Window-Strike Part II: Hand-Feeding a Cuckoo

In my last post, I introduced you to a black-billed cuckoo who hit our kitchen window. Here she is!
People who work a lot with window-stricken birds and have veterinarians they can work with give injectible drugs that help minimize brain swelling. These are best given in the first few minutes and hours after a strike, and they can definitely save lives and improve prognosis. I've got no veterinarian closer than two hours away who will see wild birds, and nothing like that at my disposal. All I've got is sympathy, some basic housing, good food, and the ability to get that food down the throat of whatever needs to be fed.

That would be you, Miss Black-bill.

By that first night, I'd decided the bird had feminine energy, and it's easier for me to empathize with it as a he or a she, so she it was. Doesn't matter anyway; I could see that this cuckoo's brain was doing some mighty swelling. Her pupils weren't responding well to light. She was slow and dopey and had no interest in being active or eating. I was quite heartened that she managed to attain a low perch for her first night with me, but she was still quite a ways from being viable in the wild.

July 9, mid-day. She's on the high perch! Gaah what a gorgeous beast she is. A foot long, and half of that tail. That bronzy green, that wash of unexpected rufous in the wing. So, so lovely. She was looking good, more alert at 24 hours out from the accident. Still spending a lot of time with eyes closed. That's OK. I've got nothing but time. Just look at the proportions of that bird. Elegance in feathers.

A look at that eye ring. When she's mature, it will be brilliant carmine-red, which lends her the species name Coccyzus erythropthalmus. This yellow eye-ring is a little visual signal to other cuckoos that she's still learning to be a cuckoo. Take it easy on her.

By now in her rehab, though, she should have shown interest in picking up food. Nothing I offered: live mealworms, including freshly molted pupae; chopped raspberries, blueberries, cherries, even a couple of corn borers from dinner's local sweet corn--appealed to her at all. C'mon. Corn borers? Soft green caterpillars hung enticingly over your perch: you're just going to cock your eye briefly and then ignore them? That's what you'd be eating in the wild, Cuckoo.

All right then. You don't like captivity. I don't blame you. But I'll be damned if you're going to starve yourself. You're going to be force-fed every two hours until you either start eating or get strong enough to be released. My staple was Mazuri Nestling Formula. , augmented with increasing numbers of mealworms as she got stronger.

Liam made this video of me, the classic Jewish mother to a cuckoo. I love this video, because the cuckoo doesn't look at all upset about being force-fed. She's like, "Yum. Thank you. Waitress, more water please?"





The next installment is the best.  I know, I'm giving away the outcome in this video. But you just wait to see what this sweet cuckoo does in the next video!!

Thanks and props to Liam Thompson for expertly handling the iPhone to make this video. The kid has skills.

Window-Strike: Please, Not a Black-billed Cuckoo!

I was in the kitchen when it hit the window. It was one of those sickening BONK's with an added CRACK from the strike of the bird's bill on glass. My neck snapped around just in time to allow me to see a pair of long brown wings flash up into a helpless vee. And the bird dropped like a stone, two stories down. 

My birdwatcher's brain went into high rev, processing what little information it had received in the split second after the bird's impact. Brown. Large, wingspan approaching 20".  Either mourning dove or cuckoo.  Mourning dove vastly more likely. But wing shape and color wrong, not grayish, the flight feathers too warm and brown for a dove. Bill went crack on window glass. Mourning doves have a soft, rubbery bill. That kind of bill doesn't make a cracking noise. DAMN IT!!! Cuckoo. DAMN IT!! ARRRGH!!

I was already tearing down the basement steps on the shortest route to the backyard. I was swearing, wailing, chanting. Please, please, please don't let it be a cuckoo. Not again. No no no no no.

Not a cuckoo, not a cuckoo, not a... 

No. No. No. Not just a cuckoo, but a black-billed cuckoo,  rarer of the two that occur here, and the second black-billed to hit this summer. The first, an adult, had died. No. 

I had grabbed my phone as I hurtled out of the kitchen, because I always want a camera with me when I go outside, when I'm investigating. I felt like a horrible creep for photographing a bird in its death throes, but oh God it was so, so beautiful, head thrown back in its anguish, a modern Archaeopteryx.  It was an unforgettable moment, an indelible image. It had landed on concrete. No.

