Thomas M. Haggerty, in his Birds of North America account, reports a case of suspected polygyny in northwestern Alabama, with two females nesting in the territory of a single male. The male assisted at the first nest but not the nest of the second female. Suspected is the operative word here, because, like Dr. Haggerty, I can’t be absolutely sure there’s not a fourth wren sneaking around in the picture. Because the literature states that only the female Carolina wren incubates (only she develops a brood patch), and because there were eggs being simultaneously incubated in both nests from April 21, when incubation started in the bucket nest, through April 26, when the garage nest hatched, I knew there had to be two females present. I knew that the resident male’s territory encompassed both the garage and the eave where the bucket hung. I suspect that the same male fertilized both clutches, and I’m certain he tended both nests, since I watched him take food from the mealworm feeder into the garage, then reenter the feeder and take food to the bucket nest.
My interpretation of events goes like this: a single pair of wrens built the early nest in the garage, and the female laid two eggs. While she was completing the clutch, a second female arrived, took over the garage, built another nest, and drove the original female out to the bucket nest. The male, seeing a chance to send his genes out nine times over, took that opportunity to redefine monogamy. Mating with both females, he housed both on the same territory. He did feed young in both nests, until the garage nest fledged on May 8 and the garage female took those four young into the woods. Then, he turned his attention full-time to the bucket nest. A serial monogamist, to put it kindly. And the vent pecking between the two tussling birds—likely females? A scientifically recognized bird’s way of trying to interrupt insemination is removing sperm from the interloper’s cloaca. I envisioned a clandestine tryst between the resident male and the interloping female, interrupted by his original mate. Give me back his DNA, you hussy! Yeow! I was thankful that I could envision no human parallels for this specific behavior.
The bucket nest fledged on May 17. The five young were in the nest at nightfall and out on the ground beneath it, only eleven days old, the next morning. Clustered together, bills out, they looked like a single clump of soft cocoa brown feathers. The parents, seeing us watching them through the foyer window, gave a signal, and the clump exploded, tiny wrens buzz-bombing low over the flower beds. They bivouacked at the fishpond. Both adults led them toward the woods. An adult would fly to a fledgling’s side, linger a moment, then fly to the next logical perch, and call. The fledgling would immediately launch for that perch, landing neatly beside the adult. One baby, still lacking its tail, could fly only half as far as the other four. The adult took it to the woods in a series of shorter flights, leading it in much shorter stages. Brains.
Since that day, thirty-five (and counting) baby Carolina wrens have been raised in the copper pail, and we’ve watched the fledglings flutter out time and time again, adding motion and music to our lives. There were five nestlings in the summer of 2008, and they lined up on the downspout before making their first stuttering flights into the world. Well, four of them did.
When Carolina wrens leave the nest, they don’t mess around. One minute, everything’s quiet; the next minute, baby birds are shooting out of the nest like popcorn. The parent birds work in shifts, calling and encouraging the young to hop and flutter to the nearest deep cover. Somehow, the adult birds keep them all together and feed them for the next three weeks, as their wings strengthen and their foraging skills develop.
So I was alarmed to find one baby wren, all bright eyes and yellow clown lips, still perched by the bucket after its four siblings had gained the safety of the woods. Surely a parent would return for it. One hour, then two went by, and the fledgling was hungry, chirping constantly for help. Oh, dear. I did not want to be a teenage wren’s mother for the next three weeks. I listened—nothing from the silent woods. By now, the family could be hundreds of yards away. What to do?
It was time for a little technology. I grabbed my iPod, which is fully loaded with the songs and calls of nearly every North American bird. I ran to the edge of our woods and dialed up the song of the Carolina wren. Please, please, let this work. I played it at full volume. No response. Desperate, I dialed up the alarm call of the wren and blasted it down into the silent tangle of raspberry and sumac. Danger! Danger! the recording shrilled in wrenspeak. An adult wren shot right past my head, flying straight toward the forgotten baby in the copper bucket. The recalcitrant fledgling buzzed out to meet it. Baby wren: last seen, headed toward the safety of the woods, in the company of a parent. Nature geek: smiling broadly.
The intrigue, the interventions, and the observations will continue. At this point, who could stop? Catfights, a two-timing male, abandoned babies to be rescued . . . the drama keeps coming. Carolina wrens are tiny birds who live large. No, I don’t look much like an ornithologist; I look more like a mom who, binoculars always at the ready, dashes between window, kitchen sink, washing machine, and computer. But, in the spirit of amateur ornithology, I send this story out to Dr. Thomas M. Haggerty, because we also serve who watch and write.
SUMMER WORK
Drawing, Raising, and Saving Birds
Hummingbird Summer
IN THEORY, at least, I like being a licensed wildlife rehabilitator. I like much of the practice of rehabilitation. Then there’s the responsibility. In Ohio, part of the requirement for getting your permit is allowing your home telephone number to be put on a list that is given to every veterinarian, wildlife official, extension office, and nature center in the state. Needless to say, it’s a bit of a leap, personally and professionally, to become a wildlife rehabilitator. There are times when there’s nothing better to be in the whole world. When a cedar waxwing you’ve raised drops out of the sky and lands on your arm, then whirls off to join its flockmates, for instance, it’s a really good thing to be.
