To the Tent with You Three!

If you're just visiting my blog for the first time in awhile, PLEASE scroll down to the older post, and pick up the song sparrow's saga from the first. We're in the middle of things here, and there's lots more story that came before. 

Bob, on the babies' first day in the tent, Day 20. He still has a little peruke of down on his head. 

This is an old picture of my first and best tent, as you can see from Phoebe's larval instar. This is the one the wind crumpled up like a ball and rolled across the yard, and that's how I learned I have to put the fledging tent up in the garage!!

Once I’d seen all three babies eating on their own from dishes, I could take them out to the fledging tent in my detached four-car garage. This is a great setup because the tent is totally protected from the winds we get on the ridgetop, which destroyed my first and best fledging tent, crumpling it up like so much Kleenex. (Luckily there were no birds inside at the time.) I leave the garage door open, and one end of the tent gets sunshine much of the day. My little inmates can sunbathe, splash in their shallow baths, sleep on high branches, and race around on the floor of the tent, which is about 10' wide x 15' long x 8' tall. They can hear birds singing and watch what’s going on in the wild birds' world, and imagine themselves flying free out there. But at night, I can close the garage door and know no predator is going to get them. 

 On Sept. 11, Day 21, I walked out and opened the garage door at first light, letting the rising sun into the tent. The three sparrows, who'd been sleeping on high branches, immediately fluttered to the floor of the tent and loaded up on mealworms as soon as they could see to forage. Oh FABULOUS!!  I tasted real freedom for the first time in two weeks. They weren't waiting for me to come into the tent and give them formula!  Making sure they had plenty of food in their dishes and scattered across the tent floor, I loaded the bike on my rack and took a wheeled tour of Marietta during Sternwheel Festival, something I’d always wanted to do. It being plague times, I kept a mask on and kept my distance, but it was really nice to see other humans having fun. It can get lonely out on the ridge, especially when I’m tied to baby bird feeding schedules for weeks at a time. 

Bob, Day 27

He had a neat little bowtie by Day 27! Bob was just neat and clean. 

Now that the birds were in the tent, my challenge was to train them to feed atop a pedestal. This would be necessary once I released them, to keep chipmunks from immediately cleaning out their food, and to protect the birds from attack by these striped vampires.

A cool little chipmunk who appeared briefly in May 2020. It was super cute. But it was still a chipmunk. 

                                                      I can see beyond the cute.

Chipmunks are the bane of my existence as a songbird rehabilitator and gardener, too. They’re super smart, conniving, and bloodthirsty, and they’ll gladly pounce on naïve baby birds and make a meal of them. In the first two days after his release, I saved Dustin (2020's song sparrow client) multiple times from becoming chipmunk lunch. My worst moment was seeing a chipmunk jump him and tussle with him. I lunged at the animal, and Dustin shook himself off and resumed hopping and scratching as if it warn’t no big deal. He didn't even fly away! It was up to me to chase the damn rodent out of the flowerbed so Dustin could go on being bait. He was slow, and they were sharp, but he eventually got the message, and began to listen to his natural vigilance.

 

Dustin, June 14, 2020. Ultimately successful, and worth all the work. 

I was taking no chances with this trio, so I decided to train them to a pedestal before releasing them. It wasn’t easy. Most sparrows are by nature ground feeders (it’s pretty rare to get a song sparrow on a platform or hanging feeder). So I started with a low iron table, perhaps 1.5’ off the ground. It took awhile, but they eventually accepted it. I then tried placing their dishes on a tray atop a pedestal, looking for an extra foot or two of height for their safety. Nothing doing. They wouldn’t land on the metal tray. I sat back and studied the situation. I placed the metal table, on which they were used to landing, atop the pedestal. Success! I had them eating 3' off the ground! 

 Slowly, they’d transitioned to accepting lots of millet and mixed canary seed as well as mealworms, and that was great, because it would be a lot easier for me to keep them in millet than mealworms, with most of the birds in my yard wise to the delicious offerings I put out for my rehab clients. 

 

                                   Ball, left, with Baby, Day 27, in the fledging tent.  These two hung out constantly in the tent. Bob was not interested in their company. 

 

Ball, left, with Baby, Day 27.

 

 

 

Baby, left, and Ball discover a termite in the tent. 

 

                                                    This was not a good thing for the termite. 

Baby cracks her own millet, Day 27. I was lying on my side, watching to make sure I saw hulls falling, and that seed going down her throat. 

Once they were used to flying up to the pedestal to feed, I switched to using a large flat board on top of it. This would be their feeder upon release. All these changes took place over the week and a half they were in the tent. Once they were reliably feeding on the board-topped pedestal, there was nothing to hold them back. It was September 17, and they were 27 days old. I had chosen this day for release because Margaret Morse Nice, Ohio song sparrow guru and author of one of the finest single-species studies ever done, wrote that the oldest young she’d ever observed being fed by parents was 27 days old. If  M.M. Nice says it, it's true!

       That's Margaret Nice in the middle, aged 60 in 1953. She looks like someone I'd love to bird with! Raised five kids while conducting the best study to date of any vertebrate anywhere, ever. Wouldn't it be a hoot to time travel and hand her a pair of Swarovski binoculars to use? We use the tools that we are given.

If you'd like to learn more about Columbus resident and exemplary behavioral scientist Margaret Morse Nice, here's a good blogpost: https://blog.nature.org/science/2016/08/08/battles-song-sparrows-scientific-outsider-changed-study-birds-ornithology-margaret-morse-nice/

 

Ball in front, Baby behind. Where's Bob?

Here are three photos of him at Day 22. 

Bob did a lot of hanging out in the tent window, just wishing he could be outside, already.

He was always just the cutest thing, and his feather quality was the best of the three. 

The difference between Day 22 (above) and Day 27...

Bob, you're so ready to go!! Looking like an adult sparrow, but for that little yellow gape line, and the indistinct streaking on your breast. 

After almost two weeks in the tent, which was the period between when they first started feeding themselves a little, but still needed syringe feeding,  and when they no longer needed any hand feeding at all, the song sparrows were fully baked and ready to release. Imagine me popping out of the house about a dozen times a day, with a syringe full of fresh formula, chasing the babies around the tent, offering squirts. When they finally started cracking their own millet, I knew this phase of my service was over. 

On to release, and a new phase!