Zick's Bluebird Survival School: Update on Our Alumni

I'm sweating. I just finished planting my snap beans, which means it's warm enough to do such a thing at long last, on May 24. The cold, miserable early May we endured is a nasty memory now, though I still start my morning walks with long pants and a decent jacket.  I have been collecting sweet reminders of the work I did in the first three days of May, to save some little souls when the weather turned horrible and the skies opened up for three straight days.

I coined the term "Perma-rain" while watching this sluggish and apparently endless storm factory squatting over us.

The only way it changed was to get bigger, pumping continuous rain over the chilled land.

Out by the oilwell at the end of my meadow, five baby bluebirds had just hatched on May 1. This was the first box I visited, and I had a syringe of warm baby bird formula against my chest as I trudged out, bundled in a down jacket. It was that cold. 

When it's that cold, parent bluebirds can't find insects for their babies, so I stepped in to supplement. Liam made this video for me on May 2. These were lucky birds, just a long walk down the meadow from my house.

But there were more out on the county roads, and I gathered my gear and steeled myself for what I knew I'd find this frigid wet morning. The first box I checked out on my trail on May 2, next to a little Methodist churchyard cemetery, broke my heart clean in two.  Five bluebird lives, wasted by the rain. I got there too late to save them.

It's a hard photo to look at, but I want you to understand what motivates me, because I'm sure a lot of people think crazy, running around hand-feeding bunches of baby bluebirds in their boxes. Maybe that's crazy in some people's books. Should I just shrug and say, "Tough luck!" to the 27  baby bluebirds that I knew were in my boxes when the weather turned horrible? C'est la vie, this is what happens to early nests?

Should I pretend I don't know what's happening in those boxes?  Or should I do something crazy and try to save them all?

 I'm not crazy. I prefer to think of it as an overdeveloped sense of responsibility to the birds nesting in my boxes. As it turned out, these were the only ones that died due to weather, but for me, that was five too many. I knew I'd lose all the rest if I didn't act.

Bug omelet is baked ground eggshell, egg, milk, dried flies from Carolina Biological Supply

all fried up. Very stanky, but it brings baby bluebirds back to life toot sweet!

I fed bug omelet to all the babies on my trail on May 2 and 3, three times a day, until I had to leave at 1:30 on May 3 to work at the New River Birding and Nature Festival in Fayetteville WV. Talk about cutting it close! It stopped raining and started to warm up only late the afternoon of May 3, and the weather somehow magically held until I got back. If we'd had another day of rain and 40's, with me away, they might have died, and all that work and all these little lives would have gone to waste. 

What I'm going to do now is take you around to the nestboxes with babies, and show you what was in there on May 2, and then I'll show you what happened with each of those broods. This post has taken me days to put together and write--very nitpicky work. I hope you enjoy it.

These five babies along my township road were the very first to hatch, and too old to feed! I shot this photo through the entry hole. They were too suspicious; they might have jumped out of the box had I opened it and tried to feed them. So I left a jar lid of mealworms on the roof of the box, and the parents completely ignored the food for a day and a half.  D'oh!!! How to get food to them? OK. Maybe food on the roof of the box just doesn't make sense to them. On the second day, I placed a fresh dish of wriggly mealworms on the ground underneath the box, and THAT made sense to the adults. They emptied it three times, stuffing those starving babies full. I was elated!

Still kickin' May 3 and finally stuffed with food--they're going to make it! I left a huge slug of mealworms for them right before I left for WV. :)

When I returned from the New River festival on May 8, these lovelies had fledged.  I cleaned the box, and Mom has built a fresh nest as of May 26. On we go!

Next box: When I got way down on Whipple Run the morning of May 2, I found these three sick skinny babies, badly dehydrated from eating earthworms. When it's cold and rainy you'll see birds foraging in the middle of the pavement, picking up earthworms. I'll always wonder how robins thrive on them, because they're a horrible food for bluebirds. Earthworms give bluebirds dysentery. The neat little white fecal sacs that baby birds normally produce fail to form and the nest quickly becomes soaked with wet feces. Chilling follows. Nestling bluebirds fed earthworms in cold wet weather are among the most miserable creatures I know.

The thing, then, is to give them something better than earthworms. Bug omelet and mealworms to the rescue! And a fresh clean nest of dried hairgrass! Muuuch better than the sodden filthy poop-soaked mess they were huddled on. I could feel their relief at being fed and clean at last.

