At first the rehabilitator was like a mother bird guarding her nest. "I don't talk to journalists," she said. But Curtis was persistent, offered to pay for a meal, and the two bonded over wine and lunch. They haven't stopped talking since.
The author was stunned by Woods' depth of knowledge, reassured by her matter-of-fact manner. Both traits are evident when they got together one recent morning.
Smiling beneath wire-rimmed glasses, Woods, 59, is a fountain of conversation, anecdote and fact.
One of her never-ending tasks, she says, is helping the public separate truth from fiction. That often means relieving them of their tendency to anthropomorphize. When people find a baby bird struggling on the ground, for instance, they often assume it's all alone, when in fact the mother is almost always nearby. ("Watch it for an hour," she tells them. "If mama doesn't show up, call me." She rarely hears back.)
Baby bunnies and fawns that appear to have been abandoned rarely are: Their mothers habitually leave their young alone for hours so they can go forage.
Then there are the esoteric cases. Woods tells of saving a wren that fell into a can of brown paint. (The remedy: washing it with Dawn detergent.) She's now working with a squirrel whose adopted owners fed it a diet of peanuts. (If a squirrel can't get hard walnuts, its curved teeth curl around and grow back through its jawbone - a condition that a pair of good nail clippers can cure.)
"There's a reason it's called 'wildlife,' " she says with a kindly frown.
The theme to her tales is simple: When dealing with wildlife, act with the head, not just the heart.
"They're not pets," says Woods, who religiously avoids giving her charges names.
That kind of clarity, Curtis says, is what brought her emerging book to life.
A question to inspire
Curtis has so much energy that when she's writing, she often sits on an exercise ball, not a desk chair. And she has methods for priming her imagination. One is to ask, "What if?"
In this case, she wondered, "What would happen if a baby owl fell out of its nest?"
At first, she had little clue. To her, owls were contradictory creatures. On the one hand, they seemed "thoughtful, placid, so beautifully detached." On the other, she was intrigued by a common nickname for one breed common to Maryland, the great horned owl: the flying tiger.
"I have to tell you, I knew as much about owls as your average well-read second-grader," she says.
