Smart Enough To Know I'm Stupid

By Deborah Markus, from Secular Homeschooling, Issue #2, Winter 2008

Socrates apparently took great pride in his own ignorance. He never wrote down a word of his teachings, but is credited with saying, "All I know is that I know nothing at all."

I love these words. Where I grew up, pretty much everyone said "I know" when they meant "I think," "I believe," or "I would like this to be true." It didn't matter if the topic of discussion was of serious significance or something utterly mundane. In fact, it seemed that the more trifling the subject matter, the more important it was for the speakers not to be perceived as wrong or unsure. What ought to have been conversations would spiral into screaming matches.

I didn't realize until much later in my life that this constant insistence on being acknowledged to be right was a sign of deep insecurity. It takes a great deal of strength to be able to say, firmly and unapologetically, "I don't know," or "I'm not sure," or "I could be wrong about that."

It's my impression that American society specifically discourages this kind of admission of necessary doubt. Maybe the implication that learning is a never-ending process is too unnerving to face.

I was taught in high school, as was my husband, that one should never use the phrase "I think" when writing a paper. "Obviously you think it, or why would you be writing it?" one teacher asked sarcastically. It troubled me that we should phrase our opinions as hard facts, in the name of making a stronger argument.

School was supposed to be a sort of hospital for the treatment of advanced, but curable, ignorance. Yet we were taught that hiding our lack of knowledge was as important as remedying it. When we took tests, we were encouraged to guess the answer to any questions we weren't sure about. A test wasn't an exploration of how much one knew or had learned about a subject; it was a game to be won. The prizes: good grades and not being thought a fool.

This attitude reminds me of the "teaching" done in the school Dickens portrays so vividly in Hard Times. At one point, a visiting official asks the class a yes or no question. Not one of the children has any idea of the answer; they barely understand what's being asked. But they do know that they have a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right.

After a pause, one half of the children cried in chorus, "Yes, sir!" Upon which the other half, seeing in the gentleman's face that Yes was wrong, cried out in chorus, "No, sir!" — as the custom is in these examinations.

This goes on and on. The "wrong half" is sneered at by teachers, visiting officials, and fellow students alike — though it's obvious that those guessing correctly have no more real information or understanding than the others do. The only child who is brave enough not to go along with this charade, and to ask questions of her own about the misguided principles and priorities of the school, is told she's a fool and reduced to tears.

All of this is a roundabout way of explaining a rather odd educational priority of my own: I want my son to understand and acknowledge his own ignorance. Learning is exciting and constant, but no one knows everything, and there's no shame in that.

To bring this point home early on in our homeschooling career, I would ask him questions about matters that were beyond anything we'd ever read about or discussed, so that he'd answer, "I don't know." I would then praise him for knowing his own limits, and thank him for giving me the chance to teach him — because how could I, if he already knew everything?

Of course the karma police were keeping an eye on me. I never knew that a clear and timely understanding of my own ignorance could be the difference between life and death for a small, beautiful creature until one exceptionally gorgeous park day.

It was the kind of spring afternoon that even southern Californians marvel at. My son and I were standing with several other homeschool families next to a picnic table, mourning that we hadn't brought more brownies, when three kids came running over full-tilt. I was pretty much the only grownup not engaged in conversation, so I was singled out to hear the news.

"It's a baby bird," one of the children said breathlessly. "A hummingbird."

"He fell out of the nest or something," another explained. "He's flapping, but he can't fly."

"Stop calling it a ‘he,'" the only boy in the group said indignantly. "It could be a girl, you know."

"He keeps making squeaky, cheeping noises," the first girl said. "We've been watching him for almost an hour, but his mom hasn't come back for him."

"It could be a girl," the boy reiterated.

My family and I live in the city. The visits by hummingbirds to the feeder we've hung on our apartment's balcony rail are precious touches of nature in our urban lives. I long for a house — a real home, as I insist on think of it — but there is something wonderful about having hummingbirds at my son's eye level and only a few feet away from us all year round.

I've read a little about them. I know how to brew their food, and that you don't have to add red coloring to it even when you're first starting out as long as the feeder is red — and certainly not once the birds are aware of the feeder's existence and visiting regularly. I know that starting up a feeder is a real responsibility, and that the sugar-water should be changed at least a few times a week even if the birds don't drink that much. Hummingbirds have been known to die from drinking from poorly cared-for feeders. They often announce their presence with a singular, metallic call that reminds me of nothing so much as a staple gun.

