, so I sang an Orphic hymn. I am convinced she waited and made sure I was there because she knew I alone could call upon the guides for her. 

I cancelled my lessons for the day and grieved. I cleaned up her aviary for the last time as her body laid on the porch. My husband came down, and seeing how upset I was, viewed the body and researched what could have caused her death.

Clarice seems to have had a birth defect of the lungs that is common to starlings. From the swelling on her chest, we were able to determine that her lungs were leaky and probably exploded. This defect was likely something she had in the nest she was kicked out of. Mother birds have very sensitive hearing and they can hear worms in the ground. It is highly likely Clarice's mother booted her out of the nest upon realizing she was a lost cause. Nature is ruthless because she has to be. 

In the following weeks, I gave away the aviary and a smaller bird cage we had bought for Clarice. I also gave away some of the expensive soft-bill bird food I bought for her to the local bird rehab place, which they were happy to have. To make myself feel better, I filled the space where Clarice's cage was with live plants and made it into a cozy place to read and take naps. 

I only had four weeks and a few days with Clarice but I loved her very much. I did not love the inconvenience of working around and avoiding interactions between her and my 3 indoor and 3 outdoor cats. I was truly committed to her and thinking of life 25 years from now without her makes me very sad. I have a funny feeling, however, that she will be back. There have been signs. I recently had a dream that she had reincarnated as a baby owl, specifically a Great Horned Owl, and was trapped in a zoo. I visited the zoo in the dream and she escaped her enclosure and flew directly into my hair. A mishap in the dream ended in her death, and I woke up crying. Then when I got up, I randomly looked at Nextdoor.com and someone had taken a photo of a Great Horned Owl and posted it to show off. 

From what my guides tell me, Clarice wants to reincarnate as one of my future pets, and allegedly she wants to try to cram herself into my final years as Kimberly Steele, being unwilling to wait until I am reincarnated as somebody else. I am not sure why she is in such a hurry and I have expressed this. 

It is always difficult to lose a pet and no matter how many times it happens to me, it always rips my heart out. What is so odd about a companion animal dying is that it is, in a perverse way, harder than losing a human family member. Pets are eternally children and never have any of that nasty guilt we humans accumulate for ourselves, even when they are truly bad. One reason watching an animal die is so hard is that they cannot speak to us in our language. I don't know what I would have done without my Ogham (Ogham is the divination system I am most comfortable with) because they gave me play-by-plays of the afterlives for several pets that passed. They gave sage advice and reassurance in a way that no human could provide or understand. 

I believe dead pets speak to us through dreams and divination, and that is why it is so important to do the work of discursive meditation to decipher dreams and divination. One of the worst things about being alive right now at the bottom of the Kali Yuga is that most people dwell in spiritual ignorance. As a person who communicates with the dead and occasionally acts as a psychopomp -- a being who eases the transition between the worlds for the dead and dying -- I am a freak and a weirdo. There are eras of this world where my talents would have been no big deal, the equivalent of being able to strum a guitar and sing along. In this Dark Age of the spirit, I am a unicorn of specialization. Yet I will always maintain that we can all speak to the dead. All of us have the talent to do this, but the main problem is most of us lack the discernment to figure out to whom we are actually speaking. There are beings called impersonator spirits that I discuss in my book Sacred Homemaking who are the creeps of the unseen world, tricking humans into believing they are Grandma, Napoleon, or the spirits of innocent children. Those who have not done a ton of discursive meditation and regular banishing rituals are prey to these predator spirits, along with a host of other nasty things from the lower astral who take advantage of grief and narcissism. 

The dead are gone and also not gone. This is Meatworld, the dirty, disgusting, heavy terminus and butthole of existence where ideas literally go to die. It is not easy to be here, but if you are here, you chose this and must work within its confines and limits. Oddly enough, to die is to live. Physical death frees us from expressing ourselves in matter, and when that part of existence is cut off, the consciousness retracts and heals itself from the open, festering wound that is Meatworld. Yet you always see me out here pimping for gratitude for Meatworld things and nagging people to clean their toilets. Why? Because to do so is to stubbornly focus on the lightest, least dense parts of Meatworld and to pierce the illusion of beauty to plumb the truth behind the veil. The truth is that all beings wish to be recognized for their goodness and what they did right. Clarice loved being seen for her fire and she loved being protected by a mother who wasn't willing to abandon her, even if she was doomed. 

Today my husband came into the house with a praying mantis on him.  He was a little freaked out at first. He got over it quickly and was then very happy as he believes a mantis hitching a ride is good luck and a good omen. In my case, I heard the mantis's voice in my head. This mantis wanted to live on our porch. I said "Absolutely not", and put him or her on the hydrangea. Though I don't believe the mantis was Clarice, I believe it is another sign from her. She is extremely strong willed and I have no doubt she will be my pet someday, though to her chagrin, it might not be as Kimberly Steele with the long black hair.