By July 7, I’ve had my two swifts for fourteen days. The phone rings in the morning, and the caller has five baby chimney swifts that have fallen down a high and inaccessible flue. They’ve kept the birds alive for three days with small balls of raw hamburger, fed five times a day. When the caller arrives with her eleven-year-old daughter, I learn that the young girl shouldered the chore of feeding them. Only two would gape readily; she hit upon the trick of roaring at them, which caused them to open their mouths and shrill in fear. This call, a harsh, incredibly loud reaaah! reaah! reeeaahh! is given when the nestlings are startled and only, as far as I know, by nestlings. It’s doubtless effective in frightening small mammalian predators away from an occupied nest; I’ve heard young titmice give a snakelike hiss in the same situations. When the swifts’ mouths opened wide in the fright call, the girl would pop in a hamburger ball, and she kept them alive that way. I praised her innovation, this budding animal person, hugged her, and promised her I’d do my best to raise them all.
These birds are a little older than my two, and though they’re a bit underweight and dehydrated, they’re bright-eyed and beautiful, having been raised by their parents until they met with misfortune. My two look a bit scruffier, but they seem thrilled to have an instant family. When I put them all in a rattan wastebasket, Sasha and Amelia scuttle into the middle of a pile of soft, soot brown chimney swift feathers and look up at me, their eyes twinkling.
I mix up my latest avian culinary offering, suggested by Astrid—a scrambled egg, its shell crushed to powder and stirred back in, with two tablespoons of dried insects added for extra protein. Fried up, the bug omelet smells nauseating and looks even worse, a gray mess of bug bits and egg. But they eat it with gusto, and it should have everything they need to grow and thrive. I order $36.00 worth of dried flies and one thousand live crickets online for $16.50. Raising chimney swifts is neither easy nor cheap, but it pays richly in intangibles.
The newcomers are frightened and still, in contrast to my raucous foundlings. They sit with bills clamped shut, watching me warily. I can’t blame them—they’ve been a bit intimidated by their foster mother’s technique. When they see Sasha and Amelia begging lustily, they join in, immediately at ease. Now my problem is remembering which of the seven have been fed in a session. Bill suggests that I color-code them, so I dab a dot of acrylic paint on each bird’s forehead: pink, green, red, blue, white, and yellow. I run out of colors, but I don’t need to mark scruffy little Sasha anyway, any more than a mother needs to mark her child on the first day of preschool. He’s still in pinfeathers and looks reptilian next to Amelia and these smooth, paint-dotted newcomers.
From two to seven—it’s a bit more work, but as long as I’m dropping everything on the hour, I might as well feed five more birds. My little flock feels like a quorum now. The bug omelet agrees with them. I supplement with live mealworms. They’re old enough to handle the smooth, chitinous coating on the larvae, which is a good thing, since I can’t find enough tender, freshly molted mealworms to keep seven hungry birds fed.
JULY 8, 2004. It’s fledging day (Day 21) for Amelia, the older of the two original orphans. She’s impossible to corral in the berry box and refuses to sit for her daily portrait, fluttering to my chest and clinging there. Once, she flutters down and manages to land on my smooth calf, so sharp are her nails and strong are her toes. Oh, that smarts. I paint one more portrait of Sasha, who’s eighteen days old and finally free from sheaths on his head and body. He’s gone from a porcupine to a sleek, beautiful bird. He watches every stroke of the pencil with minute turns of his snakelike head. But for the shape of his eyes I’d never have known it was Sasha. I feel a flush of accomplishment, washing away the apprehension that’s dogged me for the past two weeks. Somehow he’s survived my ineptitude, and now there are five more chimney swifts for him to socialize with. With my two-week crash course in nurturing swifts behind me, I feel confident they’re all going to make it.
I’m keeping all seven in the rattan wastebasket, lined with paper towels at the bottom. They cling handily to its weave, and it’s easy to feed them, then change the paper toweling every hour. When I need to wash the basket, I simply remove the nestlings and hook them like living brooches onto the front of my shirt; they’ll hang wherever I put them. Amelia and Sasha immediately scuttle up to nestle under my chin; these birds have never known any other mother, and it’s revealed in behavior like this. I keep everything as clean as possible, but I occasionally must put a bird under the warm-water tap and wash it after it ends up at the bottom of the basket. I start covering the basket with a towel in between feedings, lest one of the birds make an unscheduled flight in the house. I keep them on the kitchen table, the better to reach them for feeding and cleaning. They chitter and preen in their darkened basket, and they rasp rhythmically like an engine burning up when I raise the blanket.
