3534 Baby birds

Monday, May 21, 2012

The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but hold hands.

-- Alexander Penney --

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I've raised a few baby birds.


General Guidelines:

Wildlife rehab folks might have better info.  This is just my experience with a few baby birds; it worked for the birdies and me, and that's good enough.

The chick has to be kept warm.  If it's very young, tuck it into your bra or shirt pocket until you can get the nest set up.

Get a wide basket (best) or a bowl with straight sides no more than 1.5 inches high, and put some soft material in it.  Thick material if the sides are too high.  Tissues work fine, a piece of cotton flannel or wool cloth is best.  Don't use terrycloth because their claws get caught in it.  Put a heating pad set to low heat on a counter in a room you can close off, like a half-bath you're willing to give up for a while, and place the basket half on and half off the heating pad, so that the chick can select its own comfort zone.  You don't want to accidentally cook him.  A sheet of newspaper between the basket and the heating pad keeps things clean.

No matter what the adult birds eat, all songbirds feed their chicks bugs, grubs, and worms, because the babies need more protein than seed provides, and the babies can't yet grind up and digest seeds.  (The exceptions are pigeons, doves, and flamingos, who feed their chicks crop milk.) So go to a large pet pet shop, the kind that sells reptiles, amphibians, and fish, and buy a small rectangular plastic cage with a top with small holes in it, like you would use to keep insects or a mouse, and a handful of live mealworms to put in it with a bit of coarse yellow corn meal or oatmeal, and a slice of apple.  If the mealworms come in sizes, get the smaller skinnier ones.

Now feed the chick the mealy worms with tweezers.  The first time he may not recognize that it's a feeding, but rubbing the worm on his beak should get the idea across.  I squashed the head of the worms before offering them, because sometimes the lives ones will crawl out of the chick's mouth.   If it's a very small chick and very large worms, cut the worms in half or thirds.  Feed as often as you can.  When the chick is full, he won't open his mouth.  When he's ready for more, the mouth will be wide open.  If he's fed enough during daylight hours, night feedings are not necessary.  The mealworms in the cage will turn into beetles that mate and lay eggs, so if you bought enough to start with, your worm farm will provide a constant supply.

The chicks mostly get sufficient liquids from their food, but since we're not feeding as varied a diet as the parents would, once a day ONE TINY DROP of water from an eye dropper won't kill him.

In the wildlife videos, you often see (especially with vultures and condors) the caregivers using puppets to feed, so the chicks don't  "imprint on humans".  That doesn't seem to be a problem with songbirds.  The birds I've raised seem to know they're birds, know their breed, seem to learn their songs, become good parents, and stay wary of all other humans except me.  All on their own.

Poopy is easy.  When he has to go, the birdy will back up to the edge of the nest and poop over the edge.  That's why the sides of the basket should be low.  The poopy will be in a neat membranous bag with a convenient tag which you can pick up with tweezers and dispose of.

Eventually the birdy will grow real feathers, and start venturing out of the nest.  He'll flap and test his wings.  You can hold his toes as he sits on your finger and move your hand up and down so he gets the feeling of air under his wings (a breeze would do that in the wild, but there's no breeze in your bathroom).  Put some little branches in a flower pot a short distance from the nest to encourage him to venture out on his own.

If you can identify his breed, find out what the adults eat, and put a bowl of it nearby.  If he's a seed eater, he'll instinctively recognize it and try it when he's ready.  He'll also need some bird gravel to grind the seed in his crop.  If he's a bug eater, offer mealworms in a bowl.  If you don't know, offer both and he'll figure it out.  Offer a bowl of water, too.

The hard part is when he starts flying.  He'll perch everywhere and poop everywhere.  The window and shower curtain rods are favorite places.  I just took the curtains down for the nonce.   Pretty soon the birdy is ready for a bird cage, mainly for your own poop sanity.  You can let him out for practice flying sessions.  He'll be happy to fly from your finger to someplace high and back again.

When he's pretty confident flying, you can introduce him to outdoors. 

With my first baby bird, a robin, I simply opened the bathroom window.  She'd fly out and back in again, go into the cage to eat, then back out again.  It got to where she'd be gone all day, and then return to the cage (window and cage door left open) in the evening.  Then it was out overnight a time or two, and then she didn't return.  The rest of the story is below.

With the second bird, I wanted my bathroom back, so when he was ready for outside, he got transferred to the deck in the cage.  He'd fly from my finger around the back yard, and back to my finger.  Then I started just leaving the cage open all day.  He'd be gone all day, maybe come to sit on my finger if he saw me on the deck, then returning on his own to the cage at night, and I'd close the cage until morning so he'd be safe.  One day he brought a female back with him.  The two of them ate in the cage, then spent the night on the deck railing.  Eventually he stopped coming back.  The rest of the story is below.

