Blue Jay Days

It's been two weeks since I've posted, an eternity in the Zickiverse, but there is an excellent reason for that. I have met my Waterloo, and she came to me as a starving, dehydrated little 12-day-old lump of winsome, found by a kind teacher in the middle of the street and left in a safer spot to wait for parents who never came.  I started, via Facebook messages, to give her savior instructions on how and what to feed the tiny jay, and thought I'd make plans to meet in a few days to take the bird if she was successful in keeping it alive. I was planning to take the jay up to Columbus, to turn her over to the Ohio Wildlife Center, which is completely snowed under hundreds of birds and animals, and certainly doesn't need another baby bird to raise. I looked at the photo of this poor waif, sighed and let the wave roll over me. "Just bring her to the Bird Watcher's Digest office. I'll take care of her," I typed.  I was doomed, sucked in again, because you can't tell someone who's never done it exactly how to save a small life. These are things you must do yourself. 

By the time I'd fed and watered her and medicated her for some unknown ailment that made her listless and turned her droppings seafoam-green; by the time, four days later, her eyes finally showed a little sparkle (which I could see because she was now able to keep them open), I was sunk. I wasn't going to turn her over to anyone. I had to see this bird through.

May 16, ca. Day 12, the day she fell from her nest.

The thing about taking on a baby bird is that if you say yes, that's all you're going to do for the next month, month and a half, or two. I don't think people realize that when they pepper me with pleas for help, assuming that taking care of baby birds is what I do, right? I understand wanting to do the right thing. Getting in touch with someone who can offer help that helps is Step One. But I have to say it's a full-time job being that first stop for so many people. I finally engineered the removal of my home phone number from the state wildlife rehabber lists, had just begun to enjoy the fact that every phone ring didn't have a feathery problem for me to solve,  just in time to become, by default, a national baby bird rescue factotum, courtesy of Facebook. 

Checking out her new home, May 16 afternoon. She may just know how lucky she is. I sure do.

 I am only just grasping what it means to be easily accessible to 4,000 plus acquaintances, plus their friends, and their friends' friends, who are now all able to fire off questions and requests for advice and assistance at any hour, often accompanied by photos that squeeze my heart. Not just baby birds; it's birds fighting windows, birds in dryer vents, birds in cats' claws or found on the sidewalk, having fallen out of an eave. It's anything, and it's raining down on me so thickly I want to wear a hat. Who ya gonna ask? The workload is not trivial. It is causing me to seriously rethink my presence on social media, to think hard about the quality of my days, pre and post Facebook. I'm not taking phone calls all day long. I'm taking Facebook messages. Unless I'm hiding, which I spend more and more time doing. Hiding, and not blogging, because I can't. Between feeding the bird and feeding the Facebook requests for assistance, I'm stretched too thin. It's ridiculous.

Feeling much better, May 20, Day 16.

The work that goes into raising just one baby bird can be all-consuming. Baby birds need to be fed often, every half hour from dawn to dark; they need to be kept scrupulously clean, but they also need attention and love. All of which I gladly do, but I'm never really prepared for how labor-intensive it is to raise just one baby bird. And to be asked for help with dozens upon dozens of others, all day long. 

It all makes you kinda tired. 

I realize that I don't know how to deal with being immediately accessible to anyone. Everyone. I've been on Facebook since 2009, and it's been a blessing in so many ways. I've become much closer to people with whom I never would have been able to interact. I can see family baby, niece and nephew pictures, catch up with my dear Aunt Toot in Iowa, and yak with James in Honduras as easily as I can yak with Liam, and that's terrific. I can share all the fantastic things I find; teach and learn too. I can toot my horn and sell books and notecards and puzzles and CD's, publicize speaking engagements and workshops and trips. I wouldn't want to render myself unable to do that. So for me there is no going backward here; there's only figuring out how to manage it all going forward. Maybe I have to morph my presence there, become some kind of entity that doesn't accept private messages. But then there's Jemima. And all those people needing help.

She came to me via Facebook message on May 16 when the irises were in bloom, just a few days before Phoebe came home from school, and I didn't name her right away because I wanted my sweet daughter to have the chance. "Iris!" Phoebe said. "Jemima!" Bill said. So Jemima Iris she was named.

With Phoebe, May 23, Day 19 and three days a fledgling.

