Gift of the Ice Storm

Winter Storm Landon's been an absolute brute. Here in southeast Ohio, it's dumped many inches of cold rain which, thank goodness, was rain and not snow. Thoroughly sick of moving through, dealing with, shoveling, and stumbling around in snow! The rain washed away almost all of the 16" of snow that had fallen over the last few weeks.  Thing is, it was still raining hard as February 3 turned to night, and the birds went to bed damp. Huddling in their roost cavities or in the cover of tree branches, those wet feathers froze to the substrate around them. 

So on wakeup, this white-breasted nuthatch was doubtless frozen to the inside of his cavity. His wet upper tail coverts and at least one wing feather were stuck. As he struggled to get free, they were pulled out. But the ice kept them glued to his tail all day long. 

What you see, then, is this weird plume-tailed variant of a white- breasted nuthatch. The odd shape of the feathers owes to the fact that upper tail coverts are quite long, running down the back and over the top of the tail. The black one is a wing feather, though. So he was pretty good and stuck--wing feathers are a lot harder to pull out than coverts or tail feathers-- but he got out.

Here's an unfortunate mourning dove who is wearing her tail on her wing. Rats. 

Long pointed tails are nice for maneuverability in flight (and dove flight is amongst the speediest around), but they're a liability in ice storms. 

Last but not least, my dear Bob the hand-raised song sparrow is back to looking like a ping-pong ball. Dang it!! 

Yes, he's still here with me, and I'm so glad of that. Released in September at 27 days of age, he's hanging in there, almost five months later!  I know he'll be well-fed through whatever the winter of 2022 throws at us. But dang. Ice storms--I hate them, and not because I usually lose power. I hate them because they're so tough on the wildlife I love. 

Losing a tail isn't quite as bad as it looks. A brush-loving species like a song sparrow can adapt. Even a mourning dove can fly just fine without a tail. It's harder, for sure, but they survive. And they should have a decent new tail within three weeks. Since the feathers were pulled out, the empty follicles are already gathering themselves to make more. 

I corresponded today with a kind woman from Athens Ohio who has five turkey vultures hanging around her backyard. Like us farther east, they are encased in ice after a rainy night that turned frigid. I explained that grounded turkey vultures are a thing in ice storms; that they cannot fly if their feathers are icy, and there are no thermals to give them lift. She and her husband thawed some chicken and offered it to the birds. Interesting twist: they have a 5' chain link fence around their yard, and the vultures are on the ground, inside the fence. Coincidence? I think not. If a white-tailed deer knows enough to jump into a fenced backyard to give birth (and they do!), I submit that a turkey vulture knows enough to know it's safer in a fenced yard than outside it. Something to think about, something to ponder. 

As I shot photos of my suffering songbirds, it occurred to me that there might be some cavity-roosters in my bluebird boxes in trouble. Could some have gone in to roost last night, wet, and not come back out? A little voice was tugging my sleeve. Go check. Go check. See if anyone is in need.

So I packed a nylon drawstring bag (for weak cold birds) and a screwdriver (to open the boxes), called Curtis Loew, and set out to the meadow to check some boxes. I heard a coyote bark several times nearby and stopped in my tracks. Curtis stopped, too, and let out one short, sharp bark. 

Hey. I know you're here. This is me, Curtis. 

I saw him before Curtis did. He was sitting out beyond the big pine, watching us. Wow. That is interesting. Coyotes are usually just shadows disappearing. Not this one.

I called Curtis to me, and he was only too happy to run back with me to the house. A romantic might think the coyote just wanted to play in the snow, but I wasn't about to offer my best boy for an experiment, or my heart for more breaking. I left my grateful and sensible Curtis inside and grabbed my big Canon rig. When I came out the back door, the coyote was still sitting out there, and that's how I got that first photo, from my deck. 

Do you see that sumac clump in the left foreground? That's how I got the rest of the photos. I snuck along the back of the house, ducked behind the low spruce by my fishpond, lined myself up with that clump of sumac, and walked in a straight, unwavering line toward the animal, staying always behind the thickest part of the shrub. 

I trusted he was still there, but I never took the chance of exposing myself. I just kept walking. I wasn't going to blow my cover just to see if he was waiting there.