Here they are on May 3, after the nest change and gobs of egg food. I also left huge amounts of mealworms in a jar lid atop the box, and the adults wasted no time in stuffing their babies full. 

What a difference a day, abundant food and a dry nest can make!

And LOOK at them on May 8! Would you ever believe these are the same birds as the ones in the video?

Ahh, they're so beautiful when they're healthy. And that's the impetus, that's the reason I do this--I know I can save them, and the rewards are so very clear and rich, that I am compelled to do it. I see in my mind's eye what they could become and I can't stop until we get there.

Third box: In a nearby box on Stark Hollow Road, more babies were subsisting on earthworms. In this dimly lit photo, you can see the chick on the right has a dead worm pasted across both its nostrils, which must be very uncomfortable. It had tried to swallow it--the two ends of the worm were in its mouth--but it got looped across then dried on.

I took them out of the box, peeled off the worm, and found more earthworm gunk cemented to its sibling's left eye. (middle bird in the photo below). I peeled that off, too. I have to wonder what would have happened had I not removed it. These chicks are developing so fast you do NOT want anything stuck to their vital parts. These photos taken May 2.

I got the idea to prop my cellphone on the steering wheel so I could make a decent video of me feeding Bug Omelet to the babies. This is straightforward, and easy.

What's not easy is having to force-feed babies who won't gape. I have only two or three chances to feed these birds in a day. Each round takes me an hour and a half to complete, getting around to all the boxes. 

I'm not taking "No thank you" for an answer. You're getting fed each round, Pipsqueak, and you're going to eat as much as all your siblings. No time for your finicky stuff.

Followup: Here is the same nestful of five down in Stark Hollow, on May 8. They're out of danger and beautiful. 

Fourth box: The Eddy nest got started early, and the babies were ready for mealworms by the time I got there on May 2. (Babies can't digest the chitin on the larvae until they're at least a week old, which is why I have to feed bug omelet to most of them). I started them off with bug omelet the first day and then left gobs of mealworms atop the box for the parents to divvy out. 

What a beautiful sight greeted me on my return May 8.

The Eddy babies were old enough to sex by the color of their wings. Bet you can tell which are the males. There are three, two of them showing lots of blue, and the lone female is touching my thumb. See how gray her wing is by comparison? It's easy to sex 12 day old babies.

Now, Box 1 again. Back to those babies out by my oilwell, the first ones I fed...

Here they are on May 9, plump and fit. 

Day 9 Oilwell box

By May 11, they were feathering out...

Day 11 Oilwell

and on May 15, I could see that all four were females. What riches!

Day 15 four females Oilwell

These little darlings fledged somewhere around May 20. Phewww! Relief.

All told, there were 21 more baby bluebirds in the world than there would have been had I not intervened. No question in my mind that these babies would have died in that cold rain. I lost five, but kept 21 going until the weather warmed, and that felt really good. 

This is the fourth spring in a row that I've had to feed bluebirds in their boxes. In 2020, I fed them a total of nine days in April and May (Thank God I didn't have to go to WV that year--I'd have lost them all). 2020 is the year by which all others will be measured. Remember all those starving orioles and tanagers and kingbirds that showed up at people's feeders? Yeah. That was 2020. 

2021 was almost as bad. 2022 had only one day of hideousness. 2023 had three. 

Every. Dang. Year. 

The climate is changing so fast, and we are all caught with our pants down. Extremes are extremier. Springs in the Midwest are late and cold and wet as sin now. The normally gray and rainy Pacific Northwest has fried; California has drowned. And the hurricanes down South...well, I guess I'll take the horrible Mays out here in the middle. I'll be thankful it isn't any worse. 

Signing off from CrazyTown,

Yours,

JZ

Big Old Bluebird Tale

  “One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.” Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was one of the formative books of my youth. It was the first book I'd ever read that celebrated being outdoors and noticing things in the immediate, abundant and joyful way I experienced them. It was a journal, condensed; it was a reaction to things seen, felt, lived, in the here and now. I fully ascribe to her sense of urgency here, and it's frustrating to have to hold back.