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My Experience

The first was a robin that had fallen out of a nest and was picked up and taken home by some neighborhood children.   Usually when a chick falls out of a nest, the best thing to do is to put the chick back in the nest if you can (it's a myth that the parents will abandon a chick with human scent on it), or fasten a basket or something to the trunk of the tree as high as you can.  The adults will find the chick and care for it.  But in this case, the children couldn't remember where they'd found it.  The children's mother didn't know what to do with the chick.

The chick had some feathers started on her wings, but was still fluffy on her head and underside. It wouldn't be too long before she'd have been out of the nest anyway, so I volunteered to try raising it.  This was in the early '80s.  No internet.  I made things up as I went along.  (I say "she", but at the time I wasn't sure.  When she left she had the adolescent robin speckled breast, which could have been male or female.)

That was the robin mentioned above.

I mourned a bit when she finally didn't come back.  I hoped nothing had happened to her.  There was no sign of her for the rest of that summer, fall, or winter.

The next spring, a pair of robins built a nest in the tree just outside the bathroom window.  I'd never had robins nest in my backyard before then.

I was in the bathroom one day, and the mother robin landed on the windowsill and peered in the window.  I opened the window, and she flew away.  I left the window open, and she flew into the bathroom.  She flew out again when I went into the bathroom.

Yeah, I think it was her.

Although she wasn't "friendly", for the next four years there was a robin family in that tree, just outside the window, and eventually several more nests in other nearby trees.  Her children, grandchilden, and great-grandchildren, I like to think.  Like she told them, "This is a safe place."

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The second bird (and several subsequent) was a cowbird.  I have learned not to mention that I raised cowbirds.  People often get very angry at me.  A lot of people consider cowbirds evil, because they lay their eggs in other smaller birds' nests and then abandon them.  The cowbird chick hatches first, and pushes the other eggs or smaller chicks out of the nest to their doom and hogs the attentions of the much smaller foster parents.  Many people are disgusted with me, like I was turning Tasmanian Devils loose in the neighborhood.

The way I figure it, God didn't make any evil animals.  Even cowbirds have their reasons for being, their defined place in Nature.  Just because we don't like it doesn't make it evil.  Plus, they are native to this continent.  They have a right to exist.

When I married Jay, there was a pair of warblers who nested on the porch light every year.  I had a mirror on a stick, and liked to look in the nest every so often.  One day I saw a larger very different egg in there along with the original warbler four, and I knew immediately what it was.  I took it out and hatched it in a dish towel tied around my waist.  I named him "Birdie".  Yeah, I'm not very good at naming animals.

He was quite different from the robin in the way he related to me, probably because the robin had been raised to early adolescence by birds, but Birdie had never known any parent but me.  Plus, cowbirds are very adaptable by nature.  No matter what species raises them, they know they are cowbirds.

I swear the damn bird loved me.  He was so very intelligent, too.

He's the one who camped in the cage on the deck, and brought his first girlfriend home to his "pad" for dinner and to introduce her to his mom. He always came when called.  I'd hold my finger out and call "Birdie, Birdie", and if he was within sound of my voice he'd come to my finger.

I had a lot of affection for him.  I told Jay it was just like raising a child, but birth to leaving home was condensed into one spring and summer.  His first solid food, his first steps (flying), his first drive alone in the car (flying outside), his first girlfriend, his first overnight away from home, and then leaving for college.  I worried about him just like a  mother.

He visited often even into the fall.  I'd be standing on the deck (cigarette), and he'd arrive from nowhere and land on my head or shoulder and hop onto my finger.  Gradually visits became farther and farther apart.  Cowbirds feed in flocks, so I figured he'd joined a flock (my child in a gang!?) and was traveling with them  (visions of a motorcycle gang, Hell's Cowbirds!)  And then finally in late fall, I saw him no more.

The next summer, mid-summer, I was on the deck one day, and a cowbird landed on the railing.  He peered at me sideways, and sidled closer cautiously.  I said, "Birdie?" and held out my finger, and he jumped up and down, chirped excitedly, and flew to my finger.  Later a full flock of cowbirds visited the back yard, but there wasn't much for them to eat there compared to the pastures below the ridge, and the crows living in the woods next door objected, so they didn't stay long.  I figure that was "take Mom to the office picnic" day.

Pretty damn cool.

That was the last time I saw him.  I'm sure he's ok, just moved on to farther fields.

I continued to check the warblers' nest spring and late summer (they often raised two broods a year there), and about every other spring I found a cowbird egg, which I hatched and raised, with pretty much the same results as with Birdie.  When Jay got sick I put wire over the lights so the warblers would have to move, because I didn't know what I'd do if I found another cowbird egg.  Jay needed all my attention.  After he died I took the wire down, and the warblers came back, but I never found another strange egg to adopt.
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