Treasuring Every Day

Any day I walk, trot or jog down Dean's Fork is my lucky day. 

There's always something there to stop me dead, and stopping is what I do best. I do not run. I perform a punctuated lope, often amply illustrated.

A crayfish on a still-damp morning road stopped me short. 

Avast!

You're about to have two problems, Sir Pinchalot.

Any time I stop to photograph something, The Dean's Fork Bomber has to come see what it is.

He will pinch you, Chet Baker.

 He smells interesting. I can't hear you warning me, so I'll just go in for the full snuffarooni.

Oh! Look at you! All right, I'll back off. You smell of creekmud, fish and mad.

We will leave you be if you're going to be that prickly about it.

I had plenty of time to discover little things like day-walking crawdads, because Chet was moving very slowly on this cool, 65 degree morning, June  6. I kept having to stop, turn around, and wait for him to catch up.

It was clear that something not so good was going on inside him, and had a feeling it had to do with his heart. He kept glancing back up the road as if he was wondering if he'd have to walk all the way back. We turned around after only a mile and a quarter and headed slowly back to the car. There would be no more loping today.

Dr. Lutz worked him in that afternoon and agreed that he'd had some sort of episode, related to the heart murmur she picked up when I brought him in for his ear infection in February. The day we figured out his thyroid wasn't working right, either. That was not such a good day. Neither was this one, beautiful cool morning and Dean's Fork notwithstanding. Now it's his heart. She put him on blood pressure medication so his heart won't have to work so hard. So he's taking a thyroid pill and a blood pressure pill morning and evening. It still feels funny to shake little pills out of a bottle for Chet Baker. I started taking eye vitamins and fish oil in solidarity, so we'd take our pills together.

Needless to say, this new revelation about Chet's health sent me into a weeklong tailspin. I'm having a hard time accepting the fact that my sweet Bacon is mortal. Since you're wondering, he'll be 12 in December. I suppose it's time for him to have some signs of aging. But any time they show us they're aging, we're never ready for it. That always comes much too soon with our beloved dogs. I don't know what I was thinking--that he'd keep that smart trot going forever?

The only place I really want to be lately, the only place I feel at peace, is down Dean's Fork. There's no cell service down there. My phone becomes nothing more than a fabulous camera, all ties to the outside world cut. There are rose-breasted grosbeaks singing down there, zippity doo-dah all day, and it suits me fine.

The light and landscapes there soothe me. I so want my buddy by my side. But I have to accept that there will be days going forward that he can't come along. He'll tell me if he's up for it, and he'll tell me if he's not.

I am delighted to report that, after taking it easy for a week and sitting my last Dean's Fork six miler out, Chet was trotting smartly out in front of us for most of the five mile hike we did there today, June 12. If punctuated loping is too much, we'll walk. If walking is too much, he'll stay home, sit it out. We'll take it day by day, and treasure every single day we have together. Because that's how we roll.

His strong showing today is the only reason I'm back here, writing you a Sunday post, however belated. Kind of lost my heart for blogging when I had to leave The Bacon home. Not yet, not yet. He's got some more hikes in him yet.

This is my 2100th post on this blog. When I started in December 2005, Chet was a wasp-waisted googly-eyed pup, romping up and down frozen creekbeds. Thanks for being with us the whole way, or however much of it you've followed. We do appreciate it.

A Thrasher Goes Home

My car-hit brown thrasher didn't even try to fly for a week. She started by jump-fluttering from perch to perch, the way a baby bird begins to fly.

 I fed her. I let her be. Finally she began to fly low toward the other end of the tent when I'd enter the garage. Oh, yes. Good. Everything works. It hurts to fly, but you can fly.

By May 28, she could helicopter straight up from the floor of the cage to its top, a distance of 5'. And she did it without hesitation, like a normal wild bird would when a human enters its space. This is what I'd been waiting for. She'd been healing for 11 days.

So much of wildlife rehabilitation relies on gut instinct. You have to open yourself to the animal, feel what it's feeling, empathize completely, sense what they need. When they're ready to go, they tell you. I wanted this bird to be bouncing off the tent walls before I let her go, so I waited 12 days. It still amazes me that she could go from a little stunned immobile wreck back to a thrasher, big as life, in only 12 days. What a gift.

