“We found something!” Two girls stood huddled together in a dusty farmyard. They seemed to be holding something small between them.
“It’s a baby bird,” they said, holding the creature up so that the adults could see.
A little panting creature sat in the palm of one girl’s hand. It’s black feathers showed it to be on the older end of the baby-bird spectrum. It was submitting without objection to the girls’ affection but it was hard to imagine that it could have enjoyed it much.
The adults looked up, hoping to see an anxious mother flying around, but the sky was clear.
“Probably came from the nests up there,” said the farm’s owner. She pointed to the second floor of the large, rough-sided barn. The bird must have tipped out of its nest and slid down a long length of sun-baked metal roof before dropping into the dust where the girls had found it.
“Stop!” one of the girls said irritably. “I’m holding it!”
“I get to hold it, too,” snapped the other, jostling to take control of the bird.
“Girls!” remonstrated one of the adults.
“At least the bird picked the right place to get lost,” said another. He was right.
This farm was no ordinary farm, but a refuge for ancient, mistreated and badly knocked-about animals. Officially a sanctuary for 20 donkeys, the place was also home to 32 lounging, slinking cats (some whole, some mangled), four old and confused pot-bellied pigs, a couple of sway-backed ponies, a pair of sheep and a widower pigeon named Walter.
In the barn, spider webs sagged under the weight of dust and heaps of metal implements lay in corners. But the light for the creatures was not the bare bulbs you’d expect to see in a typical working farm; here the stalls were lit by chandeliers and faux Tiffany lamps.
In the paddock outside, one donkey lay in the dust, his poor hooves horribly split and splayed from the neglect he had suffered earlier in his life. Beside him stood a small black animal with scarred sides; this donkey’s previous owners had amused themselves by applying an electrical whip to him to make him bray.
Now all these creatures were surrounded by kindness. The farm’s humans spoke gently as they moved about, stroking the animals: “Hello, Goliath. Hey there, Primrose.” Here even the plight of a lost baby bird was treated as something that mattered.
“We can’t leave the little fellow where you found him, he’ll get trampled to death,” a farmworker was telling the girls. He leaned on his pitchfork and frowned.
“Or eaten,” said one of the children, shuddering at the sight of the slinking cats she’d been admiring only moments ago.
The farm’s owner reappeared holding, of all things, an actual bird’s nest.
“It’s old, but it’ll work,” she said. Soon she and the girls had installed the bird in the nest, and wedged the nest in the crook of a tree across the road; it was a sanctuary within a sanctuary and, in its small way, it was a beautiful thing to see.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
