When Doves Cry

An ecologist in Maine fears she will be criticized because she “communicates with animals.” Then a tiny, collared dove told her he could read her mind.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Glynn Washington?

  Dig if you will, a picture of a story that starts on the twist. She hears a voice inside of her. Can you, my darling, can you picture this? Today, for a very special episode, this is what it sounds like when doves cry. You've crossed over spooked. Stay tuned.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Why have so many crop circles appeared around Britain? How did thousands of people demonstrate powers of telepathy? Can the dead suck the life from the living? Join me, Tim Harford, for a trip into the paranormal throughout Halloween month on Cautionary Tales. Listen to Cautionary Tales on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:11Glynn Washington?

  Spooksters, today we begin with a secret. Our story isn't Sarah Wright, an oncologist who writes about animal behaviour and patterns in the natural world. There's one truth that Sarah knows about nature that she'd never want to speak about. Our in-assessment asked pretty, pretty please, if Sarah would tell us her secret.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  Sarah Wright told me that if I wanted to talk to her about her story, I'd have to come to her. So I drove to western Maine and ended up in the middle of nowhere, in the mountains, on a dirt road. And it got narrower and narrower until there was no road left, just forest. And then I got out of the car and walked through the trees. All right.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  And then I saw a tiny old woman with two long silver braids and high cheekbones, watering a patch of wildflowers in front of a log cabin. Hello.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  How are you, Anna?

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Good to meet you.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  Oh, good to meet you too.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  What a beautiful cabin. Are we going?

• 2:40Speaker 03

  OK, we're gonna go on the porch. But right now, we're gonna go inside.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Sarah brings me inside the cabin. A wood-walled living room with an aging couch, a screened-in porch. On her little white fridge, she's scrawled in a black sharpie, long slanting lists of animals and plants.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  I say, OK, sandhills arrive, turkey displays, I don't know, I do this every year. Grouse drums, cardinal songs, tip mouse arrives.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Oh, it goes around to the front, so go around the other side of the front. There's bears, frogs.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  She lives profoundly isolated in the woods. In the winter, she has to snowshoe to her car. But she loves the woods. She grew up playing in the great forests of the Northeast with only the animals and her little brother as company.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  We had nothing to distract us, and nobody was ever bothering us. We related to almost everything wild, everything we could get our hands on. I was three years older than my little brother, but we were soulmates.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  They'd wade through swamps and build forts and collect frogs. This one time, they even got a skunk in a live trap.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  My grandmother said, "No, don't get near that trap. He's gonna, you know, spray us." And we said, "No, he's not, he's not, he's not. He never did, of course." And so secretly, we went to the trap and let him out.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  And when they did, the skunk walked slowly out of the trap and then turned to the kids and looked them in the eyes. And that's when they asked it to be their friend.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Did you feel he understood you?

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely. We both understood that the skunk knew exactly what we were saying. And of course, his behavior demonstrated his response.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  That we were friends and we wanted to get to know him better and we'd like to see him again. All of those sorts of things.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  We were both so excited, we ran home. When we ran home, we were immediately told we were my parents. And of course, what came back was we were imagining things. Well, the whole incident was discounted as a figment of two children's imagination.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  But Sarah was convinced that it wasn't her imagination. And this would be the beginning of a hunt she had about communication between animals and humans.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Sarah and her brother set up the trap near their house again. And did he come back to the trap again?

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Yes, again and again and again. And he became kind of like a pet. But he wasn't a pet, he was a wild animal.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  It went on like this. They had friendships with animals. And when Sarah and her brother grew up, still, whenever they would have encounters with wild animals that they couldn't explain to anyone else, they had each other.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Sarah would call him and tell him about the conversations she had with the pheasants outside her kitchen window. He would tell her about the new skunk under his house he had befriended.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  I could always check. You know, it was always him. So there were always two of us, and then there wasn't.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Sarah's brother died unexpectedly in his twenties.

• 6:25Speaker 03

  My brother and I were very isolated, which was no problem until he died. And after his death, it became a huge problem. It was much harder after it got to be just me, because I always had him to depend on.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Once she lost her brother, Sarah's life got pretty dark. She had gotten married, but it fell apart. So eventually, after many years of living as a shell of a person, Sarah did the only thing that felt right. She moved deep into the woods, and she began to write about animals and trees.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Eventually, she was alone.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  Some days, I'm perfectly fine just being by myself. But there are other days when I am unbearably lonely.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  I pictured myself

• 7:35Speaker 03

  as a person who had a family and lots of animals. Well, the animal part, for sure, came through. The rest did not.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  She went to school, and she got advanced degrees in ecology. And she could dialogue with her professors and her peers about animal behavior and patterns in the natural world. But then there were other observations, observations she didn't dare share with her colleagues about interspecies communication. Why didn't you want to talk about it?