In spring, I have ever so much trouble keeping up with writing. So much is happening, and each thing, each day, it seems, could be its own book. I collect and journal and record and photograph and there's just so much to do, managing 80 acres and keeping this house in repair and really, just experiencing everything wonderful about living here, that my time runs too short to write much. If only some of the wild bloom and song could be sprinkled through November-February, so I could have time to write about it!

I've been messing about with bluebirds all spring, "helping" the birds nesting in my boxes here and there in my highly interventionist way, and I've learned gobs more about them. That is saying something, because I've been messing about with bluebirds since 1982. What I've learned is all so big and fascinating and wonderful that I've had trouble throwing a rope around it to write about it, but I have kept careful notes in my journal and bluebird notebook and I am trying to summarize all that's happened. Bluebirds--and all birds--always surprise me. My bluebird trail is a big old laboratory and I am the mad scientist.

It’s hard to overemphasize how much one snow in late April can screw things up for the bluebirds I tend, and for me. I have been paddling as hard as I can to keep up with the flow of events that have rolled out from one little cold snap, one little dump of snow on green leaves and nestboxes full of eggs and chicks. It's mid-May as I write, and I'm still tracking the chicks I worked with in the last two weeks of April. 

 

It was already shaping up to be a tough spring. On my modest trail of 18 boxes, bluebird pairs were down by half—no doubt because the winter of 2020-21 was so cruel down south, where they migrate to get away from such weather. A freeze like the Deep South saw, with snow and ice in south Texas, must kill a lot of wintering bluebirds. 

 

As the light slowly grew on the dawn of April 21, I was stunned to see two inches of snow coating everything. Snow on green leaves is one of my least favorite sights. I wanted so badly to stay under the covers and hold Curtis close, but I had to get up. Before my work started, I walked out the orchard to photograph dogwoods in the snow. Sourly, I observed that snow on white dogwoods just looks like more snow. I took photos anyway, and I’m glad I did, because they’re quite beautiful, now that I’m not facing days of hard labor thanks to that beautiful snow. 

 

See, what happens when it snows on April 21 is that the insects bluebirds depend on are suddenly and unequivocally unavailable. That means that adults will hardly be able to feed themselves, much less their new chicks. Bluebirds have no other choice than insects for baby food. So, realizing it’s useless to even try to find them, some pairs will abruptly desert their nests. 

 

Ten of my boxes were occupied, one by Carolina chickadees still building a nest, and nine by eastern bluebirds. 

There were chicks in six, and eggs in three of those bluebird nests. It’s not a huge deal for a female bluebird to sit out a cold spell on her eggs. She's got nobody to feed but herself, and her mate helps with that. She’s got a snug nestbox, a thick grass nest, and her own body heat to keep them warm.

It was the six boxes of chicks I was worried about. The brooding female can keep them warm, but without food, they won’t survive. 

 

So it was that I came in from snow photography and set straight to work in the kitchen, mixing up some bug omelet. I gathered my bent forceps, tissues, water, eyedropper, nestbox notebook, and fixed up a picnic cooler with hot water bottles and a makeshift tissue nest. Did I have everything? I hoped so. I opened the meadow box and was relieved to find five hungry six-day old bluebirds. I took the nest from the box, sheltered it as best I could with my body, and quickly fed the chicks to repletion with warm bug omelet. I stuffed the nest back in the rapidly cooling box and trotted back to the house, allowing the female bluebird to return and settle back on her chicks. No photos--it was all I could do to get them fed in the freezing cold wind, and put back in the box, without trying to record the moment. 

This is one of the easier boxes to deal with. It's close to my house, and all I had to do was pop out, walk a few hundred yards, and feed the chicks three times a day as long as the weather stayed frigid. Was that easy? No. But it was easier than having to drive to do it. I got in the car and set out for the closest box with chicks, at the old Ritchie place. Here's what I'd found back on April 18: 

This morning, April 21, an ominous silence greeted me at the Ritchie box. In the nest were two unhatched eggs and a three-day-old chick, cold and still as death. Death, in fact, was all that lay ahead for this poor chick. It might already be too far gone. I turned it over in my hand, felt it for any sign of life. 

        

I picked it up and moved its legs and wings. It wasn’t stiff, so it might not be dead. Without even thinking about it, I dropped the chick down the front of my shirt, into the warm pocket of what amounts to my cleavage. Careful not to squish the chick with the seat belt’s shoulder strap, I headed my car toward the township road where the rest of my nestboxes waited to be checked. I checked a box that could have chicks—still eggs. Heaving a sigh of relief, I pressed on to the next stop. As I neared it, I felt a stirring on my chest. Was it just my imagination, or was that stone-cold chick squirming? 

