I had sworn not to take baby songbirds.
The general public tend to be impressed by those who care for big, aggressive birds: swans, who can break your arm with one wing, or herons, who will occasionally try to stab their beak through your eye, or great horned owls, famous for the fly-by scalping, which is the avian version of the drive-by shooting.
Those birds are a piece of cake compared to baby songbirds.
Tiny, delicate, and insatiably hungry, baby songbirds are food-processing machines. When they’re hatchlings (just born) and young nestlings (older but still unfeathered), they need to be fed every fifteen to twenty minutes from sunup to sundown. Then they knock off for the night, giving whatever exhausted creature is caring for them—be it avian or human—a little time to collapse before work resumes at daybreak.
When the babies’ pinfeathers start coming in the feedings can be moved up to every half hour, then the time between feedings can be slowly increased in increments of five minutes. When they’re around 21/2 weeks old, their feathers have opened and they’re out of the nest and perching, and you’re practically on vacation—feeding them only once an hour.
Since I had two kids and a limited amount of time, raising baby songbirds was simply out of the question. But then the phone rang.
“Suzie,” said the woman on the phone, her voice shaking. “This is Liz—do you remember me? Dana’s friend? I have a nestful of baby blue jays. I’ve called everywhere and I can’t get anyone to take them and they’re hungry and I’m afraid they’re all going to die.”
“Are you sure the parents aren’t around?” I asked. “How long has it been since you’ve seen them?”
“The mother was hit by a car,” she said. “I saw it happen. They’ve been alone for two hours and I haven’t seen any other blue jay go near them.”
“I’m not set up for babies,” I said. “Let me make some calls.”
“Can I bring them to you while you’re calling?” she said. “They’re all falling over and I don’t think they have much time left.”
I hung up and immediately dialed Maggie’s work number. “Maggie!” I said. “I have a nestful of blue jays coming in. What do I do, besides get this woman to drive them down to you?”
“I can’t take them!” whispered Maggie. “We’re getting reviewed this week and there are people all over the place. I have nine babies in three nests, and they’re all hidden in my desk drawers and if anybody finds them I’m going to get fired!”
“But you have to take them!” I said. “What am I supposed to do with baby blue jays?”
“Call Joanne,” whispered Maggie. “Meanwhile, get them hydrated with drops of Pedialyte and feed them mealworms and that dip I gave you. Somebody’s coming—I gotta go!”
Cursing under my breath, I called Joanne. No answer. I had the numbers of a few other rehabbers, all a little over an hour away. Nothing. Finally I called Jayne Amico, the Connecticut songbird guru who, at any given spring or summer moment, can have forty to fifty nestling songbirds going at one time.
“Jayne!” I said into her phone machine. “Pick up the phone! You gotta help me!”
Jayne lifted the receiver. “Damn those raptors!” she exclaimed. “I hate those things! How can you rehab them? I’ve got a Cooper’s hawk hanging around my backyard and I know he’s going to get one of my little woodpeckers as soon as I let them go.”
“Forget the raptors,” I said. “Blue jays—I’ve got baby blue jays and I don’t do babies.”
“Oh, yes you do!” she chortled. “You do now, honey!”
Technically, blue jays aren’t even songbirds—they’re Corvids, the group of birds that also includes magpies, crows, and ravens. As Jayne explained as she was giving me a crash course in housing and caring for orphaned songbirds, I was lucky that I was starting out with a nestful of relatively sturdy birds; they could have been impossibly minuscule creatures like wrens or chickadees.
They arrived in their own large and beautifully constructed nest, six awkward, naked hatchlings sprouting tufts of down. They had oversized square heads, bright red mouths, and yellow gape flanges—the outer lining of the mouth, which is one of the markers for identifying nestling birds. Their eyes were just beginning to open, which meant they were about three days old. By the time they arrived they had missed more than ten feedings and were lying limply, like small plants that had been deprived of water.
First they needed to be warmed up, which meant placing them on a heating pad covered by a thick cotton towel. Meanwhile I twisted a small cotton towel into a doughnut, draped another one over the top of it, covered it with a few Kleenexes, and placed the whole thing into a ceramic bowl, creating a clean—and easily cleanable—nest. When they were warm I transferred them to the new nest and rehydrated them by placing tiny drops of electrolyte solution along the sides of their closed beaks until they were alert. Then I began to feed them, something I would do about a gazillion times during the next month.
The best diet to feed orphaned passerines is another contentious issue among rehabbers, inspiring lively bouts of namecalling and slander. A rehabber’s goal is to mimic as closely as possible what the parent birds offer their nestlings, and almost all passerines feed their babies bugs. However, the parents supplement with various other wild foods—plus the adults’ saliva contains essential nutrients, all of which you must attempt to duplicate if you want the baby to grow up healthy. This means you must put together a complicated and carefully measured vitamin mixture—of which there are many recipes that are constantly being perfected—and puree it into a hummus-like paste, into which you dip each bug and then serve it using tweezers or forceps. At least, that was the idea at that particular point in time. Jayne recently told me that she has jettisoned the dip idea in favor of a more complicated mealworm diet—something that might have saved me hours of work had I known about it back then.