• 8:10Speaker 03

  Because I'm crazy. I knew people were going to think I was crazy. So I didn't talk about it, period.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Tell me, why did you want a dove?

• 8:26Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh. That's such a great question. That takes me back. When I was a very, very small child.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  When I first learned how to draw, and I was drawing as, you know, as a toddler, I used to draw little doves. I had a thing about doves. I had always wanted a bird, but I could never... I could not bear the idea of having a caged bird. Because birds need to fly and they need to be free.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  So I was never able to resolve that conflict.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  But then she discovered an opportunity to save a dove from potentially being killed.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  I don't know if I read it or saw it, but I found out that they imported African collared doves into the US to sit on exotic birds' eggs.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  And then they set them free. And of course, most of them died.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Sarah found an average-looking African collared dove at a pet store for $5 in a nearby town and drove him home in a little box on her front seat.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  She named him Lily B. Lily because she always liked that name. And B because he was a boy, Lily Boy. And Sarah and Lily B became instant BFFs.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  I loved him. I just loved him. And he liked the kitchen because he loved to watch me cook. And that's how I discovered he loved Havarti cheese. Anytime I was in the kitchen, he was in the kitchen. Anything I cooked, he wanted to taste.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Lily B. liked Mozart on the record player and sitting in the window and watching the wild birds outside.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  Lily B. liked to go for rides in the car. I would take him with me. And he would perch either on the seat or his favorite place was the dashboard. And he'd sit up there and just, he'd just enjoy riding with me.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Why do you think he liked riding in the car?

• 10:52Speaker 03

  I think the scenery. I mean, always, always paying attention. We just had a life. I would wake up and, and he would start cooling. He would just cool and cool and cool and cool. And I'd say, "Oh, good morning, sweetheart."

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Sarah had become a full-time professional ecology writer, delivering articles to nature journals and online magazines about her observations and her research.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  Every morning I journaled. And he was always in the room with me in the early morning.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  But then, something kind of beautiful started to happen.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  When Sarah would sit down to write her scientific observations.

• 11:38Speaker 03

  The reality is, if I was writing about, and I was always writing about nature. And if it was something really important, he had a special triple cool that he would use.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  The thing is, the cool was so, it was so insistent. It was louder than his regular cools. And at first, you know, I thought it was interesting.

• 12:17Speaker 03

  It took me, believe it or not, it took me six months to get it, that he was reading my mind.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  But after six months, I knew he was reading my mind. And I was also dealing with the fact that I might be crazy. And so that was really scary.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  Tell me if I have the correct understanding.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  You would be journaling. Lilly B would be next to you.

• 12:57Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  And when you would have a... Maybe, you know, when we're writing, you get to a point where things click?

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, and insight. Any kind of... I don't like that word. Revelations.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  A breakthrough, a landing.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Anything, anything. And that... Damn, that bird.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  He would coo three times.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  Only three times.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  So, for example, Sarah would begin to write a piece about her observations, let's say about mice or bears. And she would begin to work out a theory on pen and paper. And Lilly B would coo three times if she was on the right track.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  And, I mean, it put me over the edge because at that time, you know, I had done graduate work and everything is intellectualized. I had, at that point, been academically trained not to believe in this.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  So she kept it to herself? Well, herself and Lilly B.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  I mean, I knew it was happening. And I believed him. I believed Lilly B.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  I mean, you do... The whole scene is, you know, like crazy old lady in the main woods.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  Exactly. Like a fairy tale. That's all. You know, honestly, I've become the old woman who lives in the woods with a bunch of animals.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  Was kind of like a Baba Yaga figure.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  He helped to cement something I had always known about myself, and which was that I was different.

• 14:59Speaker 03

  Lilly B. was the one that did that.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  So when he cooed, I paid attention. I said, "Oh, okay, I get it."

• 15:14Speaker 03

  I said, "If he's like this, they're all like this." All these things that I have experienced during my life, I can communicate across species. In other words, I was starting to own it, to myself, not to anyone else.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Does accepting that also mean accepting a certain amount of isolation from the rest of the world?

• 15:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  So is that a trade-off in your life?

• 15:47Speaker 03

  I think it is, yeah, for me, yes. You lose the ability to share your experiences with other people. That, to me, has been the worst, especially since I had it as a child.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  But she had Lilly B. And for the first 10 years of Lilly B.'s life, he was a reliable editor, cooing three times when her writing was headed in the right direction. Sarah never kept Lilly B. in a cage. He just lived here in the cabin with her, following her from kitchen to dining room table to bedroom, where he'd sleep above her bed. And then, one day, something terrifying happened.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  Lilly B., her editor and her best friend, decided to fly away.