              

Agog, I reached into my shirt and brought the chick out. Once yellowish and blue, its skin was flushed with pink, and it was moving weakly. However many times I deploy the bracubator, I will never quite get over the magic it can do. I never tire of feeling life come back into a tiny bird, lying so close to my heart. I crooned to the little thing, wiped a tear away, and put it back in my bra to cook awhile more. I had more boxes to hit, and a heavy day with three appointments in town besides. It's kind of weird how busy and hard life can become for someone who loves birds like I do. I feel responsible for them to an abnormal extent.

My charge safe within its little pocket, I fought my way up a steep snowy bank to a nestbox put up by my late friend Jeff Warren. It wasn’t really part of my trail, but I felt I had to check it anyway, to see if anyone needed help. I was shocked to find six—SIX!! newly hatched chicks, barely alive and nearly as cold as the first one. Their mother was nowhere to be found. Oh, no. No no no. I placed them in a grass nest in the picnic cooler, which was near 100 degrees inside thanks to the hot water bottles. 

 

This was a fine kettle of fish. I’d gone from zero to seven bluebirds to care for in less than 15 minutes.

 

As luck would have it, I had deliberately scheduled this Wednesday with three appointments in town, reasoning that I wouldn’t be able to do much orchard clearing or lawnmowing if it was snowing. It hadn’t occurred to me when I scheduled this day that I might be busy saving bluebird lives. 

 

Well, they would just have to come to town with me. I had food for them. All I had to do was find more hot water along the way. This proved to be easier said than done. It came home to me that grocery store bathrooms almost never have hot water in the bathroom sink, which is kind of gross when you think about it. I finally found some reasonably hot water at an Indian restaurant, where I ordered two takeout dinners for myself, knowing that I wouldn’t have time to cook in the next few days. The cooler had lost almost all its heat when I finally replenished it in the restaurant’s restroom. I also fed the babies there. You do what you must. 

 

It was a hectic day. I had several out of body moments, one in the lounge at the auto repair shop, where I barely suppressed laughter as I thought how surprised Larry the Mechanic would be to know that, as he explained about the possible cause of my blinking dash lights, I had six newborn bluebirds squirming away in my bra, each one stuffed full of bug omelet. I hoped there was no security camera. I can only imagine what it all would look like on security video. Phoebe planted that idea in my head, and it made me laugh. I needed the laugh, with the day I was having. 

All this thanks to a couple inches of snow on April 21. 

 

More snow fallout in the next installments. 

Making the Baby Bird Rounds

I had 21 bluebirds and 15 Carolina chickadees to keep alive, in weather like this: 48 degrees and raining nonstop. 

I hand-fed 18 of the bluebirds four times that day (four were too old to feed; I risked causing premature fledging), and after feeding them I left bug omelet on the roofs of their boxes and those of the chickadees, and to a bird each parent fed that stuff to its babies as soon as I was gone. The older babies got fed--I just crept up and put some live mealworms mixed with bug omelet on top of their box and the parents did the rest.

I'd just get back from rounds (some of the boxes are about five miles away from my house) and it would be time to cook up another couple of omelets and head out again. I was thankful for the bluebirds who'd gape for me right off the bat, like this little shaver. Oh, they were hungry!

                                                         photo by Liam Thompson

The Carolina chickadees were tricky. They're smarter than bluebirds, and they won't gape for just anybody who whistles at them the way young bluebirds will, so I had to leave food for the parents on their box roofs. It worked. The parents fed it to them.

I found one chickadee baby choking down an enormous green caterpillar. It was swallowing it just like a snake, lying on its belly, working that thing down its gullet, tossing its head back and forth as it forced the oversized item down. Amazing. You can see its tiny wings thrown out for leverage. There are nine in this nest. Thereby hangs another story for another time. Yes, that's my doing, too. Update: All nine of the chicks in the photo below are fledging as of 11 AM Thursday, May 26! Lots of chickadee-dee-deeing going on in the backyard right now, clown-lipped babies popping their heads out of the hole...what joy!