After one feeding, I forget to cover the basket, and one bird makes an escape. I’m not aware of it until an hour later, when I find only six gaping mouths on going to feed them. My son, Liam’s voice comes from the adjoining living room. “Mommy, there’s a bird in the chimney!” And there is Sasha, up inside our big stone chimney, clinging quietly. This bird was brought to our home at perhaps four days of age, a blind pink blob of protoplasm. He’s never seen a chimney. And yet he knows where to go; he’s following an instinctive blueprint. Clearly, we owe him a chimney of his own.
I stuff Sasha back in the wastebasket, cover it, and go to the garage to rummage about among the lumber and garden tools, emerging with four stout, weathered boards. Bill revs up his circular saw and makes a narrow, four-foot-high box, a suitable substitute for a real chimney. I rough up the inside for clingability, and we mount it in the middle of a fifteen-by-seventeen-foot nylon-screen tent out in the yard. The swifts leave their basket, fly tentatively around the new space, and immediately drop into the box as if they’ve been doing it all their lives.
They throw their wings over each other’s backs and sleep inside the makeshift chimney in one big, soft mass of feathers, studded with sparkling onyx eyes. After dark, I go into the tent, gently gather them into their old rattan wastebasket, and take them inside for the night. The nylon tent is anything but raccoon-proof, and I can’t let these wonderful birds go to feed a bandit.
By July 14, all seven are careening around wildly inside their soft net tent. It’s an ideal way to let them fly without damaging themselves. They pester each other, landing on each other’s backs and chasing. When I go in the tent, they land on my chest and head. Amelia seems to delight in landing on my eyebrows, even my lips. It is excruciatingly painful to have a swift hanging on one’s face from needle-sharp claws. Tears start in my eyes and roll down my cheeks even as I shake with suppressed laughter at being suddenly turned into a perch. I inhale the fusty, warm bird scent of her belly against my nose and marvel that she’d choose to cling to my face. It would feel like a hug if it weren’t so painful.
There is a spark in these birds, a mischievousness and intelligence that I’d never had the luxury of noticing before I stood in as their mother. It’s easy to assume that a bird that spends most of its life on the wing must not be very interesting or intelligent. And yet I perceive predictable differences among all of the seven fledglings. Some are adventurous, like the aptly named Amelia; some more timid; some are assertive and reckless; some, like Sasha, just sweeter, for lack of a better word. Amelia has figured out where the door is on the flight tent, and she’s clearly hoping to make a break for it. It’s accessed by a floor-to-ceiling zipper. Because of her insight, I’m forced to unzip it at the bottom, just enough to insert my foot, and block the opening with my body, literally zipping my way into the tent. Amelia will land on my thigh as I’m trying to get inside. These swifts are not slow in any sense of the word.
Just as we’re poised on the brink of release, it gets tricky again. I learn from other rehabilitators that I must wait until the flight feathers have completely emerged from their sheat
hs before releasing the birds. Every day, I watch them circling their tent, and I check their flight feathers as they cling to its screened sides, watching the sky. To my consternation, they begin refusing all food. Every time I think I have them figured out, they throw me another curve. I dive into the literature to see what might be going on. They’re healthy, flying strongly, bright-eyed, preening. They just seem to be fasting. The Birds of North America account states that body mass of fledglings that first leave the nest and begin exercising their wings is three grams less than peak mass on Days 18 to 22. These birds are almost thirty days old, old enough to leave and not come back. I think they want to feed themselves now. Because I have no way of offering flying insects, I try throwing mealworms at them as they circle the tent. They feint but don’t take the offering. I coax and cajole and manage to get a few crickets in them.