• 16:37Speaker 03

  I remember the moment of, "My God." I opened the door, and it was open. But he had never attempted to fly out before.

• 16:51Glynn Washington?

  After this short break, you're gonna want to hear what the bird does next. Spooked.

• 17:02Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Spooked, the wind dove's cry episode. When last we left, the little bird, Lily B, had just made a break for it and flew out of the house to the shock and the horror of Sarah. Spooked.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  When Lily B flew into the woods and Sarah didn't know if he'd ever come back, she panicked.

• 17:30Speaker 03

  Because I was so afraid he was gonna be killed.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Lily B had never been a wild bird. He had no experience with predators. But eventually, he perched himself on a tree branch near their house.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  He'd sing to me every single morning at about 5 o'clock from the lilac tree that was right outside my window. So he never went anywhere.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Sarah knew what he was doing. He was trying to get the attention of a wild bird.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  He was chasing the morning doves from tree to tree, right around the house, over and over and over. I watched him the whole time, fly after one morning dove after another.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  And what do you realize he's trying to do? Or what do you think?

• 18:17Speaker 03

  He's trying to find a mate.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  And I could feel that. I knew it. And after six weeks of flying after, and it was springtime, it was mating time, and nobody loved him. And then one day, he just flew home again, flew back in the house, and he stayed there. And I said, "Ah, gotta get him a mate."

• 18:48Speaker 02

  So Sarah found Lily B, a series of female doves who he loved with varying degrees of enthusiasm. And then she found Lucia. Do you remember how you found her? How you found Lucia?

• 19:00Speaker 03

  Internet.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Where was she?

• 19:03Speaker 03

  Someplace in, right here in Maine. And I took one picture of her, and I ran it off the computer, and I put it up on the wall, and I said to Lily B, "Is that the bird?"

• 19:21Speaker 03

  I went back to the internet. I said, "I'll take her."

• 19:29Speaker 02

  Lucia had brown feathers and was very smart.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  That bird was the love of his life. They were never separate. They ate together. They sat on the same branch. If they moved to the house, one followed the other.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  He taught her everything she knew. She was a real spirit bird. They slept together. They were together all day. They were just always like this. If one flew, the other one followed. They never were separated. And sometimes he had treats for her. He would bring back a little piece. I never really got it, you know? But he would bring her things.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Like what?

• 20:12Speaker 03

  Well, he bought her blueberries once. And once he brought her some kind of little stone. You know, he brought her presents.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  When he had that kind of love, could you feel something?

• 20:28Speaker 03

  Oh, it was impossible not to.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  What did that... Tell us what that felt like as someone who's so connected to Lily B.

• 20:38Speaker 03

  There was some distance that opened up. It's not that we didn't communicate, but there was another in the space, and I could feel that.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  But there definitely was a distance.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  Was that okay with you? Was that hard?

• 20:54Speaker 03

  No. I didn't think it... I missed him. But I wanted him to be happy. And he was happy.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  Lily B and Lucia stayed together wing by wing for years and years. Until the morning Sarah woke up and put the kettle on and looked out the window for the turkeys and the deer, and then looked up to the perch Lily B and Lucia sat on and noticed something wasn't right with Lucia.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  She seemed like she was sort of rocking back and forth. She was not acting right. And I went, "Oh, no." And the next morning... Morning, she was on the bottom of the cake.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  When I went in, he was on his perch, but he flew down. He was so clearly in mourning. He wouldn't leave her.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  So I left her there.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  And I said, "I'll leave her there as long as he needs her." And I left her there.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  It was all that day. And the next morning,

• 22:12Speaker 03

  I dug a grave. And I put her in it. And he watched me bury her.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  He was inconsolable. And so we all sat with him. He had a basket over the window. And I sat with him. He loved the Mozart requiem.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  And so I put on the requiem.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Sarah was 65 years old when she buried Lucia in a wildflower patch. She couldn't deny that her future wasn't the limitless expanse imagined in younger minds. Lily Boy's feathers were starting to age, too. His voice was getting croaky. It was time to ask her bird a question.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  I said to him, I said, "Look, if you feel like you need another mate, you've got to let me know. Because I don't know what to do at this point."

• 23:53Speaker 02

  You're looking at him in the eyes?

• 23:55Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Ah, ah, ah, oh, yeah.