My son and I hurried to see this baby in distress. And there it was, clinging to the thick roots of a tree and occasionally emitting a squeak.

"Don't touch it!" several children shrieked when one of their number moved toward it.

"But it's so cute," the little girl in question protested.

"If you touch it, the mother won't take care of it any more," one of the older children said solemnly. "She'll smell that a human's touched her baby, and she'll never let it back in the nest."

That was the same thing I'd been told, and dutifully repeated, when I was a child. I'd only recently learned from a caretaker at the San Diego Wild Animal Park that it wasn't true. However, she'd also told us that not touching fallen birds was a good idea for other reasons, so I decided against arguing against this piece of misinformation for the moment.

I thought quickly. I knew I wasn't an expert, but based on all the watching I'd done, this bird didn't look quite big enough to be out of the nest. It was, as the children had said, failing at every attempt to fly. More importantly, it was out of the nest and close to the ground in a park full of small children. I worried about the possibility of its coming to harm at the hands of an excited little one.

"I think he likes me," the girl who'd wanted to pick it up before said confidently, as if to confirm my concerns. "He wants me to hold him."

"I don't think that's a good idea, sweetheart." I looked up at the branches of the tree. "Can anyone see the nest?" I asked. "Look carefully. It'll be pretty small." Not only could I perhaps put the bird back if I found its home, but searching for that gave the children something useful and bird-related to do, and drew their attention away from the idea of attempting to hold it.

None of us could see anything even remotely nest-like. The baby was still sending its distress call, and still fluttering awkwardly.

"I guess maybe we should bring it home," I said.

A chorus of excited voices answered this. Every mother's child there wanted that bird to be the newest, smallest member of the family.

"I saw it first," one of the children said. "I want to keep it."

I felt like a bully taking the biggest piece of birthday cake. "Honey, it's not about that," I said. "This bird could never be a pet. It just needs to be taken care of until it can take care of itself. A lot of hummingbirds live where we do, and we have a feeder. I think we could give it what it needs."

I sent my son over to where the grownups were standing and talking, and told him to explain the situation and ask if anyone had something that might be used to bring it home. After some thought and several trips to cars, we managed to rig up something out of what used to be a cracker box, some aluminum foil, and a lot of paper towels.

Hoping against hope that I wouldn't throw the poor thing into a fatal panic, I picked up the baby hummer. Its heartbeat was so rapid that it felt like a purr, and its flapping became so frantic and sustained that I was amazed it still couldn't fly. I slipped it into the improvised "nest" and carried it to our car, followed by a swarm of children. I don't remember which of them suggested that it ought to be named Spirit, but I promised that we wouldn't call it anything else, and that I would keep everyone posted on its progress.

Getting Spirit home was more difficult than I'd anticipated. My son was delighted at first to hold the box. However, it didn't shut completely, and Spirit was agitated, flinging himself around. He might not be able to fly, but he could sure move. We ended up having to pull over so I could climb into the back and try to get things under control. I had a horrible image of a just-learned-to-fly baby hummingbird hurtling around the interior of our car like a deranged bumblebee, possibly hurting himself and driving my son into hysterics, and then I thought about how I'd explain all that to the cops when they asked why, exactly, I'd found it necessary to park in a total stranger's bay window. Our air conditioning was broken, but needless to say we kept all windows shut

We live in an apartment. We don't have a cat or a dog. We do, however, have a pet lizard, and this lizard has what we call his playpen — an enclosed mesh cylinder, about three feet tall and maybe eighteen inches in diamater, that he sunbathes in, with a clean towel on the bottom and a little flap of a door that zips open and shut.

"Let's put Spirit in the playpen," my son said as soon as we arrived home and managed to get safely upstairs.

I was glad that one of us was thinking straight. I'd slipped back into the state of mind I remembered all too well from my son's early infancy — that drop-everything-and-panic mode I fell into when he wailed to let me know that he needed to eat. Feeding this new baby would be trickier, but I remembered something I'd read, oh, years ago, about a baby animal pathetically sucking nourishment from a damp rag.

We put Spirit in the pen, box and all, and I boiled up some sugar water for him. (Or her, I reminded myself sternly.) I poured it into a glass measuring cup, found a clean, soft cloth, and brought them both to where Spirit and my son sat waiting.