Once chimney swifts leave their nest sites for good, at twenty-eight to thirty days of age, their parents no longer feed them, even when they return to roost and beg. I know that these birds are equipped with the instinct to grab flying insects, but it seems like an abrupt transition to go from total subsidy to none. Because some of them still sport sheaths on the bases of their flight feathers, I’m reluctant to just zip open the tent. I want to be sure their flight powers are as well developed as possible. Even though I sense that this anorexia is a natural prerequisite to fledging, I keep careful track of their food intake and occasionally take a recalcitrant fledgling’s bill in my hand and stuff a calcium-dusted cricket down its mouth. I’m not going to have devoted a month of intensive care to these birds only to lose them on the brink of independence. I’m consumed with worry again, slaloming down the steep slope of my learning curve.
JULY 19, 2004. There was something in the swifts’ eyes this afternoon that made me realize it was over. They had to go today. They were wild, unruly, impatient, hungry, and keen. One by one, I hand-caught them as they clung briefly to the tent walls, and I put them in their little rattan wastebasket. I gathered the kids and Bill, and we drove into the old part of Marietta, Ohio, and walked out onto a railroad trestle over the Muskingum River.
Ironically, we had to take these birds eighteen miles into town to release them, for chimney swifts need chimneys for roosting and nesting. Marietta is swift heaven, full of old buildings and uncapped brick chimneys, and situated on the confluence of two rivers, with associated hordes of aquatic insects overhead. Clouds of swifts swirled over us; there was a huge caddis fly hatch on the rivers this July evening. There couldn’t be a better time or place to release these birds than here, on this quiet river beside this lovely old riverboat town, beneath a peach-colored sky.
My daughter, Phoebe, who had so faithfully helped me feed these seven foundlings, uncovered the rattan basket. Pink was the first to leap into space, flying with verve and vigor high over the smooth, peach-hued Muskingum. Then came Red, Blue, Green, and Willa. Sasha and Amelia, the ones we’d hand-raised from tiny squirmers, stayed at the bottom of the basket, their heads tracing little arcs as they followed birds high overhead. A squadron of wild swifts came down to meet and flank each new flier, and I laughed out loud to see the fledglings dive, circle, cut side to side, feint, and especially glide—none of which they had been able to do in the cramped confines of their fledging tent. My fears that the human-acclimated swifts might land on passersby evaporated when I saw how high, fast, and freely they flew. They took such obvious joy in pushing the sky’s envelope, these avian DeLoreans, these high-maintenance, high-performance aeronauts, who would now be taking care of themselves.
The air was charged with joy, liberation. Finally Amelia sprang from the basket, and Sasha soon followed. The wild swifts made them welcome, swooping down as a body to fly alongside them. I tracked their flight as long as I could through binoculars, their eyepieces muddled with tears. I looked at Phoebe and Liam, who, like me, had known from the start that our strange little orphans would have to leave someday but had gotten hopelessly attached anyway. Tears dripped from their chins. And I decided at that moment that it was time to get these kids a puppy.
On the way home, we passed streetlights swimming with caddis flies. I sighed happily, knowing that I could sleep in tomorrow, that I could take the big tent down and finally mow the lawn, knowing I’d done my best by them, these seven birds who would have died without us. A small voice came from the back seat, four-year-old Liam: “Will those birds be okay in the night?” I assured him that the wild flock had most certainly shown them to a big chimney where they could all roost together; that they were probably snuggled under a blanket of new companions, and happier than they’d ever been.
Rose-breasted Grosbeak
Close Encounters of the Bird Kind
JUNE 22, 1988. The call came from Connecticut Audubon’s nature center in Fairfield. A nestling rose-breasted grosbeak had been brought in, and it was doing poorly. Would I take it off their hands? I pondered the eighty-mile drive from my home to the state’s western coast and thought about the possibility that the bird had been misidentified. What if I made the drive all the way down only to find a look-alike brown-headed cowbird nestling waiting in a shoe box? “Are there any feathers on its head?” I asked, hoping to smoke out a cowbird impostor, for they stay bald until well after their bodies sprout feathers. “Yes, the head is feathered, and we’re sure it’s a grosbeak,” the caller replied. “He’s not doing too well, and we’re afraid we’re going to lose him.” I reshuffled my schedule, gathered some feeding supplies, and got in the car. The chance to raise a rose-breast was worth the slight inconvenience, worth the months of care, the worry and work.
