pelicans are especially special

In August of 2008, I was on a camping trip on the northern coast with the man I didn't yet know was to be my husband, and a couple of friends.  It's a place that's very special to him, a status that I attribute to a previous trip that he spent agog on the beach for days watching whales breach offshore.  I've only ever seen one there, but I imagine that watching a pod of the behemoths flopping around in the surf is like finding god and spying on his playtime with his friends.  The four of us illustrious campers were on a walk on the beach, approaching a pelican seated in the shorebreak -- by which I mean, periodically a wave actually pushed him further up the beach and partially onto his side before he righted himself.  I took pictures as we approached, awaiting the inevitable trigger-point of take-off over the water.  It never came.

That pelican let me walk right up next to him and sit down on the sand, with hardly a protest.  Initially, I was fairly certain he was going to use that two-foot beak to teach my fingers a lesson they'd not soon forget, but he must have been so sick or exhausted as to warrant such an expenditure of effort unfeasible.  Like when you're in the emergency room with as-yet-undiagnosed mono, and the effort of pulling on your winter coat over your pajamas and walking across the street to the hospital has sapped all your remaining energy and you gratefully pass out in a holding room for three hours until the doctor discovers you there, curled up alone in the fetal position on that rickety hospital cot, undisturbed by the GSW-induced screams and short-on-patience patients around you.  Because surely, anything that could befall you in such a state could not be resisted anyway, especially by such a paltry defense as you could mount.

After ascertaining that I wasn't a threat, the pelican closed his eyes as I gently stroked the feathers on the top of his head.  He rested his head on his breast.  The pictures of us together on the beach are lovely, but they're a facade.  That pelican smelled of rotting fish, his feathers were bedraggled, he lacked the strength to stand up, and his entire body was crawling with bugs.  They poked in and out among dirty down feathers as we sat together on the sand, him resigned, me protective.  Later, I had to comb them out of my hair, although I'm not sure they were actually there.  My friends had proceeded up the beach and were sitting a short distance away, having had the sense to avoid a dying wild animal, and one to which they could give no aid.

When I was a child, a fledgling goldfinch crashed into our sliding glass door and blinded himself.  After he didn't leave the scene of the accident overnight, we brought him inside and put him in a cardboard box with a dish of water, and the family took turns catching bugs to feed him.  In the mornings, that bird sang his little heart out, perched in the middle of his cardboard box.  Perhaps he was calling his parents, I don't know, but he didn't seem anxious about his new lifestyle and was eating well.  After a few days, we dropped him off at the bird sanctuary.  Soon after, we received a form letter thanking us for our effort and informing us that since the blinded bird would be unable to survive, they'd euthanized him.

It seemed harsh to a seven-year-old, but it was clearly the route that produced the least pain and suffering.  I have since often wished that people showed the same humanity to our human loved ones as we do to our pets.  And so, communing with that sick pelican on the beach, it became suddenly clear to me that the proper next step was to end the pelican's suffering.  The conclusion was both horrifying and calming to reach: I couldn't imagine killing that poor bird that had decided to trust me, but neither could I imagine leaving him to his destiny when he was too weak to defend himself against marauders.  So I sat with the idea for a while.

I used to hold a job that required me to cull litters and to euthanize animals, under the auspices of an institutional review board, i.e., via scientifically humane measures...but I didn't have a CO chamber or any sodium pentobarbitol or even an axe.  Once, when I was house-sitting for my parents, a mousetrap failed to kill its victim and my father had advised me to put the entire trap into a bucket of water and hold it there.  I cried my damn eyes out doing that, but I do think it was the kindest thing I could have done.  Although I was standing adjacent to the largest stretch of water in the world, holding an adult pelican underwater did not seem like a good option.  But I could probably break his neck.  After that, the bird would feel no pain and would die very quickly, especially if I could cut off his breathing.  And I shuddered to myself, because how could I do such a thing, when the bird had such a long and flexible neck?  It was imperative that the operation go well, because otherwise I would be torturing instead of alleviating.  And that's when my future husband came back and sat down next to me, while I was pondering how best to go about breaking this pelican's neck.

I wanted to tell him what I was going to do, and tried to start a couple of times, but I thought I'd lose my resolve if I vocalized it.  I hoped he would tire of the monotony and go back to our friends, but he didn't.  And then something told me that it was time to do this thing, and I thought maybe it was the bird.  So I did it, without having warned my poor husband-to-be, who was sitting right next to me, because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to do it.

And now I can say that, beyond the emotional component, breaking a pelican's neck is at least as mechanically challenging as I anticipated it might be.  I think I can also say that the procedure went as successfully as it could have, at least in terms of the bird's experience.  My future husband was as shocked as anyone would be if his vegetarian girlfriend suddenly killed a docile animal with her bare hands, without having given any prior indication of intent.  He maintained a little distance from me for the remainder of the afternoon, and I could place no blame on him for it, although I felt a little barbaric and like a pariah, I have always felt I did the right thing.  After it was done, I was going to put the bird's body up in the brush on the beach, but took the boyfriend's suggestion to put it in the surf, because it was a seabird.  And I did , and our friends joined us and asked if the bird had died, and I said yes, and B said that I had done it a kindness by sitting with it during its last moments.  And I agree.