They fell right smack in love, and I'm sure Phoebe is her favorite person on the planet, the person who has spent the most time loving her and singing with her and appreciating all the cool little things she does. "You always have a pal for me when I come home, Mai." Shrug. I guess I do. Today, I was sent a playlist of Jemima Iris' favorite songs (she's a huge Ed Sheeran fan, "Barcelona" being her all-time favorite), and chastised for not spending enough time deejaying for a jay. Guilty. 

For a brief window she was portable, but then she started flying. Took her with us to Liam's crew banquet, where she represented for da boids.

The only time I was able to get a photo of her actually gaping was first thing in the morning. After that, she kept her mouth clamped shut, gaping only long enough to take a bit of food, often ducking and weaving to avoid the syringe. I've fed a lot of baby birds, and I would not call her easy to feed. Each one is as different from the other as snowflakes are.

Day 16 at first light. Neeeeyyaaahhhh! Neeeyaaaaahh!

Jays are omnivores. Once she started picking up her own food, which she did around Day 19, my job was to offer her an ever-changing smorgasbord of things from which she could choose. For a couple of weeks, she ate maddeningly tiny bites of everything, flinging away far more than she took in. Her tongue lashes in and out, and she cocks her head, considering the taste of each morsel. She is at once the most careful and discriminating bird I've ever tried to feed. She seems to be evaluating each new food for suitability, over and over. A bit of a surprise; I'd figured she'd gobble everything down like the jays at the feeder do. Not so. She is quite concerned, apparently, that someone might have slipped poison into her food. You never know. This kind lady who has dropped everything to serve her off perfect china plates could be plotting something.

As a  result, I kept supplementing her food with syringe feedings of Mazuri Nestling Formula, beefed up with Repto-Cal (a calcium supplement) until Day 37, which happens to be yesterday. That's a long time to be giving hourly feedings.

But this glorious creature, arrayed in shades of sky and ocean, is the result, and I could not be prouder or happier to have made the journey with Jemima. 

She made free in the house, which was messy but necessary, I thought, for her to develop socially as well as physically. Yep, whitewash spots everywhere. No big deal. I'll get 'em after she's released.

photo by Anne Babcock 

When left in her flight tent in the garage, she did OK, but screamed when she was lonely and hungry. So I'd pop out there, love her up, feed her, cave in and bring her back in the house. First thing in the morning she was too crazy; I couldn't stand having her go through my art materials and pound them to pieces, so I'd let her fly off her yayas in the tent. Then she spent somewhat quieter afternoons inside.

Chet Baker's been an absolute prince with her, suffering her affections. She latched onto him as the closest thing to a blue jay, and followed him, riding on his back, pounding on his toenails, sticking her beak in his ears...the most he'd do is get up and slowly walk away. What a guy, what a gemmun. To this day she hops right up and gets up in his face, quivering her wings and screeching softly at him with wide-open mouth. I think it's an invitation to play, to interact. He is always kind.

I'm writing this on Release Day, June 11, 2017. It seemed to take an eternity for her to be 100% self-feeding, and there were several days when I was sure she wasn't eating enough, but she refused the syringe, so it was what it was. And then finally on Day 37 I left her alone in the flight tent for most of the day, and she cleaned up all the mealworms in her bowl and nearly all her fruit and vegetable mix, and I knew she was ready to go. If I held her any longer she'd lose her edge. The point isn't to make a welfare case of her. The point is to release her.

I made her last tent breakfast this morning. Freshly molted mealworms, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, mulberries, sweet corn and cornbread.

Fed her up good in the tent. 

Bill caught me topping her off with mealworms.

Then I took her out into the yard and showed her the little feeding station I'd set up in the Japanese maple that was once a bonsai. 

And she flew down and helped herself at once. 

 What a thing that was, to be outside with her in the warm sun and fresh breeze, to watch her play in the limbs of a tree I'd started from seed 35 years ago.  You can see her little feeding station behind her.

Chet and I sat out with her all morning. It was so nice out there, listening to her sing. The joy in the bird was palpable. My heart flew with her, because she was no longer captive. And she has all the tools she needs to survive and prosper. Just needed a little help from her friends.

She still goes to mush when Chet walks up.

From the Japanese maple, she flew to the arbor vitaes by the front door. So I made her a little feeding station there as well, with everything she likes and water too.

I put her bathtub in a big planter in case she wanted to bathe. 

And when the afternoon got hot, she did. Oh my. She tried to fly and landed in a heap on the ground. She scuttled under a boxwood to hide, knowing it was bad juju to be soaked and flightless outside. First big lesson on outdoor living!