The tiny bird looked bad, all right, his left leg sprawled out from lack of support and a calcium deficiency. He’d been trying to stand on smooth newspaper when he needed the support of a nest. His droppings were runny, and his appetite was nil. But his eyes were bright, and he was a nine-day-old rose-breasted grosbeak all right, and my heart fluttered and landed over him, clucking and brooding, gathering him in. First, the spraddled leg: I cut white artist’s tape into a narrow strip, taped his sprawled leg to the good one, bringing them together in a natural pose, and installed him in a tissue-paper nest in a small strawberry box for support. I mixed up a diet of mealworms and ground puppy chow, parrot chow, lactobacillus, and vitamins, and fed him from a syringe. He was brighter by nightfall, chirping for food the next morning. That night, I untaped his leg, and it held in a normal pose. We were on our way. I named him Jeff, guessing at his sex, for all rose-breasted grosbeaks are striped brown at the start. By Day 22, salmon pink feathers were emerging in his wing linings. My guess at his sex had been correct. If chimney swifts are the extreme slope in the ski course of wild bird rehabilitation, rose-breasted grosbeaks must be the bunny slope. Jeff’s transition from syringe feeding to picking up his own food was seamless and painless. His natural curiosity about inanimate objects that might be food caused him to pick up and taste anything small enough to fit in his bill. By Day 28, his syringe-fed diet was supplemented with fresh garden peas, diced fruit, parakeet pellets, and ground dry puppy chow, which he picked at himself. On Day 30, I was called away for the day, and the young rose-breast fed himself.
From then on, he refused hand feeding. That was easy—such a contrast to other songbirds I’d raised, which seemed to need real deprivation to try picking up their own fare. Jeff processed live mealworms by flipping them against his perch before masticating and swallowing them down. He bathed daily in a shallow dish and slept in a homemade cage, a two-foot cube of hardware cloth and wood. I left the top open most of the time so he could come in to feed and rest as much as he wished. Jeff was a “trusty”: a clean, quiet bird who stayed out of trouble and kept to predictable perches, refraining from bashing himself against the windows or whitewashing my home. He began his day by leaving his cage, hopping across the bedclothes from my toes up to my head, and gently pecking my nose until I opened my eyes with a chuckle. A rose-breast reveille was a fine way to wake up.
Because I lived on a Nature Conservancy preserve in Salem, Connecticut, surrounded by approximately one thousand acres of woods and field, releasing such hand-raised, human-acclimated birds rarely presented a problem. It was the ideal environment for soft release, whereby a hand-raised bird gradually becomes used to being outdoors. Training them to come when called, rewarding them with food from a brightly colored plastic dish, I could ease their transition to the wild over a period of weeks.
Short outings transitioned to several hours outside, and finally to entire days. On Day 32, I hung Jeff’s cage outside, his food bowls in place. I opened the cage, and he flew to the top of an apple tree, where he remained through the afternoon. He descended to eat mealworms from my palm at 8:00 P.M. and spent an uneventful night outside. Though one might expect a hand-raised bird to simply vanish upon first being released outside, my foundlings showed a strong bond to me and to the place where they were raised. The first overnight outdoors is a watershed moment, probably more for me than for the bird.
The next morning, I heard Jeff’s juvenile contact call, a soft, whistled teeawee, at first light. I emerged from the house with a dish of mealworms, chopped peaches, and cherries, to an enthusiastic reception. By his fourth day out on his own, at thirty-five days of age, his natural wildness was kicking in, and he’d come with increasing reluctance to my hand to be fed.
One of the largest obstacles in releasing hand-raised birds is their lack of vigilance behavior. For Jeff’s benefit, I imitated sharp, sibilant avian alarm calls and acted frightened when a blue jay, crow, hawk, or mammalian predator (my landlords’ galumphing Labrador retriever) happened by. But it was exposure to other birds, some of them hand-raised, at my yard and feeders that probably most helped my foundlings learn appropriate vigilance behavior. These hand-raised birds occasionally presented a problem as well, since they associated my call with food. One catbird, raised and released the summer before, made a specialty of pilfering each new recruit’s food, no matter where I’d hide its special dish. It was hard to be annoyed at such a clever and personable bird, especially since I was his foster mother.
The Bluebird Effect Page 11