I could see by the yellow eye-ring that this was a recently-fledged juvenile, which made its chances of surviving the impact all the more slim. Such a young bird would have a paper-thin skull, the double layers still forming in a process called ossification, which builds honey-comb struts of porous bone between two solid plates of bone, strengthening it immeasurably. This one hadn't had time to make an ossified skull.

A poor candidate for rehab, or even survival. No, no, no. 

Another bonk, this one light, without a cracking sound. I looked up quickly, unbelieving, to see a second black-billed cuckoo striking the exact spot on the window that stopped its friend. It flew back to a birch and perched in plain sight as I knelt beside its fallen friend. A juvenile, with a yellow eye ring, exactly the same plumage and age as this one. This cuckoo gave a scolding rattle and cocked its head at me. Its message was plain. 

"That's my sister! She hit the window. Take care of her." 

I will do my best, sweetheart. I'm so, so sorry. I'm going to get some netting up over this window, too.  You be careful. I've got to take her inside for awhile.

July 8, 2016

I picked it up, away from the ravenous chipmunks and gray squirrels that constantly patrol our foundation for just such treats. I couldn't believe it was still breathing. It was a patchwork of molt, grayish-brown juvenile plumage, fringed with white, being replaced by brighter, warmer russet feathers of adulthood. I was surprised by the amount of rufous in the primaries, and for a moment doubted my initial ID as a black-billed cuckoo. But a yellow-billed this age would have a bright yellow mandible. Note how the impact has misaligned its bill--you can see the mandible tip sticking out to the bird's right. Not good.

For these two cuckoos, the tail is the clincher. Yellow-billeds have quarter-sized white spots at the end of each tail feather. And black-billeds have tiny white spots, especially at this age.  Note also the grayish-buff underparts. Yellow-billeds are much whiter and cleaner. At this point, I'm figuring this bird is going to be another specimen for the freezer, and eventual donation to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Might as well take some ID shots. 

I brought it inside and put it in a small Critter Keeper on a soft towel. I plumped up the towel to support its head and put it in a corner of the studio where I could keep an eye on it. It lay, not moving a muscle, for three hours. 

I put a peanut butter jar lid of mealworms and one of water in with it. It ignored the food, lying with its eyes closed, breathing. Another hour passed. Clearly, this wasn't one that was destined to revive and "fly away." 

Better feed it, or it's going to use up what reserves it has, just trying to survive the impact. I mixed up some Mazuri Nestling Hand-feeding Formula #5S90 (for insectivores). This stuff, available in a 1KG bag from mazuri.com,  is my new favorite formula--a finely ground vitamin-fortified meal that mixes up velvety-smooth, perfect for syringe-feeding nestlings and compromised adults, too.  Nestlings fed this formula make the most beautiful fecal sacs, and adult droppings are gorgeous, too. Do I sound like a mom? Well, you can judge the health of a bird (or a baby!) by the consistency and color of its droppings. So there. The brilliant Virginia bird rehabilitator Connie Sale, who expertly raises everything from hummingbirds to jays to wrens to woodpeckers and back again, turned me onto Mazuri. The thing that convinced me to take the plunge were her photos of fecal sacs from wrens fed Mazuri. Ha! Rehabber to rehabber, it's all about the poop. I'll never grind kitten chow again! and I've got a beautiful one-kilogram bag of Mazuri #5S90 in my fridge, ready to be deployed at a moment's notice.

By nightfall, the cuckoo was able to raise its head and look around a little. There's no doubt in my mind it would still have been lying under the kitchen window, though; it couldn't move at all, nor did it seem to be with it enough to pick up mealworms or even drink. I force-fed it every couple of hours until bedtime. 

It seemed a bit stronger, and I didn't want it to suddenly come to in the small Critter Keeper, so I installed it on the floor of a spacious cage, one that had housed Vanna, the World's Longest-lived Savannah Sparrow, for 17 1/2 years.  I put the cage in Charlie's glassed-in aviary, now my mailroom and sometime rehab room. 

When I peeked in the same night, July 8, just before I went to bed, the sweetest sight greeted my eyes.

Somebody's able to PERCH!! Good night, sweet angel. Now I think I can safely say,

"See you in the morning!"