In practice, it can be harrowing. In June and July, the months that rehabilitators know as “baby season,” the telephone rings several times an hour, and each caller has a unique problem that, should I allow it, might become mine. The particular difficulty is that I work with songbirds, which are much more labor-intensive than larger birds. There are a lot of raptor rehabilitation facilities around but very few places that will take songbirds. The simplest reason is that raptors need to be fed once a day. Most of the songbirds that get in trouble are orphaned nestlings, and they need to be fed every twenty to forty-five minutes, dawn to dusk, for a period of weeks. Try to imagine your life as it would look while feeding something every twenty minutes, and you have the short answer to why so few people are willing to work with songbirds.
I dread hearing the phone ring in summer, but I always pick it up because I can help the vast majority of the callers without ever having to handle the bird. In many cases, they’ve found a feathered fledgling that is supposed to be out of the nest and hopping around on the ground, one that’s being tended by its parents and just needs to be put back outside so it can live out this vulnerable but necessary part of its life cycle. Because I travel a lot, have a family and a career, and I need to do things other than feed baby birds, I do what I can to help over the phone. I try to redirect injured birds to the facilities where they can be helped. Occasionally, though, there are calls that demand immediate action, calls that change my life.
It’s July 9, 2003. Two calls come in rapid succession, both from Reno, Ohio. One woman has found two nestling hummingbirds in an intact nest on the ground following a powerful thunderstorm. I tell her to tie the nest back up in the sweet gum from whence it came and call me in an hour if the female hummingbird hasn’t returned. I hang up the phone, and another call comes in, from another woman in Reno with exactly the same story. “Didn’t we just speak?” I ask. No, it’s a second nest, with two baby hummingbirds inside. I instruct her to do the same thing, but her front yard is such a mess that she can’t tell from which tree it might have fallen. As I’d done with the first
caller, I give her directions to my house.
As it turns out, neither hummingbird mother was able to relocate her young, and both nests, their precious cargo intact, are on my kitchen table within two hours. When I see the first one, my hand flies up to cover my mouth and I gasp. I know, intellectually, that hummingbirds are small, but these two nestlings are so very tiny. After all, they’ve hatched from eggs no bigger than black-eyed peas. They’re in pinfeathers, and their eyes are winking open and closed. They’re breathing hard and fast. The birds in the second nest are a few days older than the first two, with all but their head feathers out of the sheaths. Four baby hummingbirds, where before there were none. I’ve never even seen a baby hummingbird up close, and now they’re mine to deal with.
I am reeling from the thought that these unutterably dear little birds will die unless I figure out how to take care of them. I imagine them, clinging to the walls of their soft, walnut-size homes as their nests suddenly became space capsules, hurtling downward to a hard landing. I know, looking at them, that my life has suddenly and irrevocably changed, as it would have had I opened my front door and found a newborn baby crying on the stoop.
What to Feed Them?
By chance, I have on hand a jar of powdered hummingbird maintenance diet, the kind that’s used in zoos and aviaries. I’d ordered it when I’d taken in an adult ruby-throated hummingbird, who had hit a window and broken her wing. I thought I’d keep her until I knew whether the wing would heal. If it wouldn’t, I told myself, I’d euthanize her, because a hummingbird who cannot fly can no longer be a hummingbird. By the time I knew she was permanently grounded, I had fallen for her bright eyes and indomitable spirit. My resolve to do the right thing ebbed away. I no longer knew what the right thing might be. Lily lived in a large glass tank next to my drawing table, set up with delicate twigs, a handicapped-accessible feeder, a shallow bathtub, and clean paper towels. She chipped in alarm when she saw a hawk, and she scolded vigorously whenever anyone but me entered the studio. Her zest for life was barely dimmed by her infirmity. When she finally died, as grounded hummingbirds inevitably do, I missed her terribly. Her spirit, so much larger than her tiny, broken body, had imbued the studio. I buried Lily in a bed of cardinal flower and salvia and stored the seventy-nine-dollar jar of powdered hummingbird diet in the refrigerator, saving it against the time when I might need it again.
Remembering Lily and thanking my lucky stars that I had saved her food, I mix up some solution and drizzle it along the sides of the tightly closed bills of the nestlings. They swallow eagerly. I try a variety of sounds to stimulate them to gape as they would for their mothers. A rapid peeping does the trick—orange gapes fly open, and their heads pump like sewing machine needles as they glug down the nectar. They practically swallow the eyedropper in their eagerness. To my amazement, I can see their newly full crops ballooning out on the left sides of their necks, like pea-size water blisters. It’s easy to tell when they’ve had enough.
