The egret has landed

After hitching a ride from Orlando to Pennsylvania in the bumper of a minivan, a Florida bird comes home in a Lear jet.

[Times photo: Jamie Francis] Butch, who has been renamed Miles, rests at the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary in Indian Shores after arriving by jet from Harrisburg, Pa.

[AP photo] Butch Lockey of Harrisburg, Pa., is bitten by the bird after removing him from the Marsicos' minivan on April 16.

CLEARWATER - At 1:15 p.m. Thursday, a Lear jet taxied up to a hangar at St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport. It didn't carry a corporate executive or showbiz celeb, but a frequent flier of a different sort.

A cattle egret with white feathers, a yellow beak - and one heck of a tale.

"Forget those contestants on Survivor," says Ralph Heath, founder of the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary, holding a travel cage with the egret inside. "You want to talk about survival, this bird is the real thing."

Heath had just retrieved the bird from a Harrisburg, Pa., wildlife center and brought it back to Tampa Bay in style.

The bird deserved some pampering. It had been through quite an ordeal, traveling for six days, through seven states, with no food or water.

Inside the bumper of a minivan.

It all started on the morning of April 10 when the Marsico family of Mechanicsburg, Pa. - Doug, 35, his wife Michele, 32, and sons Dougie and Thomas, 4 years old and 3 months - were cruising down U.S. 27 on a day trip to Disney World.

They had arrived three days earlier on Amtrak's Auto Train, and now were heading south in their 2001 Ford Windstar from Lady Lake through Leesburg. Doug noticed a pair of unusual white birds on the right side of the road.

"For somebody who's from out of state, they were the kind of birds that catch your eye," he says. "But just as I drive past, they scatter."

One fluttered away. But the other one flew directly into the Marsicos' path. Feathers flew and Doug turned to Michele shaking his head. "Aw, I just killed a bird."

The couple looked back but saw no sign of it. They imagined the worst, a dead egret in the middle of the road, or perhaps plastered to the front of their minivan. "We just felt so bad," Michele says.

They didn't know they were co-stars in a new bird version of Planes, Trains and Automobiles. They spent the day at Disney, then drove 70 minutes back up U.S. 27 to a condo in Lady Lake.

The next day, a Friday, they headed down U.S. 27 for a trip to Universal, again returning at night to the condo.

On Saturday, April 12, the Marsicos drove to Sanford to board the Auto Train with their Windstar. About 800 miles later, they arrived in Lorton, Va., where they began the 21/2 hour drive to Camp Hill, Pa. They have been staying in the Harrisburg suburb with Michele's parents while their house is refurbished in Mechanicsburg.

On Monday and Tuesday, Michele, a real estate agent, drove the Windstar around town for work.

Then, a mysterious sound.

On Tuesday, her father, Harry Clark, walked past the van in the garage and thought he heard a thumping, but couldn't find anything. On Wednesday, he again heard it.

"At first, I suspected it was one of my daughter's two cats," he recalls. But both cats were inside asleep. The sound was coming from the corner of the bumper area. So Harry popped the hood and grabbed a flashlight.

"I spotted a small hole under the battery compartment," he says. "I was able to shine the light down there, and I could kind of identify what looked like a white part of a wing and the yellow of a beak."

He called out to Michele. She was stunned. While her father dropped bread and water through the hole, Michele grabbed the phone and called Doug, a lawyer, at work. Here's how they remember the conversation:

Doug: "You've got to be kidding me!"

Michele: "It's definitely the bird, the same bird."

Doug: "Yeah, I only hit one bird."

It had been six days.

Wedged in

Doug called a local body shop. He was told to bring the van right over, where repairman Butch Lockey carefully took apart the bumper and removed the disoriented egret. It was suffering from an obviously broken leg and was understandably cranky.

"First thing he did was bite my finger," Lockey says. "Good thing I was wearing gloves."

The Marsicos named him Butch, after the body man.

How did the bird survive?

"The lower part of the van has vent areas, 4 inches wide, and at 65 mph it just kind of shoved in there," Doug says. The bird is about 18 inches high.

It was stunt work more improbable than anything Indiana Jones ever pulled off on a moving vehicle. But what about nourishment?

"We kind of think it had some water to survive, maybe air-conditioning condensation or rain," says Doug.

They contacted Dauphin County Wildlife Rescue co-director Beth Carricato, who told them to bring the bird right over. She had rescued a few birds from the grilles of cars, but had never seen anything like this.

"It was just so remarkable, because No. 1, the bird survived for that period of time, and they're far more delicate than some of these other birds," she says. "This bird was feather perfect when it came in."

Almost. She diagnosed the bird with a compound fracture of the upper leg bone. Carricato theorized that the tight space inside the bumper probably kept the egret from thrashing around and further injuring itself.

Her first task was to stabilize the starving, stressed-out bird with food and water. Her second challenge was to fend off the media. An initial story in the Harrisburg newspaper triggered a flood of news briefs in papers around the country.

Local TV stations wanted to film Butch. CNN called. But Carricato turned down every request, except from one wildlife TV veteran she knew.

"All those cameras would only have stressed out the bird even more," she says.

Carricato was preparing to anesthetize the bird for surgery when she received a call from Florida.

Ralph Heath, of the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary in Indian Shores, had heard of the bird's plight through a friend and wanted to help. He suggested that surgery, particularly anesthesia, was too risky.

"Birds like this one might never survive the anesthesia, and it would be such a shame to him after everything he'd been through," he says.

The vet had heard of Heath's sanctuary. They decided over the phone that setting the broken leg in a splint was the best course. It worked. Soon, Butch started to use his injured foot, though its toes knuckled under a bit. The good news is he can support his weight. And because his feathers are fine, he can fly.

On Wednesday, Heath took a Southwest Airlines flight to Rhode Island to rendezvous with the two pilots of a private jet owned by St. Petersburg lawyer Edward D. Foreman, a longtime supporter of the sanctuary. Capt. Andrew Tumicki and First Officer Steve Haloski worked for free. They flew Heath on Thursday morning to Harrisburg, where Carricato transferred Butch to Heath's care.

Carricato says she had no emotional attachment to Butch, and was just happy to have helped his recovery: "He's tough, but to tell you the truth, he's not a real sweetheart. I'd have to say, he's not very friendly."

To Heath, who founded the sanctuary in 1971, Butch's survival is nothing short of miraculous.

"How it ended up hitting that car traveling at that speed, and slides inside that bumper without being instantly killed, it's almost impossible to calculate the odds," he says. "It's like a one-in-a-million shot."

Butch, who is 4 or 5 years old, will rest at the sanctuary until he is ready to be released into the wild. That could take a couple of months. In the meantime, the staff has renamed the bird Miles, because of all the ground he has covered.

Doug Marsico went to the Harrisburg airport to see Butch off. Heath shook the hand of the man who started the adventure rolling.

"I thanked him for being so concerned," Heath says. "And I told him he certainly created a bird story that's one of a kind."

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