When Rachel awoke, fluffy cumulus clouds were floating across the face of the sun. She was late. She had overslept, and she panicked.

She flew quickly to a nearby stream, bathed hurriedly, and zoomed back up to her nest. She stood in front of her mirror and preened her feathers, paying special attention to her headfeathers. She was trying a new 'do' for this special occasion. Rachel was vain, and she knew it, but today everything had to be just right, especially today. Last year...well, she wasn't going to think about that anymore. That was then, and this is now. Tommy Thrush is in my past, she thought, and I can't think of him now. I've got to find myself a new birdman, a new life, and I've got to stop thinking like this. She hit herself in the head with a pinfeather to jog her thoughts back to reality, back to the duties at hand.

She stood back in front of her mirror and took a full length view of herself. She wiggled her hips, smoothed her feathers. and hopped onto the rim of her nest. She cocked her head from side to side and listened to the forest.

It was virtually impossible to discern a Blackburnian Warbler's song from all the others in the cacophony of sounds that rattled the forest. This was not a well-orchestrated concert. Nature had chiseled the lyrics and melody line of each bird's special song on the lines and spaces of their teeny brains. With all the different species having a different song, in a different key, timed at a different meter, and prodded by Nature's promise of the ultimate orgasm, all of the horny cocks were trying to sing the loudest. It was a tooth-gnashing, backboard scratching sound that could drive a bird to drink and use drugs and it did on many occasions.

Rachel decided that she would have to relocate to have a better angle from which to listen. She looked around and spotted a tall white oak tree about two hundred yards away at the edge of the forest. She sprung into the air and flew toward the top of the white oak, but about halfway there she thought she heard a Blackburnian Warbler singing the melodic strains of her favorite love ballad, "Feelings." The voice of this Warbler was different, though. The only other sound Rachel had ever heard that was anything like this Warbler's voice was a semi-truck with bad brakes screeching to a hurried halt. She throttled back, pulled her nose up and slowed to VMC (velocity of minimum control). She descended in a shallow left turn, lowering into the forest in the direction from which she thought her new lifemate was singing to her. She was moving her head from side to side, her eyes scanning the forest, trying to get a fix on this weird and outrageous voice, trying to 'home in' on her future lover's magnificent and excitedly different sound. Rachel realized that the voice was coming from near the edge of the forest. She throttled up, climbed above the treetops, made a wide circle over a lush meadow, and turned back toward the forest. She slowed to VMC once again as she descended toward the forest and sailed low over the dogwood three where Willie was performing. Rachel realized she had overshot her lover and hurriedly jammed the throttle to the firewall, made a sharp steep right bank and pulled into a 5-G right turn. As she headed back toward the dogwood tree, she slowed to VMC once again. She moved her head back and forth quickly as she peered downward and was so intent on locating her new mate, she didn't notice that she was headed directly for a maple tree. Rachel raised her head to see the tree trunk only a millisecond before she hit it, ker-splat! Her head hit the trunk a little off center and to the right, thank goodness, and thank goodness she had slowed to VMC. Her natural instincts, however, in case of an emergency, was to go to full power until the problem could be determined. She had involuntarily jammed the throttle full forward at the instant of impact. She caromed off the trunk of the maple tree and fluttered through the air at full power. Rachel was completely out of control as she tumbled into the top of the bushy dogwood tree. She tried frantically to grab any available limb with her tiny talons as she plunged downward. Her fragile wings were a blur, stuck at full throttle. In her semiconscious state Rachel was totally at the mercy of fate. Down through the limbs of the dogwood tree she tumbled, zigzagging from one bushy limb to another until she plummeted to the ground, ker-plop, where she lay quivering uncontrollably, unconscious!

Rachel's gyroscope had been jarred out of synchronization and her mental and bodily functions were all askew. (Unlike the gyroscopes we are all so familiar with--the type that controls the major axis' of pitch, roll and yaw--a bird's gyroscope also has the additional duties of supervising their memory and it's functions, plus repairing any physical damage that might occur.)

Rachel's primitive, survival instincts went to work to save her. The wound on her head was superficial, and while a part of her brain attended to the minor repairs in that area, the remaining portion began to review her past.