And yet I worry. Is a diet formulated for maintaining adult hummingbirds sufficient to keep nestlings healthy and growing? I’d read that female hummingbirds take tiny insects to their young—gathering aphids and gnats, robbing spider webs of their catch. Protein is an essential ingredient in the diet of any young bird. I think hard about how to get some live animal protein into the nestlings, since the protein in the powdered formula is derived from soybeans. When has a hummingbird ever eaten a soybean? I hit upon the idea of beheading and squeezing mealworm larvae, like miniature toothpaste tubes, and offering the pastelike substance on the blunt end of a toothpick. The extra protein seems to agree with the nestlings. As they get older, I pick out freshly molted, tender white mealworms, dice them up, and give each bird a few bits with every formula feeding. Although I’m flying by the seat of my pants, I learn afterward that the powdered formula alone would have provided insufficient nutrition for the growing nestlings. Successful hummingbird rehabilitators (at the time, I hadn’t known there were any!) add live insect protein, usually in the form of pulverized fruit flies, to their nestling formulas.
Setting the Motherclock
The first day of being a stand-in hummingbird parent is a little rough, remembering to drop everything every twenty minutes, cut the head off a mealworm, squeeze it out, and warm their formula. By the end of the day, my natural motherclock sets itself, and I automatically head for the glass tank where the nestlings wait in their nests, bills agape, for their next meal. I’ve had the hummingbirds for two days when my daughter’s seventh birthday arrives. I clean the house, cook dinner for sixteen people, wrap a dozen presents, and make and decorate a cake shaped like a dolphin. I can’t find the blue food coloring, and I can’t go to the grocery store to get some with my hummingbird guests in tow, so I tell Phoebe it’s an Amazonian freshwater dolphin and dye the frosting pink. She seems happy with that. In between, I feed the hummingbirds twenty times. While I’m giving them their last evening feeding, Phoebe unwraps all the presents I bought for her, including her new roller skates. I miss the whole thing. It’s hard to hide my disappointment. Even so, I realize that no seven-year-old ever had a better present than four baby hummingbirds to help care for. Should she choose to be a naturalist, she will instinctively know things that only living with wild creatures can impart. Things I know in my bones, things they have taught me—things she will know, too.
By Saturday, July 12, on their fourth day with me, almost all their pinfeather sheaths have burst, and the nestlings really look like birds. They are immeasurably easier to feed, having abandoned the sewing-machine motion for quiet gaping, allowing me to slowly drop the nectar into their gullets. It’s a good thing, too, because the pump-and-dodge behavior was getting them covered with the sticky, protein-rich nectar solution, and I had to swab them down with wet Q-Tips after each meal. They’re looking natty and clean now, save for a bit of stickum around the gape. A new shipment of mealworms arrives, and I tear the tender white worms into millimeter-size pieces and give the birds one worm each per feeding, washed down with nectar. I grow more confident in my ability to provide for them every day and am beginning to allow myself to fall in love with them. Like a mother of identical quadruplets, I can tell each one from the others, by its behavior and preferences if not by its looks. These are hours well spent.
Life in the Nest
I think about what it must be like to be crammed into a tiny, thick-walled nest with a sibling for three weeks, the space getting tighter and tighter. Hummingbird nests, being constructed mainly of plant down and cobwebs, stretch considerably as the nestlings grow, but they remain a tight fit. One hummingbird cannot preen without the consent and accommodation of the other. Often, a nestling that’s trying to preen or scratch itself winds up preening or scratching its nestmate instead.
The birds are crawling with feather mites, so many that, when I inadvertently touch the nest branch or the edge of their tank, twenty or more swarm up my arm. Looking like tiny, animated periods, the mites make me itch intensely. I can only imagine how they feel to the hummingbirds. I can’t dip or treat the birds, so I hope that, when they fledge, they’ll leave the majority of their mites in the nest. I take the empty nests and microwave them as soon as they’re vacated, and the napkin beneath the nests looks as if it’s been peppered.
The most trying time for the roommates comes when the wing feathers shed their sheaths. Then, the major occupation of the birds is exercising their wings. They climb up to cling to the nest rim, wings beating in a translucent blur. Only one of the two (hummingbirds always lay two eggs) may exercise at a time. The exercising bird’s wings hum, and it chips excitedly. Its nestmate hunkers down as low as it can, shutting its eyes and sounding an annoyed, low-pitched growl as it is buffeted hard about the head by its sibling’s wings. (Nestlings almost always face the same direction while sitting in the nest.) As soon as the buffeter is finished, the buffetee climbs to the nest rim to give tit for tat. I decide, watching the birds barely tolerating each other, that the feroci
ously independent and irascible temperament of ruby-throated hummingbirds must find its genesis here, in twenty-five days of enforced confinement with an annoying nestmate.
And yet they seem to be eager to imitate each other. Like that of other birds I’ve observed, I suspect that much of hummingbird learning is based on instinct but also on observing others. I am amazed to find them copying each other’s feeding style. When one bird learns to stop pumping its head and lets me drizzle nectar into its open gullet, its nestmate immediately follows suit. One of the nestlings, my favorite for its clean plumage and alert demeanor, often refuses to gape for me, preferring to slowly lap nectar out of the dropper. When I come in to feed them one afternoon, a younger baby from the other nest is sitting by this bird’s side. I try to feed my favorite, and it refuses to gape. When I offer the dropper to its companion, it, too, refuses to gape. I have to laugh. There is so much more going on in their tiny heads than I give them credit for.
The Bluebird Effect Page 6