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!

 

Letting Libby Go

Libby the dove stayed in her outdoor flight tent from May 14-23. We kept it zipped closed, but we visited with her and made sure she was eating and drinking and that she didn't get too lonely.

Phoebe and Liam spent quite a bit of time out there with her. Phoebe would take a book and read, and Liam would gently play with Libby.

He'd hold a handful of her favorite finch seed while she ate.

On May 23, it was time to open the tent. Libby had been trying to fly in a straight line and bouncing off the soft nylon walls, especially when something scared her. I was pleased to see her panic when a raccoon came trundling alongside the tent one afternoon. She's so blase about Chet Baker that I was glad to see her primitive little predator alarm still worked. Three other largeish dogs have visited us in the time Libby's been out of the tent, and she's refused to come down to visit while they've been in the yard. She seems to understand that Chet is all right, but other mammals aren't. Phewww. You always wonder about hand-raised birds.

Libby made a short flight into nearby birches and sat for an hour. It was nice to be able to tell the kids I thought she wouldn't go far when we finally opened her tent. The other two doves I've raised were homebodies.

She moved from there to her beloved lawn chairs and sunned for a long time. She's 43 days old in these photos. I wondered if she would sit there all day. At 12:38, I looked out to see her take off like a rocket flying high and hard, due east. Wow! She was gone for the rest of the day. At 8 pm, she winnowed down into the yard, landed on her little food table, and ate. She was so tired and hungry she was trembling all over. She filled her crop with millet and gradually became calm. We were so happy to see her.

photo by Bill Thompson III

When she was full she flew back into her tent. Aww. See her in flight?


photo by Bill Thompson III

She landed on the tent netting, trying to maneuver her way back inside.

Finally on her favorite lawnchair inside the tent, she looks undeniably smug.
But then doves look a bit smug anyway. And Libby's behavior should go to show that they're not near as dumb as they look. She explored who knows where, and then navigated her way back home and into the tent where she felt safe.

At dusk that first night she was nervous and unhappy even inside her tent, flying from perch to perch and landing on my head, so I took her inside the house to spend the night on my desk lamp or on her favorite chair.

She settled down with a contented pweep. I would take her inside for the next seven nights, until May 31, when she didn't come flying in to ask to be taken inside. Seriously. She'd come down at dusk, go into her tent or land on a nearby tree or someone's head, and as much as demand to go in the house. She'd climb up on our fingers like a cockatiel and ride inside, where she'd be safe from owls and storms and raccoons.

Of course, we greatly enjoyed taking her inside and tucking her in on a comfy chair with a kiss on her dear little head. We'd made a pet of her, but even so I knew she'd be all right in the end. We were just stretching the inevitable parting out a little longer.

And it was nice to be able to give her breakfast in the studio before taking her outside for the day. Please don't poop in my palette, Pweep.




And so she spent the next week coming and going from her tent. Most of the time, she'd disappear mid-morning and not be seen until almost dark. I don't know where she went, but I knew she was building her strength and learning about being a dove.

She was free to go, but she chose to stay for awhile.

Sending this from Pittsburgh, where we took in a Pirates game (total rout for the Buccos, unforch, but great fireworks!) with the Heeters. Now motelpooling with the kids. Wherever you spend your Fourth, have a wonderful one!