Josie escaped on Columbus Avenue two days before the storm reached New York. What the vet found four days later explained how he had stayed alive.
A Friday On Columbus Avenue
On Friday, August 26, 2011, Jim DiGiovanni and his partner John Casserly left their building on West 81st Street to take their two cockatiels to the vet. Both birds travelled in a single handheld carrier.
Halfway across Columbus Avenue, Casserly crouched to check that the carrier door was properly fastened. The door fell open instead — the exact failure the ten-minute check before vet day is designed to catch.
Josie and Cliffy went straight up. For a few seconds DiGiovanni could still pick them out among the trees of Theodore Roosevelt Park, beside the American Museum of Natural History.
Then they were gone. Neither bird had spent a day of its life outdoors. “What a nightmare,” DiGiovanni said. “It was the worst moment of my life.”
One Bird Came Back
The two men moved fast. DiGiovanni went to his building’s resident manager, Stephen Murphy, whose 14-year-old son Aidan put together a full-color missing poster.
DiGiovanni ran off fifty copies immediately. He and Casserly papered the blocks between West 81st and 77th streets, along Central Park West, and — for reasons that mattered four days later — near the Central Park Conservancy’s headquarters at 79th Street.
Around ten that night, a woman who had seen one of the posters found Cliffy. The three-year-old white female was on West 81st Street at Central Park West, bleeding and badly injured.
Casserly rushed her to a 24-hour emergency vet on the Upper East Side. She died at about one in the morning, possibly from a fight with another bird. “That bird trusted us and we blew it,” DiGiovanni said.
The Cage On The Sidewalk
Casserly went looking for method rather than luck. An online cockatiel forum called Tiel Talk advised searching just before sunrise, when the pre-dawn quiet makes it easier for a lost pet to hear its owner calling.
They followed a second tip and set Josie’s cage on the sidewalk outside the building, door propped open, food dishes stocked. The doorman kept watch so nobody walked off with it.
At 4:30 on Saturday morning the two of them went out and walked for hours, calling Josie’s name and playing a musical toy with a chirping tone he liked to imitate. That toy was the closest thing they had to a recall cue.
A bird that steps onto a hand without hesitating is a bird with something to come back to, and the trust work every recall cue is built on happens in five-minute sessions months before anyone needs it. Josie had lived with them for 14 years and could say exactly one thing: “pretty bird.”
Then Irene Arrived
They set out again on Sunday. The rain and wind from Hurricane Irene picked up and forced them to stop.
The storm dumped several inches of rain on Central Park and left felled trees and branches across it. DiGiovanni did the arithmetic anyone would do.
If the hurricane had not killed Josie, a red-tailed hawk or a feral cat almost certainly had. “We couldn’t imagine at that point that Josie was alive,” he said. “I was completely beside myself with grief.”
Escapes of this kind almost always begin with one fastening nobody checked twice — a carrier latch, a screen, a door left on the catch. That is the whole argument for the five-minute loop before any window opens, on the days it feels excessive as much as the days it does not.
A Call On Tuesday
On Tuesday, August 30, the phone rang. A woman said she had found Josie, and Casserly told DiGiovanni to hang up — he assumed someone was chasing the reward they had offered.
She convinced him otherwise. She worked for the Central Park Conservancy, and a family walking through the park had spotted a small grey bird hunkered down under a bench near the statue of William Shakespeare, at the south end of Literary Walk by East 66th Street.
Josie had covered more than 1.6 km (over a mile) from West 81st Street. He seemed “traumatized” and did not respond when the workers spoke to him, said Conservancy spokeswoman Dena Libner, but he let them lift him out and they nestled him inside a jacket in the back of a golf cart to keep him warm and dry.
A supervisor drove him back to the Conservancy’s headquarters near 79th Street, where an employee recognized him from the poster someone had pinned to the yard bulletin board. The moment DiGiovanni and Casserly arrived and the bird could hear their voices, he began chirping. “It was immediately responsive to the owners,” Libner said.
Sixty-Two Grams
The two men took him straight to the Center for Avian and Exotic Medicine on Columbus Avenue. He was weak, emaciated, severely dehydrated and could not keep his eyes open — the state in which what you do in the first fifteen minutes decides most of what follows.
Cockatiels normally weigh 90 to 100 grams (3.2 to 3.5 oz). Four days out, Josie was down to 62 grams (2.2 oz).
An X-ray showed what he had been eating. He had tried to feed himself on bits of gravel and pieces of metal picked up off the ground, because birds raised with a full dish in front of them never develop foraging skills and are not equipped to find real food, avian vet Rina Maguire explained.
Maguire’s reading was that the hurricane may actually have worked in Josie’s favor, since it at least gave him a steady supply of water. Her prognosis was blunt anyway: “He was pretty much dying,” she said. “If they had waited another two hours to find him, it would have been too late.”
Back On The Eleventh Floor
Maguire had put Josie’s chances at “not better than 50-50”, and DiGiovanni went home expecting a call the next morning saying the bird had died in the night. The call never came.
Vets checked that his internal organs were still working, then gave him antibiotics, fluids and medicines to clear the metal toxins out of his body. When the two men visited the following day, Josie flew up and “kissed” DiGiovanni on the ear.
He went home after four days of treatment, to the eleventh-floor apartment at West 81st and Columbus. By the next Tuesday he was back up to 72 grams (2.5 oz). “He’s a very lucky bird,” Maguire said. “Most birds when they’re out for that long, and they’re that sick, they don’t make it.”
DiGiovanni tried to press $300 in cash on the Conservancy employee who had recognized Josie from the poster. She refused it, so he bought a membership instead. “I’m a member for life, with automatic renewals every year, thanks to this,” he laughed.
Cliffy never came home. That is the part of this story that does not resolve, and it left a two-bird household as a one-bird household overnight — an arrangement that carries tradeoffs most owners only weigh up afterwards.
Josie could say one thing, and it was not an explanation. “Where Josie was during the hurricane, only Josie knows,” DiGiovanni said. A carrier door that was not quite shut cost one bird her life and came within about two hours of costing the other his — and what closed that gap was fifty photocopies and a stranger who thought to look under a bench.
Source: “Lost Pet Bird Found Alive After Riding Out Hurricane Irene in Central Park”, by Leslie Albrecht, DNAinfo New York, 14 September 2011. Every name, date, weight and quote in this article is taken from that report. The DNAinfo archive is preserved by WNYC / New York Public Radio.