I scooped her up. For better or worse, I'm still her mama. Brought her inside to dry and preen in the sun, in the safety of the kitchen. She's a work in progress. Aren't we all? 

Dried out, she went right back to pestering Chet Baker.

I want to PLAY WITH YOU. Are you DEEF???

Hm. That's right. You are deef. 

Let Jemima have a look in that ear. 

From there, she went to tussling with my antler back-scratcher.

She got her dose of Ed Sheeran today! For me, this little clip embodies the joy Jemima has brought to our lives. She's a scruffy little angel, sent down to cheer us, to buoy our spirits. I watched her work her magic on exam and life-weary Phoebe, who needed exactly this: a little thing to care for and dote on, one she could love and then release to a bright future.  I'll always be grateful that Jemima Iris landed in our lives just when she did. Whitewash and all.

A Naturalist’s Rosetta Stone

“Look! There are caterpillars on every rock! Think they’re eating the lichens?”

“Ehhh. I doubt it.” The words floated down from Keith Corliss, my co-leader on the Prairie Ramble at the Potholes and Prairies Birding Festival near Chase Lake in east-central North Dakota. Though the prairie grass was soaked, I was prepared with a full rainsuit, and Keith’s playful skepticism was all the impetus I needed to get personal with some larvae, to get on down and ground-truth my growing suspicion. The unplowed prairie we were exploring under heavy skies and spitting rain was dotted with boulders large and small, and on each rock I had spotted some interesting caterpillars, army green and chartreuse chevrons running up their backs. Given that caterpillars are eating machines, I suspected that they must have been consuming the lichens that covered the rocks, and had expressed as much to the group. But now I had to be sure.

I took off my glasses and went nose-to-nose with two caterpillars. I held my breath and gazed, trying not to interrupt their caterpillary doings. Sure enough, there was a small avenue of rock, grazed almost clean of lichens, in front of each one. Behind them, small brown pellets of frass. I crowed with delight and struggled back to my feet. “They ARE eating the lichens! Look! You can see where they’ve grazed the rock clean!” No one else got down on their stomach to see. I think they believed me. Either that or kneeling in wet grass wasn’t their cup of tea.

Delight at this discovery led only to more questions. What kind of moth or butterfly would these lichen-eating caterpillars become? I was burning to know. And it was at this juncture that, only a handful of years ago, my inquiry would have stalled and stopped. Books that could have addressed the question simply didn’t exist. Stephen Ingraham whipped out his iPhone. Out here in the middle of nowhere, he somehow picked up a signal. Well, there wasn’t much to stop it.

“See what you get with ‘lichen-eating caterpillar!”

Everyone crowded around.

“There’s a painted lichen moth caterpillar, but I don’t have enough bars to get an image just yet.”

My heart was racing. Just the thought that we’d turned the key and opened the door with nothing more than curiosity, an iPhone and the wide North Dakota sky above us electrified me.

Back on the bus, Stephen unearthed an iPad from his pack and handed it forward. There on the screen was a stunningly beautiful salmon and orange moth, its wings folded tentlike over its back: the painted lichen moth. Ooh’s and aah’s hung in the air. Curiosity and gratification came full circle and collided in cyberspace, somewhere far above my head. As someone who spends much of every day and most of my life wondering about natural phenomena I observe around me, I felt like a cave man presented with fire for the first time. We can walk around with a computer in our pocket, one that can tell us if there exists a caterpillar that eats lichens, (Yes! There is!) then tell us its range (Yep, central North Dakota!) and then show us in vivid color what it grows up to be (A glorious orangey pink moth, zigzagged in black). We have a portable Rosetta Stone.

 

 Rick Bohn, a Carrington photographer, naturalist and Prairie Ramble leader, said he’d seen that moth before, but had never known what its caterpillar looked like. At the Chase Lake Nature Center, Rick produced a gorgeous photo of gray coneflower, with a gaudy painted lichen moth clinging to its stem. We’d guessed right on what this caterpillar would become. The last piece of the puzzle fell into perfect place.

 

photo by Rick Bohn

There has never been a better time to be a naturalist. Social media have spawned what are essentially support groups for bird, butterfly, plant, mammal, arachnid and dragonfly enthusiasts, to name just a few. Every day, I peruse posted photos of butterflies and birds and help identify them where I can, bringing each observer just a little closer to conversance with Ohio’s fauna. In my turn, I’ll “tag” friends on photos to ask for ID’s on flowers and insects and often get them within minutes.