• 23:59Speaker 03

  And I was talking out loud to him. I said, "You have to let me know because I can't make that decision for you." I was worried. I thought it was gonna kill him. Because I hadn't heard a sound since she died. We go on another day or so. I'm still writing in the morning.

• 24:22Speaker 03

  And all of a sudden, I know.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  I just know.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  And I wrote, "He doesn't want another mate."

• 24:41Speaker 03

  And when I wrote those words, he spoke for the first time. He cooed three times. And so I knew.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  And then, all of a sudden, he's... He just came back to life. And that was when he became my bird again, just the way he had been in the beginning. I was in the kitchen, he was in the kitchen. He was everywhere I was.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  How long you told Lily B. would live?

• 25:21Speaker 03

  Um, it was about 10 or 12 years.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Some African collared doves live all the way into their mid-teens. Lily B. is now 35 years old.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  You know, it's been him and me, you know?

• 25:39Speaker 03

  And it's okay. He's an old bird now. He's starting to lose his vision. And we're just getting old together.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  It's 79-year-old Sarah and 35-year-old Lily B. In their little log cabin. Lily B. moved into the bathroom.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  And you see, the bathroom is the perfect place to have their ruse. Because I have to go to the bathroom. So I'm in there like, what, 50 times a day. It's perfect. It's absolutely perfect. I mean, I couldn't have planned it better.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  Alright, let's go say hi to him. Let's go say hi to him.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  You want to go inside? Okay. So now we go see Lily B.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  Hi, sweetie. Oh, he's napped on. It says napper. Yeah, hi, honey. Hi. Hi, sweetheart. How are you? I love you. I love you.

• 26:46Speaker 02

  The bathroom is lined in cedar wood. Lily B. has a perch in the corner. He looks out a big glass window onto a meadow.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  He can see, he's focused on everything I'm saying. Everything. And at the same time, he's got his eye on you. And he's like, really?

• 27:02Speaker 02

  He's kind of like trembling.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  Is he always done that?

• 27:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, he does that. He does that as part of, it's part of the communication thing.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  He's kind of like shuffling back and forth on his branch. Lily B. is a remarkably unremarkable-looking bird.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  His feathers are scruffy and he's got some bald spots. And years ago, he lost his voice.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  And...

• 27:27Speaker 02

  He just raised his wings when he said "hi"?

• 27:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. He says, "I just can't fly the way I used to." Yeah, I know, honey. Oh, honey, I know.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  He was trying to fly when she was talking about flying.

• 27:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, he's just talking about flying. Yeah. See, he understands everything I say, so... This is why it's such a good thing to be in a bathroom, because you can always have the conversation with me.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  What do people misunderstand about your telepathy with Lil B?

• 27:59Speaker 03

  I don't talk about it to people because nobody understands it.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Are you worried about this interview going out?

• 28:07Speaker 03

  I was initially. I said, "What? How? I never talk about this." I have reached the point now where I'm just not shutting up about it.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, he reads—Lil B reads my mind. I used to feel like I had to explain all this stuff. It's like, the nice thing about being a very strange old woman is that I am free to say any damn thing I want. All I have to offer is my own experience. That, take it or leave it.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  If you don't want to believe that interspecies communication is a reality, that's your problem.

• 29:17Glynn Washington?

  Thank you so much, Sarah and Lil B, for sharing your story. And thank you so much for sharing your connection.

• 29:27Glynn Washington?

  The original score by Nicholas Marks, produced by Anna Sussman.

• 29:40Glynn Washington?

  This episode comes to us from our sister podcast, Snap Judgment. And if you dig it, don't miss a single journey. Take your phone out right now. Subscribe to the Snap Judgment Podcast. It is that easy. Amazing stories from the bright light of day each and every week. On Team Snap, the union representative producers, artists, editors, and the deniers, are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Works of America, AFL-CAL, Local 51, robots. And people cosplaying as robots. Please note that no Snap Studios content may be used for training, testing, or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission.

• 30:21Glynn Washington?

  Snap is brought to you by the team who would mostly not dress up as a mime, except for the uber-producer, Mr. Mark Ristich. There he is, miming it up right now, banging his head against an invisible wall. Uh-oh, now he's climbing the stairs. Very nice. There's Nancy Lopez, Pat Messini Miller, Anna Sussman, Wenzel Goryo, John Facio, Sheena Shealy, Taya Decot, Flo Wiley, Bo Walsh, Marissa Dodge. And this is not the news. No way this is the news. In fact, you'd suppose it'd be completely impossible to do a talky-talk hour of audio, radio storytelling about a mime.

• 31:06Glynn Washington?

  Well, that's what you'd think, right? And you'd still, even then, not be as far away from the news as this is. But this is... P-R-X.