When Doves Cry

To give you will a picture of a story that starts on the twist.

She fears 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 does cry. If crossed over this stooped, stay tuned. [MUSIC] You're listening to this podcast, so I know you've got a curious mind.

Here's a helpful fact. You might not know yet. Dryers have switched and saved with progressive save over $900 on average. Pop up with reveresive.com and answer some questions and you'll get a quick quote with this counts that are easy to come by. In fact, 99% of their auto-customers earn at least one discount.

Visit progressive.com and see if you can enjoy a little cash bag. progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates, national average 12-month savings of $946 by new customers

“surveyed who saved progressive between June 2024 and May 2025.”

But digital savings will vary. [MUSIC] Stucksters, today we begin the secret. Our story is in Sarah Wright. And in colleges who writes about animal behavior and patterns in the natural world,

there's one truth that Sarah knows about nature that you can never want to speak about.

Our an assessment asked pretty pretty please. Is Sarah, but tell us her secret. [MUSIC] 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 I got an narrower and narrower until there was no road left just forest. And then I got out of the car and walked through the trees. [MUSIC] 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.

Come on. [BLANK_AUDIO] Good to meet you too.

“What a beautiful cabin, are we going to go in the porch?”

Right now, we're going to go inside. 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 scrolled in black Sharpie, long, slanting lists of animals and plants.

Let's say, okay, sand feels alive. And turkey displays, I don't know, I do this every year. Grouse drums, cardinal songs, two mouse of rives. Oh, it goes around to the front of the front, there's bears, frogs. She lives her profoundly isolated in the woods.

And the winter, she has to snowshoe to her car. But she loves the woods. She grew up playing in the great forest of the Northeast. With only the animals and her little brother is company. 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 so amazed. [BLANK_AUDIO] They'd weighed through swamps and build forts and collect frogs.

This one time they even got a skunk in a live trap. My grandmother said, no, don't get near that trap.

He's gonna spray us and we said, no, he's not, he's not, he never did, of course.

And so secretly, we went to the trap and let him out. 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. Did you feel he understood you?

>> Oh, absolutely. We both understood that the skunk knew exactly what we were saying. And of course his behavior, demonstrated his response. We were friends and we wanted to catch him no matter and we'd like to see him. And we got all of those sort of, all of those sorts of things.

[MUSIC]

We ran home when we ran home.

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

[MUSIC] Sarah and her brother set up the trap near their house again. And then he came back, the trap again. >> Yes again and again and again. And he came kind of like a pet.

Well, but he wasn't a pet, he was a wild animal. >> It went on like this. They had friendships with animals. And when Sarah and her brother grew up. Still, whenever they would have encountered it with wild animals,

“that they couldn't explain to anyone else, they had each other.”

[MUSIC] Sarah would call him and tell him about the conversation she had with the peasants outside her kitchen window. He would tell her about the new skunk under his house he had befriended.

>> I could have this shit, yeah, it was always him.

So there were always two of us and then there wasn't. [MUSIC] Sarah's brother died unexpectedly in his twenties. [MUSIC] >> My brother and I were very isolated,

which is no problem until he died. And after his death, it became a huge problem. [MUSIC] It was much harder after he got to be just me. Because I always had him to depend on.

[MUSIC] >> Once she lost her brother, Sarah's life got pretty dark. She had gone 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. [MUSIC] >> Eventually, she was alone. >> Some days, I'm perfectly fine just being by myself. But there are other days when I am unbearably lonely.

[MUSIC] >> I pictured myself as a person who had a family. >> And lots of animals, but the animal part for sure came through the rest, did not. [MUSIC] >> 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. [MUSIC]

>> Why didn't you want to talk about it? >> Because of crazy. I knew people were going to think I was crazy. So I didn't talk about it. Period.

[MUSIC] >> Tell me, what did you want to do? >> Oh gosh. That's such a great question. That takes me back when I was a very, very small child.

[MUSIC] When I first learned how to draw and I was drawing is, you know, it's 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 cage bird because birds need to fly and they need to be free. I was never able to resolve that conflict. [MUSIC] >> But then she discovered an opportunity to save a dove from potentially being killed. [MUSIC]

>> I don't know if I read it or saw it, but I found out that they imported African colored doves into the US to sit on exotic bird's days and then they set them free and of course most of them died. [MUSIC] >> Sarah found an average looking African colored dove at a pet store for $5 in a nearby town and drove him home and little box on her front seat.

She named him Lily B. Lily because she always liked that name and B because she was a boy.

[MUSIC] >> So I loved him.