So many people have digital cameras now, and it’s so easy to upload and share photos, that there is an unpaid army of observers out there, reporting to Central Command in the form of such social media sites. The Ohio Lepidopterist’s Society is in the process of teaming with Facebook’s Butterflying Ohio page to expand the horizons of its knowledge, using photos submitted by experts and beginners alike to fatten county and state checklists, and to get a better grasp of what’s flying when. Rare bird record committees are receiving better, faster documentation of strays than ever before. News flies out about the latest discovery and up-to-the-minute coordinates of a rare bird’s location are shared even as birders drive to the scene.

Just a couple of weeks before the Potholes festival, Bill and I had been hot on the trail of nesting northern hawk-owls in Soldotna, Alaska, where we were working at the Kenai Birding Festival. We had a reliable report of a hawk-owl nest on the edge of a golf course right in town, and we stole a few moments from our festival work to see if we could find it. It would be a lusted-after life bird for me. Arriving at the scene, we found the nest tree, but there was no sign of the hawk-owls. A woman pulled up in an enormous black SUV as we walked down the street in front of her house. Seeing our scope and binoculars, she asked us what we were searching for.

“We received a report of nesting owls here, and we were hoping to see them.”

“Oh, THOSE THINGS! Are you here to get rid of them for me? I hope so! Because I keep calling the Fish and Wildlife Service! Those things are so NOISY!!”

It developed that she had had an owl family in her backyard all spring, and the begging calls of the juveniles had “driven her crazy”  for several weeks. She said she’d called the state wildlife department and the Fish and Wildlife Service, asking someone to come remove the birds.

The effort not to roll my eyes became intense, then supreme. I tried to appear sympathetic, all the while wondering how she and I could both be members of the species Homo sapiens. Wondering how someone with so little appreciation for nature wound up on the Kenai Peninsula, where you must regularly stop to let moose and caribou cross the roads in the subdivisions; where bald eagles are more common than robins in my neighborhood.  An incredibly cool owl, the most unusual North American owl; a streamlined, hard-feathered day-flying owl I want so desperately just to see for a moment. And here she is, with northern hawk-owls feeding young in her yard, and she is not enthralled but annoyed? Then came the final blow. She took a cellphone out of her purse and scrolled to a photo of a hawk-owl sitting atop a spruce in her yard. It wasn’t a very good photo, but it was a northern hawk-owl all right, long tail, barred belly and all. Arrggh.

“Yes, that’s the bird we’re looking for. You’re a very lucky person to have them nesting in your yard. They’re extremely rare.”

“Well, you can HAVE them!! And the Fish and Wildlife people won’t do ANYTHING about it!”

Well, I should hope they wouldn’t. Last I checked, the services offered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service did not include removing threatened owls from backyards. This anecdote may seem incidental to my story, but hang with me for a moment. Practically everyone has technology now. A person who doesn’t know a hawk-owl from a handsaw can now take a tiny cellphone camera out of her pocket and produce a recognizable photo of one of North America’s most sought after birds. And she can use that photo to torture a couple from Ohio (who went back home without seeing said bird).

 

Take it a step further, and someone who is mildly interested in nature can find out with a few clicks what a strange bug on the window screen might be. Now give the same tools to avid naturalists, and they can find out what sort of caterpillar eats lichens on a boulder in the middle of literally nowhere in North Dakota, and then what kind of beautiful moth it grows up to be. Technology supplies answers, but it isn’t an answer in itself, and it certainly can’t make us smarter or more appreciative of nature. Rather, it’s been successfully argued that it competes with nature for our full attention, to our detriment. Technology is a tool, and in the right hands it has awesome power. The catch? You still have to be interested and informed enough to ask the right questions. Curiosity is the hot-burning engine that propels a good naturalist, and it can’t be replaced or supplanted by any gizmo, no matter how powerful. It’s not how, or how quickly, the question gets answered. It’s asking it in the first place.

Julie Zickefoose, author of The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds with Common Birds, got an iPhone from Bill for her last birthday. She held out as long as she could, but the Lichen Moth Incident tipped her over the edge.

If you liked this piece, you can read my column, "True Nature," in every issue of Bird Watcher's Digest. Click HERE to subscribe. And you can hear me read the piece (Episode 29) HERE.