A Brown Thrush
	LeeAnn was a pretty little thing with Jean Harlow hair and face to match. She lived in the jungle treehouse on my property twenty-five feet above the ground in the trees. Being a zoo employee, like so many of my friends, she loved living this lifestyle in the swamps. I loved having her as a resident because her having worked at two of the major zoos in Tampa, even though I was retired, it was like old home week. She regularly brought baby animals home with her that needed round the clock feeding and care. It was a hoot having the chimpanzee babies here. LeeAnn was renting here while she was waiting for her approval to go to Africa. Her boyfriend had left almost a year earlier and was waiting for her to join him. Unfortunately a far too close encounter with the savage jaws of a bull hippo in Botswana changed those plans. One day LeeAnn asked me if she could bring home a brown thrush to release here on the property. A brown thrush is a "neighborhood type" bird about the size of a mockingbird. As a chick it had fallen out of it's nest and a Good Samaritan found it and brought it to the zoo where it had been hand raised until it was ready to be released. She said it was used to people and was very tame. I told her it was fine with me but that I wouldn't recommend it. The reason was that in the many years I had lived here I'd never once seen a brown thrush. There had to be a reason for that. There are many hawks and owls in this area and I wasn't sure how safe it would be for him. The next day when LeeAnn came home from work she had the bird with her. For several months after that every time she or I would come in the front gate the bird would come flying all the way down my very long driveway and land on our shoulder to greet us. It was really pretty nice and I started looking forward to it. I would regularly see him sitting on the tops of fence posts grooming his feathers and not paying a bit of attention to his surroundings which in the woods can be fatal. These are the things that real bird parents teach their young. One day he was gone and we never saw him again. About ten years later I was going out to a weekly Thursday night dinner with my friend and neighbor, Jerry who lives in a cabin down in the woods behind my property. On the side of the country road I happened to see a bird (no, not the brown thrush) that had been hit by a car, like we've all seen before. But the bird was alive and holding its head up. About a half mile down the road I said "Jerry" and I told him what I had seen. I said "I'm sorry. I know this is crazy but can we go back." Jerry turned the car around without questioning it. I don't know what I thought we'd do. We put the bird inside an old felt hat that was in the back seat. By the time we reached the restaurant he was gone. On the way home I told Jerry "I guess you think I'm kind of goofy to want to stop and check on that bird." He said "No, not at all. I have feelings for the animals too and they have an unexplainable attraction to me. You may not believe this but one day about ten years ago I was out in my front yard and a wild brown thrush just flew down out of nowhere and landed on my shoulder." Lynn Ash