 Finally I got to the sumac clump and peeked through the branches to catch sight of the animal, who had moved off to the side.

And look where he's sitting. That's the iron fence around Bill's grave, and the big Virginia pine that stands by it. Ice has brought its boughs to the ground. 

Though I stayed mostly behind the sumac clump, I'm sure the coyote knew I was there.

After all, he'd been watching me. 

I knew it was a male when I enlarged this photo. Click on it and you'll see, too.

The size of his tracks alone suggested a male.

It was a big coyote. The front pawprint shown here was 2 7/8" from heel to toe.

The hind paw (below)  is narrower, and has a smaller heel than the front paw.

Here is the imprint where he had been sitting when I first spotted him. 

And here he is loping along. There's a 16" span between the pawprints. 

After watching me for awhile, he stood up and turned to leave. What a long neck he has! 

He stood for a moment, looking. It was moving to make contact with a wild creature, here in this place I come visit every day. The way he looked back at me sent a feeling through me, something benign and wondering, not threatening. 

I guess this is the best shot. He was so red against the ice and snow, so warm. I wondered what he was thinking. I wondered why he and his pack have spared Curtis these past three years. If they'd wanted him dead, they've had a million chances to do it.

For now, and I hope for as long as Curtis lives, there is peace, and this beautiful red wild one, walking easily through the snow. 

All this, within sight of the house, with the ice still dripping off the sumac from last night. 

Ice storms are hard, but this one brought me a gift.

Here is where he melted back into the woods.

There were no birds trapped in my boxes--I checked.

There was just the little voice, telling me to go out and help,

the gift,

 and the silence when he had left.

 

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!

 

A Tale of Three Song Sparrows

 From left, Bob, Baby, and Ball. 

I doubt that the person who found four baby song sparrows, one already dying, in her yard, had the slightest idea what she was getting me into when she called Bird Watcher’s Digest for help. BWD is, or was, a great birdwatching magazine. It was housed in an office, and was never a bird rehabilitation center, yet it was the closest anyone could come to anything having to do with birds in our rehabber-impoverished part of Appalachia. So they'd call with their bird problems. I was the magazine's go-to for local wildlife emergencies, and I never did figure out how to divert tiny songbirds in immediate need of food and care. With the closest rehab center more than two hours away in Columbus, I'm stuck with their care. 

 Too young to be out of the nest, the eight-day-old birds were scattered across the caller’s lawn. She thought they’d fallen from a nest she could see “about 25’ up in a big tree.” Now, that doesn’t fit for song sparrows. It’s not even close. Weren’t there any shrubs nearby? No, just the woods across the road. Well, song sparrows don’t nest high in trees, and tiny immobile song sparrows don’t just fall from the sky. Where they'd come from was moot, anyway. One was dying and the other three were cheeping shrilly. I could hear them over the phone! They’d be dead soon, if I didn’t do something. I asked the caller to scramble an egg, and try to push it into their mouths. Immediate food was what they needed. I asked for photos. Their hungry calls over the phone had triggered something in my memory, and I was not surprised to see four nestling song sparrows in the photos and videos that followed. Oh boy. I had raised a song sparrow named Dustin just last summer. Raising Dustin was no cakewalk. Was I really going to do this again, times three?

 

Sometimes I wonder if people think I am sitting by the phone,  waiting and ready to deal with these situations. That I’m going to swoop down and take care of it for them. That that is all I do: sit by the phone, hoping to get the next call for help. I suppose, in real life, that I do little to dispel that assumption. I do swoop in and take care of it for them, so the calls keep coming, because word of mouth travels fast and far in a small town.

 

I'm writing this up because I want to remember the experience, which was wonderful. I'm also  doing it because I want people to understand what unfolds when a bird rehabber swoops in to take care of their situation. The caller, a young mother, asked a friend’s mom to take the birds and meet me at the midpoint I’d suggested—a drive of perhaps seven miles for her, and 14 for me. The black Dodge Charger rolled up; its darkened window rolled down and a woman wordlessly handed me an open-topped cardboard box. Inside were three live song sparrows and one dead one; several handfuls of cold, damp green grass, and a whole slice of white bread, which, the caller had informed me, the birds wouldn’t eat.