I didn't look anything like poor Spirit's mama, but he figured out pretty quickly that I was there to take her place as best I could. After a few false starts, he managed to take some sugar water, and seemed more relaxed.

He also seemed smaller and more vulnerable in my home than he had outside. I began to wonder if he needed to be kept warm. And how long it would take him to learn to fly. And if my son and I would have to stay at home with him until he did.

I'd thought I had some kind of idea of what I was undertaking. Now I could hear Socrates laughing at me. Later I was able to find my favorite passage in The Apology, that brief, heartbreakingly funny work in which (at least according to Plato's recollections) Socrates defends himself with Puckish innocence against those he has infuriated:

I thought to myself, I am wiser than this man; for neither of us really knows anything fine and good, but this man thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not think I do either. I seem, then, in just this little thing, to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know, I do not think I know, either.

Knowing just a little, I'd flattered myself that I knew a great deal. Or at least enough to save a bird's life.

Well. What I didn't know, others would. I had only to ask.

Homeschooling has taught me to be grateful for computer technology. I left my son gazing lovingly at our tiny new friend and went to poke around on the Internet. I found a site, www.hummingbirds.net, that had a page with the section heading, "I found a baby hummingbird. Now what?"

I read eagerly. First, I should look around for the baby hummer's mother. She might be waiting for the humans to leave, so that she could feed her baby.

Well, I'd done that. The kids had said that the bird had been there for about an hour, and we'd stayed with it for another twenty minutes or so without seeing or hearing a mother bird.

I read on. I should make every attempt to find the nest and put the bird back in it.

I'd done that, too. Maybe I wasn't as ridiculously foolish as the Athenian citizen Socrates had mocked.

My heart gave a lurch at this sentence:

It's not legal to capture or technically even touch a wild bird without state and Federal permits, except under the supervision of a licensed individual, so please don't expose yourself to legal problems.

I could hear Socrates laughing hysterically.

Legal problems? Me? I'd never gotten so much as a speeding ticket. All I'd done was try to help a baby bird, and now the feds were going to be after me.

I tried to calm myself down. Surely it wasn't as dire as all that. Panicked, I read on.

Caring for baby hummers is neither easy nor straightforward — e.g., most of their natural diet is partially-digested insects, shoved directly down their throats all the way into their stomachs.

By now, my heart was in my shoes. I'd screwed up completely. I was in over my head.

I called my husband at work and sobbingly confessed why his wife was about to start living on the lam unless he had any ideas. "Why don't you call an animal hospital?" he suggested.

We were still paying off a lot of human medical bills; I wasn't sure I was up to racking up avian ones. "Just ask them what to do," he said. "I'm sure they get calls like this all the time."

I was lucky. The first one I found in the phone book recommended me to another one, whose staff recommended me to a hummingbird rehabilitator.

"That's a job?" I asked incredulously. I'd spent almost four decades on this planet without knowing that.

I obediently called the number given me and spoke to a kindly older woman named Jean. She listened sympathetically to my tale of woe, asked where I lived, and explained that she had trained someone who was much closer to me than she was. Perhaps I could call her? If Terry wasn't home, I could talk to Frank.

Thankfully, Terry was home, and would be more than happy to help. She asked detailed questions about Spirit, how long we'd been taking care of him, and what we'd been doing. I told her about our feeder and asked timidly about the sugar water I'd administered.

"Were you able to get him to drink any? That's great," she said, and I began to feel like less of a felon. "Just be careful not to spill any on his feathers."

"Oh," I said. "Okay. Um, why?"

"The sugar degrades the base of the feather," she explained matter-of-factly. "The feathers will fall out."

I was back on the wanted posters. I didn't think I'd dripped on Spirit, but how could I be sure? The poor thing might go bald, freeze to death, and die, all thanks to my inexpert ministrations.

I barely heard Terry asking if I'd mind taking care of the baby for a few more hours until she could come pick him up.

"Absolutely," I said. As long as expert help was on the way, I could hang in there a little longer. Anyway, it would give me time to break the news to my son.

I gave her directions to our place, hung up the phone, and told him that we wouldn't be able to take care of Spirit the way we'd hoped to. Of course he was unhappy. But, as I pointed out to him, our biggest priority was getting this bird the best care. If that meant we had to say goodbye to him, at least we'd had the privilege of spending a whole afternoon and part of the evening in his company.