I gratefully defrosted Maggie’s container of dip, which she had insisted I take “just in case.” I took a portion of it and added a bit of water, cut a group of mealworms in half, and went to work. But as I discovered, nestling birds who have been yanked away from their parents and placed in a bizarre new environment don’t automatically open their beaks at the sight of a pair of tweezers.
“Jayne!” I shouted through her phone machine. “What am I supposed to do now?”
The phone clicked on. “Who is this?” she demanded. “Could it be the former raptor rehabber who has finally started to see the light?”
Armed with Jayne’s arsenal of tricks I gently tapped the sides of the orphans’ beaks, stroked the sides of their faces, lightly jostled their nest, and approached them with tweezers five different ways; soon they were all gaping for food except the smallest one, who steadfastly refused to open his beak. Eventually I pried it open gently, using a tiny tool so as not to inflict any damage, and placed bits of food inside. Realizing that I would be doing this every twenty minutes, rain or shine, I suddenly understood why most rehabbers react badly when yet another mom telephones and announces that she’s found a baby bird and wants to know if her five-year-old can raise it.
By the time the kids returned from school things were manageable, if not under control. I had put the nest bowl into a small lidless cardboard box, just to be safe; the kids peered over its edge and gasped.
“Ohhhhh, look at them,” cooed Skye, who, from that moment on, would always turn maternal at the sight of a nestling. “Can I help you feed them?”
“Can you find out who hit the mother?” asked Mac, who had recently reacted to a schoolmate’s tale of removing an egg-filled nest from a tree by loudly announcing, “You’ve just violated the Migratory Bird Act—one phone call from me and you’re headed for jail!”
“Sorry, Mac,” I said. “I’m afraid whoever hit her is long gone.”
The kids had just watched their new Harry Potter video several hundred times, so they christened the orphans Harry, Ron, Hagrid, Norbert, Professor McGonagall, and Albus Dumbledore. (Skye had decided, inexplicably, that she was saving the name Hermione for a woodpecker.) After several sessions of watching me feed them, the kids took supervised turns. We gave extra care and extra feedings to Albus Dumbledore, the smallest, while I tried to prepare them for one possible outcome.
“He’s so little,” I said. “It’s like being the runt of the litter. He’s just not as healthy as the others. Sometimes not all of them make it.”
“He’ll make it,” said Skye.
The odds are that not all of them would have survived in the wild. The largest and most aggressive siblings usually get most of the food, while the smallest become progressively weaker and sometimes die. Occasionally the parents will push a sickly baby from the nest, an act that may seem brutal to those who don’t understand the Herculean task the parent birds face. Once you stop to consider the dawn-to-dusk feeding schedule and combine it with the dangers facing most songbirds—both natural (natural predators, bad weather) and man-made (suburban development, outdoor cats, windows, cars, pesticides, etc., etc., etc.)—it’s easier to comprehend a parent bird’s cutting its losses early and devoting its limited resources to the nestlings more likely to grow to adulthood.
Our extra labor didn’t do any good. Despite our best efforts, Albus remained small and sickly and died two days later. I carried his tiny body into the woods, once again trying to figure out what I would tell the kids when they returned from school. Unlike with the house sparrow, they had invested time, effort, and emotion in the nestling jay, even if it was only two days’ worth.
Wildlife rehabilitators see more death in a busy month than most people do in a lifetime, and must come up with their own coping mechanisms. In my previous eleven years I had handled the deaths of many wild creatures with the emotions rehabbers strive for: a mixture of regret and resignation and a resolve to use any knowledge gained for the next one. But I had one spectacular crash. She was one of a pair of orphaned crows I had raised during my years at the raptor center. I released them both and she stayed around the house, only to die in a freak accident one late summer morning. She was half wild, still friendly to our family, but along with her shyer nestmate, she was in the process of forging a bond with the local crow flock. She soared between our world and theirs, bursting with life and joy, and when she flew beside me as I ran through the woods I felt as if I, too, were flying.
I knew I could lose her at any moment. Like the chickadees of my childhood she was free to leave, free to cast off the chains of my increasingly desperate love for her. Though captive-raised, she was my tangible link with the wild world, the feathered embodiment of everything I had always found wondrous but unattainable. I rejoiced when she appeared and feared for her safety when she left. I worried about a hawk attack, however, not some random, unpreventable accident: a collision with a swing that broke her neck.
After she died I swore to myself that I could still see her flying beside me as I ran through the woods, and grieved for her for months with an intensity that frightened everyone but my children. Wearing an unconvincing smile, my eyes bruised and swollen, I would start them on a project; as soon as they were engrossed I would slip out the door, hurry down the hill, and sit beside the stone-circled grave blanketed with flowers, my face buried in my arms. Soon they would both appear behind me, at ages four and five the small guardians of their devastated mother. “Time to come home now,” they would say, and carefully lead me back up the hill to the house.
Remembering this I realized that they were more resilient than I gave them credit for, and probably far better equipped than I was to handle the highs and lows of bird rehabilitation. The kids came home from school, peered into the box, and looked up in dismay.
“Where…” Skye began.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “He didn’t make it.”
“Oh, no,” sighed Mac.
For a long moment Skye stared into my eyes, precariously balanced between grief and resignation.
“Could you feed the others?” I asked her.
Her gaze dropped to the remaining five nestlings. Roused by our voices, they had lifted their heads and were opening their beaks.
“Okay,” she said finally, and picked up the tweezers.