Redemption…

This entry was posted by KK on Thursday, 3 July, 2008 at

Ok, so this post is honestly my way of redeeming myself and my family for the awful things that took place in our back yard today. I was sitting at my desk working this morning when the boys came running into the back door crying. Lake began screaming and crying saying something so terrible happened. I quickly made sure everyone was alive and then began to listen to him. As it turns out, last night Jason pointed out a birds nest on a limb on one of our dogwood trees in our back yard. Today, the boys got a bit curious and wondered if there were any baby birds or eggs in it so they started grabbing the limbs in an attempt to pull them down and take a peek. Well, needless to say, the nest came crashing to the ground…about a 10 foot drop. It was indeed full of baby birds so they spilled out all over the grass with all of the contents of the nest. When I went out to look, all I could think of was how I had no idea what to do to help and also wanted the boys far away from this so they wouldn’t catch any icky diseases or anything (my ignorance kicking in here…but I am paranoid about diseases carried by wild animals). So, I began to freak a little, especially because the baby birds were crying out and their little flimsy necks extended like I should feed them something. I had Wheat run in the house to fetch a pair of gloves for me to put on so I could pick them up, not sure what I was going to do with them when I picked them up. I also had Lake get my mom’s dog out of the yard and enclose him in her fence. While I was giving the older boys instructions, River lost his balance and fell forward stepping directly on one of the baby birds. More screeching, then silence. Oh wow. My son has just stepped on a helpless baby bird and killed it right in front of me. I started crying and he started crying and here we are with a dead baby bird in my hands and then two more crying on the grass. So what the heck do you do in this situation?

Well, I got Jason’s ladder out of the barn and climbed up to the top and began trying to arrange the nest back onto the limb where it was. My thinking was that if I could put it all back just like it was, maybe the mama would come back and just forget that she had three in there and not wonder where the third one was OR maybe I would put the dead baby in there with the other two and she would assume he/she just choked on a worm or something. So I fixed the nest back onto the limb as well as I could but in no way even comparable to how it was originally. I thought it would work. I put the babies in it and left the scene, hoping the mom would come back, say “what’s up?” and then fix everything or grab the babies in her mouth like a mama cat does with her kittens and haul them off to another nest, like their Summer home. Well, their placement lasted about 10 minutes. I came out of the house to check on them and saw they were all on the ground again. They were crying again….well, 2 of them were. Those two had now survived two plunges to the ground. I knew I could not make their nest stable enough for them and didn’t want to attempt it and have it fail again and send them plunging a third time. So, I turned to my most faithful friend….Google! (You guys thought I was gonna say God, didn’t you? Well, He is really number one:) I found some things on rescuing baby birds and what to do and how to do it. At the same time, I thought maybe I needed to hear all this from someone who really knew this would work because I surely did not want to go to the trouble of all this for it not to work. So I found a number for a wildlife rehabilitation professional in our county and gave her a call. She basically said all the same things that I read online. Part of me was hoping she would just come to my house and take them away and I wouldn’t have to worry about it any more but tha wasn’t the case. So, I began my project.

  • Get a gallon milk jug and cut the top out of it (I left the handle part attached to have something sturdy to hang it with).
  • Cut small holes in the bottom of the jug. Not too big so a bird leg doesn’t fall out, but big enough for rain water to run out easily and not collect and drown the birds.
  • Cut small holes in a few places around the edges to attach the twine or rope to.
  • Line the bottom with paper towels (which I did, but I also placed what was left of the actual nest down into the jug hoping it would help more).
  • Lastly, hang it near where the original nest was and place babies inside and wait.

So, I did all this and while doing it thought I could take pictures to perhaps help someone as ignorant as myself learn all this, too, in case they ever found themselves in this situation. I was mad that I did not know already how to deal with this and felt at some point that it should have been taught in school. LOL I also realized that very few people would go to this extreme and many would have probably left the birds on the ground to be a snack for another wild animal but those types of things don’t happen here. Every heart beat is worth saving, yes?

Well, to make a long story short….(if short is even possible at this point) I made this way more obsessive than it needed to be but I also really needed to justify all the time I had spent on this all day while neglecting all my many other responsibilities. So, I set up my video camera on the tripod on the back deck and recorded no less than three hours of footage pointed at this nest in the tree. At some point in the late afternoon, I brought the camera in the house and rewound it and watched it, fast forwarding mostly. What I ended up seeing was the most miraculous thing ever. After about 2 solid hours of tape with absolutely nothing happening, you see the mama bird come hopping down a branch with a baby lizard or salamander in her mouth and she hopped on the edge of my milk jug and bent over and fed it to one of her babies. :)

 

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