“I just loved him and he liked the kitchen because he loved to watch me cook and that's how I look”

discovered he loved her body cheese. >> He at any time I was in the kitchen he was in the kitchen. Anything I cooked he wanted to taste. [MUSIC] Lily B liked Mozart on the record player and sitting in the window and watching the wild bird

that side. [MUSIC] >> Lily B liked to go for rides in the car. I would take him with me and he would purchase either on the sea or his favorite place was the Dutch board and sit up there and just he just enjoyed riding with me.

>> Why do you think he liked riding in the car? >> I think the scenery.

I mean always, always paying attention.

>> We just had a life. I would wake up and he would start cooling. He would just cool and cool and cool and nice. >> Good morning sweetheart. >> Sarah had become a full-time professional ecology writer delivering articles to nature

journalists and online magazines about her observations and her research. Every morning I journaled and he was always in the room with me in the early morning. >> But then something kind of beautiful started to happen. When Sarah would sit down to write her scientific observations.

>> The reality is if I was riding about and I was always riding about nature and if it was something

“really important, he had a special triple cool that he would use.”

The thing is, the cool was so, it was so insistent. It was louder than his regular cool was and at first, you know, I thought it was interesting. It took me, believe it or not, it took me six months to get up that he was reading my mind. 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. >> Tell me if I have the correct understanding, you would be journaling. It would be next to you, and when you would have a maybe, you know, when we're riding, you get to a point where things click or you get inside any kind of, I don't like that word revelations. >> I break through a lady and anything, anything and that damn that bird.

He would cool three times, only three times. >> So for example, Sarah would begin to write a piece about her observations. Let's say about my surbears and she would begin to work out a theory on pen and paper. And Lily B would cool three times if she was on the right track. And I mean, it put me over the edge because at that time, you know, I have done, you know,

I've done graduate work and everything is intellectualized. I have had that point and academically trained, not to believe in this. >> So she kept it to herself. Well, herself and Lily B. I mean, I knew it was happening and I believed him.

I believed Lily B. I mean, you do the whole scene is, you know, like crazy old lady in the

“mainwood. >> Exactly. Like a fairy tale. That's all, you know, honestly, I've become the old woman.”

Well, there's in the woods with a bunch of animals. Was kind of like a bobby, y'all could figure.

He, he helped to cement something I had always known about myself and

which was that I was different.

So when he could I pay the attention, I said, oh, okay, I get it.

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

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

>> Yes. >> So is that a trade-off in your life? >> 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.

But she had Lily B, and for the first 10 years of Lily B's life, he was a reliable editor, cooing three times when her writing was headed in the right direction.

Sarah never kept Lily 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.”

Lily B, her editor and her best friend, decided to fly away. >> I remember the moment of my god. >> I opened the door, and it was open, but he had never attempted to fly out before. >> After this short break, you can want to hear what the bird does next. You're listening to this podcast, so I know you've got a curious mind.

Here's a helpful fact. You might not know yet. Drivers who've switched and saved with progressive save over $900 on average, popoverabgressive.com, answer some questions, and you'll get a quick quote with discounts that are easy to come by. In fact, 99% of their auto-cussers earn at least one discount. But it's a progressive.com, and see if you can enjoy a little cash bag.

A progressive casualty insurance company in the affiliates, national average 12-month savings of $946 by new customer surveyed who saved progressive between June 2024 and May 2025. But it's a savings. We'll vary. Welcome back to Stooped, the wind delves cry episode. When last we left, the little bird, Lily B, had just made a break for it,

and threw out of the house to the shock and the horror of Sarah. When Lily B flew into the woods and Sarah didn't know if he'd ever come back, she panicked. Because I was so afraid he was going to be killed.

Lily B had never been a wild bird. He had no experience with predators.

But eventually he preached himself on a tree branch near their house. He'd sing to me every single morning at about five o'clock from the wildlife tree that was right outside my window, so he never went anywhere. Sarah knew what he was doing. He was trying to get the attention of a wild bird. Hi, he's chasing the morning devs. From tree to tree right around the house,

over and over and over, watched him the whole time, fly after one morning dev after another. And what do you realize he's trying to do? What do you think? He's trying to find a mate. And after I'd feel that, I knew it. And after six weeks of flying after and it was spring time, it was mating time and nobody loved him. And then one day, just flew home again, flew back in the house, and he stayed there. And I said, "Uh, got to get him a mate."

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?”

Internet. Where was she? Some place 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?" I went back to the internet, and I said, "I'll take her."