I opened up the garage at dawn and closed it at dusk, so she could take in the fresh air and sounds and scents of outside. She spent a lot of time listening to the thrasher who sings in our yard. I was sorely tempted to release her here, where she wouldn't get hit by a car.

But I knew from past experience that wild things want to be where they want to be. The last bird I took in, a tufted titmouse whose airsacs had been punctured by a cat, was ready to go in a  little over a week. I was loath to release it where it had been injured (a residence about 5 miles away, with feeders and free-roaming cats, ugh!) so I let it go here. When I let it out, it flew and leapt to the top of a birch, got its bearings, and flew in a direct line straight back toward Lower Salem, and that yard full of feeders and free-roaming "barn" cats. All I'd done is make getting home harder for it. Duh. 

It was hard to take this exquisite creature back where she'd been hit, but I knew that was the right thing to do. 

If I didn't take her there, she'd have to fly there.

Farewell, sweet thrasher, who never got a name, because I always knew you were going home.

In this video, you can see that I'm worried about her, hating the traffic; hoping she'll stay on the green side of the highway, yet knowing that bringing her home is the right thing to do. The thing about rehab is most of the time you can never really know if you're doing right by the animal. You just have to hope you are.

Thrasher + Car = Bad

I'm trying to stay under the radar where wildlife rehab is concerned. When simply answering the phone constitutes taking on someone else's fresh, completely unexpected problem, one that is likely to eat most of my day, what you get is someone who cringes every time it rings. And all the other callers are Democrats, hesitating in silence for about 30 seconds, and then wanting money for this and that. I'm thinking of yanking the thing out of the wall. The number of calls I get on my cell (none) is about right for me.

I've gotten myself off the public lists of Ohio wildlife rehabilitators. I had to. I'd get nothing else done. But as my friend Christy said, "Rehab follows you, wherever you go." 

Word.

This brown thrasher came to me via a Facebook message on May 17. Guessing at its sex, I called it a female. She'd been hit by a car and found stunned and gasping in the middle of a busy intersection that roars through some beautiful thrasher habitat. 

When I picked her up at my good Samaritan's home, she could hardly move. The slightest exertion resulted in an open bill and loud gasping, with a clicking noise called crepitation. When you hear crepitation, you can assume the bird's airways are compromised. The clicking can be caused by fluids or rupturing of its air sacs, which need to be intact to give it the buoyancy to fly. Crepitation not a good thing to have or to hear. 

I examined her thoroughly, finding no visible broken bones. Wings and legs worked, but she was totally grounded. The prescription, in an ideal world, would be an X-ray to see where it hurts. Washington County, Ohio is not an ideal world, and local veterinarians quite understandably won't admit wildlife. If they did, word would get out and that's all they'd wind up doing. So I go a lot on gut instinct. 

And if I can determine that nothing visible is broken, I don't see the point of sending a bird to the excellent but oversubscribed Ohio Wildlife Center in Columbus. R & R I can provide, and my gut told me this bird just needed a couple of weeks of food, rest and healing. She was underweight to start with. Well, at least compared with the superfat baby brown thrashers Cletus, Melba and Harper the kids and I raised last summer. So I kept her in a pet carrier for a couple of days, feeding her and leaving her alone. She barely moved, even when I changed her dishes and papers. Hurting bad, she was.

After a couple of days, she started rattling around in the carrier, and it was time to move her to more spacious quarters. I pulled out the flight tent and put it up in our garage. One whole side of zippers has given out and I have to secure them now with clothespins. It's an incredibly flimsy piece of overseas-made crap, far too delicate to be erected out in the yard, where the slightest gust would roll it over, but it works just well enough to contain most birds. Must be why they call it the Zephyr. 

The thrasher seemed thrilled and overwhelmed at the new digs. She spent the whole first afternoon trying to get out the front of it.

Then she settled down a bit and started using her perches. I offered her unmedicated chick starter, live mealworms, sunflower chips, and fresh berries. Oddly, at first she ate a lot of chick starter, in preference to mealworms. My baby thrashers liked it too. It's nice to have a nutritious pelleted food I can offer wild birds, and even nicer when they accept it.

I could literally see her gaining weight, though I wasn't about to capture her or lay a finger on her until it was time for release.

I'll leave her, and you, here to heal awhile. The Rest of the Story is coming up.