 I thanked the intermediary for bringing the birds. She didn’t reply—she just rolled up her window and pulled out of the lot. It was an odd handoff. I watched her car pull away. She was headed back to her life, and I was off to mine, which, thanks to the box contents, was going to look a lot different from that moment on.

 

Aug. 30, 2021. Day 8. As presented, on white bread: an open-faced sparrow sandwich. Sadly, one has already succumbed to the fall, or starvation. You've got to move fast with baby songbirds.

I filled them with warm insectivore formula and mealworms. Ordered 15,000 more mealworms from thenaturesway.com . And I settled into the routine: half-hourly feedings, dawn to dark, that tiny birds require. Thank goodness they sleep through the night. 

It wasn't long before they fledged from their strawberry box nest. Bob was first; he fledged on Day 9.

            Bob, just fledged, Day 9, Aug. 31, 2021. He wanted to be with me, and not with his siblings. He cheeped incessantly until I went to get him and bring him into the studio with me. Baby birds want what they want, and you have to listen to them.

He spent most of his time in the cage once he started flying a lot. Baby birds ricocheting around the studio: No good. It's little wonder Bob wanted out of that cage, though. Look how Ball (far left) treats him. Bob's in the middle, and Baby's to the right. Ball always wanted the highest perch, and he thought nothing of just jumping atop whatever hapless sibling held the position he wanted.

. 

 

Ball the Intimidator

Bob, looking very round. 

Sept. 7, 2021--the three in a rare bunch. Ball in front, Baby behind, and Bob, facing away as usual. 

Ball was a bully, but he was also a teacher. By comparison to my experience raising Dustin in the spring of 2020, this trio was a cinch. With bold and curious Ball at the lead, they fledged on Day 10, hopping all over the studio. I had to place a large cage atop my flatfile in the studio to keep them confined, as baby birds have a talent for flying into walls and dropping behind furniture. They come out covered in dust bunnies.

The sparrows' primary diet was soft, white, freshly molted mealworms, and Mazuri Insectivore Nestling Diet, which I fed them from a syringe. It comes powdered and you mix it with warm water. They were great gapers and eaters, and they also enjoyed pecking through the dishes of food I kept in the cage.

               

                        Ball's First Worm Pickup: Inspiring the Rest. Day 17! 

           

To my amazement, they began picking up their own mealworms on Day 17! Ball would initiate the activity; the other two would watch closely, then copy whatever he did.  All three birds went from gaping for the syringe in the morning to feeding themselves in the evening. I couldn't believe it. I felt like I should be paying Ball, so much work did he save me. I placed large flat jar lids full of ground sunflower hearts, dried flies and larvae, millet, dove seed and ground chick starter in the cage. They were interested, pecking and even swallowing at this tender age. Their transition to self-feeding was smooth as satin, a stark difference to 2020 sparrow Dustin’s bizarre refusal to take in any nourishment on his own.  That little devil still wasn't cracking seeds or swallowing anything but the occasional mealworm on Day 33, when I finally released him in desperation. I realized that continuing captivity wasn't getting that bird anywhere. That afternoon, he cracked and swallowed his first millet seed, and he was off to the races. 

Ball, very round, resting in the studio cage. He could be a jerk, but he was my hero. Still is.

This is Baby. Baby did a lot of crouching, and she squalled every time her brothers shouldered her out of the way. Might be a female thing. How did I know the sexes of the birds? I guessed, based on behavior. 

By Day 19, they were feeding themselves reliably, and refusing to gape for the syringe, though they’d peck and eat the formula that came out of it as I pushed the plunger. They discovered water on Day 19, and spent much of the day bathing, flinging water and seed, and making a mess of everything through the bars of their cage. It was time to get them out of the cage, out of the house, and into the soft-sided fledging tent. What a relief to know they’d have ample room for exercise, and could bathe and fling seed to their hearts’ content, without leaving waterspots on furniture. 

I was never so happy to set up the fledging tent. Those birds were a mess! And I knew they'd love the safe, comparatively vast spaces they'd have to fly and skitter and bathe and peck, out in the tent.