My husband came home, admired our guest, and took a great many pictures of him. My son could barely tear himself away long enough to eat dinner.

Terry arrived at about eight o'clock. I spoke to her again on the phone a few weeks ago, to get more information about her work and let her know I'd be writing this article. She was concerned about my giving specifics about the care she gave our little friend, lest my readers should get the idea that this was something they could try themselves. I promised her that the whole reason I was writing it was to caution people against being as dumb and arrogant as I'd been, thinking I could take care of a baby hummer just because I'd occasionally enjoyed the company of adults of the species. Also, I'd mention the legal aspects prominently. Especially the fact that she's had to call the Department of Fish and Game on some people.

So when I say that Terry fed Spirit some high protein food right after arriving, I want to stress that this wasn't something she picked up at the health food store, and that getting it into him was nothing that anyone but a trained professional should even attempt. If you've ever seen a mother hummingbird feeding her young, and looking very much as if she's stabbing him to death with a knitting needle, you'll have some idea of how it looked when Terry used her syringe to jam some dinner down our thankful baby's throat.

"Most people freak when they see this," she said. "It takes years to learn. Scared me to death at first."

Terry stayed a few minutes to talk. We were all fascinated by what she had to say, not only because hummingbirds are innately wonderful, but because none of us had ever had any idea that people might devote a big part of their lives to unpaid work like this. I wondered if I'd ever get to the point of knowing enough about the world that I wouldn't keep stumbling over my own ignorance into rich little realms like this. I rather hoped not.

Terry's a professor at UCLA, and has her PhD in education, as well as master's degrees in philosophy and English as a second language. Her work with hummingbirds is a labor of love.

She said that our little one was an Allen's hummingbird, probably a few weeks old. Too young for us to be able to tell if it was male or female.

It was pretty early in the year for Terry to be getting hummingbird emergency calls. She'd start hearing from frantic sorts like me pretty steadily in May, and be inundated by calls in June and July. By August, she'd never want to see another hummingbird. And by spring, she'd be up for the adventure again.

Taking care of baby hummingbirds was as much work in its own way as taking care of a baby person. They have to be fed every half hour to an hour, though at least they don't eat at night. Our little one would be going into an incubator, and, when he or she was ready, a small flight cage. Terry would teach him how to catch bugs, and feeder train him. Suddenly, having taught my son to read didn't seem like that big a deal.

When I spoke to Terry recently, it was all I could do to scribble as fast as I could as she reeled off facts about the different breeds and behaviors — and I knew she was barely touching her store of knowledge on the subject. And yet she stressed that hummingbirds are still a mystery to researchers. Different species are always turning up in unexpected places. They're not supposed to imprint, but Terry swears that some of them sure seem to. "They're just like kids," she said. "They're all different. Some of them are quick learners, some of them need to take their time. They're all individuals."

That evening, of course, all we cared about was one particular individual. "I never make promises about this," Terry cautioned as she helped Spirit into a comfortable little travel box. "I can't guarantee that he's going to make it. But I will say that he looks strong and healthy. I think he's got a good chance."

I thanked her for being honest, and she promised she'd let us know how things went. Our apartment felt smaller and darker after she left.

I flinched every time the phone rang for the next week or two. I figured that, for a while at least, no news would be good news, and with the kind of workload Terry had, she wouldn't have time to call just to say everything was fine.

It was, though. We spoke to her again at the end of the summer. Spirit — whom she called Markus, after my son — was fine, and had started to fly just two days after Terry had brought him home.

"Except he's not a he," she said, laughing. Our bird was a fine and healthy female, now living in Terry's yard and drinking from her feeders.

I laughed, too, thinking of the little boy at the park who'd been fiercely indignant when we slipped into calling the bird "he." "It could be a girl!"

And he was right. Not just about Spirit-Markus being female, but about a larger point: that we should always be willing to admit our own ignorance if we ever hope to cure it.

Terry Masear and her husband Frank now have a web site, www.losangeleshummingbirdrescue.com. They get calls from all over the country, and have even saved birds over the phone. So far as they know, they are the only hummingbird rescue service on the Internet.

Note: In the magazine, the photos are in black and white (what with it being a black-and-white magazine and all).

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