That bird was in love in his life. They were never separate. They were eight together. They

sat on the same branch. They, as they moved to the house, one fall of the other. 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. One flew one, the other one followed. They never were separate. And sometimes he had treats for her. He would bring back a little piece of, I never really got it, you know, but he would bring her things like what? Lily bought her blueberry

once, and once he brought her some kind of little stone. You know, he brought her presents.

When he had that kind of love, could you feel something? "Oh, it was impossible not to."

“What did that tell us what that felt like as someone who's so connected to Lily B?”

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. But there definitely was a distance. Was that a fuse at heart? No, I didn't think of it. I missed him.

But I wanted you to be happy. And he was happy.

Lily B and the Chia stayed together, winged by wing for years and years. Until the morning Sarah woke up and put the kettle on, looked out the window for the turkeys in the deer, and then looked up to the perch Lily B and the Chia sat on. And noticed something wasn't right with Luchia. He seemed like she was sort of rocking back and forth. She was not acting right. And I, I went, oh no, and the next morning she was on the bottom of the cake.

When I went in, he was on his perch, but he flew down. He was so clearly in the morning. He wouldn't believe her. It's my left ear there. I said, I'll leave there as long as he needs her. And left her there. I was all that day. The next morning I dug a grave and I put her in it and he watched me there here.

“He was inconsolable. And so we all sat with him. Do you have a basket over the window?”

And I sat with him. He loved the Mozart, right winged. And so I put on the red quim. Sarah was 65 years old when she buried Luchia in a wildflower patch. She couldn't deny that her future wasn't the limitless expense imagined in younger minds. Lillie Boyce feathers were starting to age too. His voice was getting croaky.

It was time to ask her bird a question. That said to him, I said, look, if you feel like you need another mate, you got to let me know because I don't know what to do at this point. You looking at him in the eyes?

“Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. 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. Those words and I thought it was going to kill him. Because I hadn't heard his sound since she died. We go on another day or so. I'm still writing in the morning. And all of a sudden, I know I just know. And I wrote, he doesn't want another mate.

And then all of a sudden, 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. How long have you told me to live? That's about 10 or 12 years. Some African colored dubs live all the way into their big teens. Lily B is now 35 years old.

You know, it's been him and me, you know. And it's okay. He's an old bird now. He's starting to live his vision. And they're just getting old together.

“It's 79 year old Sarah and 35 year old Lily B in the little log cabin. Lily B moved into the bathroom.”

And you see the bathroom is a perfect place to have their roots because I have to go to the bathroom. So I mean they're like, what? 50 times a day. It's perfect. It's absolutely perfect. I mean, I couldn't plan it better. Let's go say it. Let's go say it. You want to go inside? Okay. I'm so tired. Oh, are you? I love you. I love you.

The bathroom is lined in Cedarwood. Lily B has a perch in the corner. He looks out a big glass window onto a meadow. You can see, he's focused on everything. I'm saying everything. And it's the same

time he's got his eye on you. And he's like, he's kind of like trembling. Yeah. He's always on that.

Yeah. Now he does that. He does that as part of it's part of the communication thing. He's kind of like shuffling back and forth about his suffering. Lily B is a remarkably unremarkable looking bird. His feathers are scruffy and he's got some bald spots and years ago he lost his voice. He just raises rings when he says, yeah, yeah, he says, I just can't fly in the way I used to. Yeah, I know. Oh, I know. He was trying to fly when he was talking about flying. Yeah. See,

“I understand everything I said. Yeah. That's why it's such a good thing to be in the bathroom because”

you can always have a conversation with him. What do people misunderstand about your telepathy with

Libby? I don't talk about it to people because nobody understands it. Are you worried about this going to be going out? I wasn't initially. I said, what? How are you? I never talk about this. I have reached the point now where I'm just not shutting up about it. Yeah, I need some Lily 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 I take it or leave it. If you don't want to believe that interspecies communication is a reality that's your problem. Thank you so much Sarah and Lily B for Schenger's story and thank you so much for sharing your connection. Original score for Nicholas Marx produced by Anna Sussman. This episode comes to us from our sister podcast snap judgment and if you dig it don't

that easy. Amazing stories from the bright light of day each and every week on team snap.

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to you. By the team who would mostly not dress up as a mine except for the overdue service

to my research. There he is. My name is 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 McEmeacher, Anna Sussman, Lyndso Goreo, John Focil, Sheena Sheely, Teal DeCott, Flowwiley, Bowwalsh, Risa Dodge and this is not the news. No way it's a news. In fact, it's a pose. It's completely impossible to do a

“talkie talk hour of audio radio storytelling about a mine. Well that's what you think, right?”

And you still, even then, not be as far away from the news as this is. But this is, be our ex.