In any clutch, I find the runt (see it at the bottom) usually begs the most vigorously. I love runts.  They know they have some catching up to do. These are bluebirds, about Day 6.

 Here's a nest of 11-day-old bluebirds with their bug omelet. I use a bent dentist's forceps for feeding.  I had to force-feed about half the bluebirds since they wouldn't gape. The older they are, the less likely they are to gape, even if they're starving. They're suspicious of this big colorful ape with a forceps.

The tree swallows sat moping, hungry in the rain, but they ignored both bug omelet and live mealworms placed on their box tops. They'd just step aside as a mealworm would crawl by. Aerial insectivores are very tough to help, being hard-wired to take their food only on the wing.

Hang in there, little swallow. The rain will stop, sometime.

Luckily this pair had only eggs yet laid. Five, and they kept them warm through the cold spell.

It was a heck of a day. I gave up on accomplishing anything but pulling these baby birds through. I just stayed in my rain suit and tromped from box to box.

photo by Liam Thompson

But the rewards were immense--live, warm baby bluebirds and chickadees, who were 100% stronger and healthier at the end of that long, long day than they were at its start. They'd all have died if I hadn't made the effort, and knowing that made it all worthwhile.

photo by Liam Thompson

My photographer was pleased, too.

monkeycam photo by Liam Thompson

Saving Baby Birds

 I remember a stranger at college coming up and introducing himself, saying that he knew me because someone had told him to look out for an “unusual-looking woman on roller skates.” After thinking about whether I like that description for oh, thirty years, I have embraced it. Unusual works for me. There are a couple of ways in which I am unusual, which readers of this blog will probably readily identify. I can see you there, wagging your hands wildly. “I know! I know!”  No, it’s not being able to identify any kind of animal poop, though that certainly plays a part in my makeup. Here, it’s about feeling unusually responsible for birds.

 I have this trail of bluebird nest boxes, about 25 or so, that I check once a week from April through August. And pretty much every year there is a period when, if I didn’t do something unusual, birds in those boxes would die. We’ve just made it through such a time, in this thoroughly crappy, cold, rainy spring—three days of steady rain and fog, when the mercury barely inched above 50 degrees. Arrrrghh. And baby bluebirds and Carolina chickadees in many of my boxes, slowly starving.

 I went out the afternoon of May 17 to check my boxes. It had been raining and cold for two days straight, temperatures barely inching into the 50's. Opening boxes in weather like that is the opposite of Christmas morning. 

Sure enough, the first box I opened held five perfect, perfectly cold and dead baby bluebirds. My stomach turned into a rock. I was too late to save them.

When it's cold and rainy, the parent birds can't find enough food for their young, or even for themselves. Sometimes the parents get soaked to the skin and can hardly fly. Then their own survival is in question. So they wisely give up and just save themselves. They'll quit incubating near-term eggs; they'll quit feeding starving young. I've lost two clutches of near-term bluebird eggs from abandonment this spring. The birds couldn't find enough to eat to sustain themselves while sitting, and they knew they'd never be able to feed their babies when they hatched. And this is the latest spring on record for bluebird nesting. They waited and waited to lay this year. They knew it was going to be a real bummer of a spring, long before we did.

Ironically, the older the baby birds are when it hits, the more likely they are to succumb to cold and rain. Once baby birds are feathered, the female won't brood them any more, and they get chilled a lot faster than naked young birds who are still being sat upon. Like these in our driveway box, who were very hungry, but still toasty warm:

After that first nasty shock, I found all the other bluebirds and Carolina chickadees in my boxes still warm and clinging to life. They were weak and hungry, but they were alive.

And I had the answer, kept warm in an insulated container, with me. I call it Bug Omelet.

It's scrambled egg with...additions.

Which include dried fly (Musca domestica) larvae (available from Oregon Feeder Insects)

and ground, baked eggshells.

 You fold this all together and fry 'er up in a little butter. Mmmm, nauseating.

But Bug Omelet is superfood for starving baby birds. I have wildlife rehabilitator Astrid MacLeod to thank for this wonderful recipe. I love it because I can keep the dried fly larvae in a big ol’ jar in the cupboard and I always have eggs and eggshell on hand, so I’m ready to feed starving baby birds at the drop of a hat.

 I keep it right next to the eye of newt and toe of frog.


Unusual.

Next: Come with me on my bird-saving rounds.