A Helping Hand for House Finches

It started on the fifth of April,  with a typical rainy morning, when I looked out my bedroom window and saw this little fella with a big Fu Manchu of nesting material. I skibbled down the hall in my jams, did a two-wheel corner into the studio, grabbed the big camera, and thank God he was still a settin' there when I got back. 

First, you gotta love a guy who helps around the house. Second, my affection for house finches has grown over the years, as I've watched them decline pretty drastically from their mid 1980's explosion in New England, then all up and down the Eastern Seaboard.  They were frankly a huge pain, mobbing feeders by the score and tweeting incessantly. Loudly and incessantly.

Nature finds its balance, though. I've watched as they have been taken out by inbreeding depression, which means they have little resistance to disease. All eastern house finches descend from a release event at a NYC pet shop in 1939.
They were imported from California and sold as "Hollywood Linnets." Imagine. This is what the Migratory Bird Treaty Act disallowed! Let's hear it for that!  Being inbred and with little genetic diversity,  they've succumbed to Mycoplasma gallinae, a disease of domestic chickens that also strikes at least 30 other native songbirds to date. I'm so happy now when I see healthy house finches and I really do wish them the best. After all, they are native to North America--just not east of the Mississippi. Their song is among my favorites--so clear and vibrant, a tumbling cascade of beautiful notes.

I figured they were building, and it wasn't hard to figure out where. House finches like dense conifers close to houses. Duh?

And speaking of duh...Do you see their neatly woven nest?

With its precious cargo of four eggs of palest blue, ink-dotted with black?

Daddy's whiskers for a lining and a mourning dove tail feather for good measure. Ah, it's all too sweet--and too damned visible. Any blue jay worth its salt--and there are at least six around the yard this year hooray!!--is going to key in on that nest immediately, if not sooner. If I can find it so easily, what about a sharp-eyed jay or crow?

So I cut a thick branch off the bottom of the same spruce and stuffed it into the boughs over the nest, making a little awning to hide it from predatory eyes. 

Better. (Compare to first photo). 

You have to approach it from the side to see it. Jays flying over won't see it nearly so easily. At least that's the hope. 

And speaking of hope...they hatched April 21.

And here they are on Day 2, April 22. The weird yellow thing is the transparent crop of a baby which has its head down in the nest lining to the right. That's actually regurgitated seed fed to it by its parents, and it's completely normal for an infant house finch to look like that. I know it's hard to tell what you're looking at, but the lower chick has a downy head to the right and two sweet little arcs of downy wings on either side.

House finches were the most challenging of baby birds to paint for my book, Baby Birds: An Artist Looks Into the Nest because they have so darn much long grayish white down that their anatomy was totally obscured! But oh are they dear. Crossing my fingers for this nest, hoping the cold spring keeps the ratsnakes in their burrows, hoping the chipmunks won't brave the prickly spruce--just hoping for everything. Know the feeling?

More Skunk Lore

Obsessing about a badly injured skunk has been sort of a steam escape valve for me, and Lord knows we all need those. I mean, it's business as usual for me to be hyperfocused on and fussing over some badly compromised wild thing, but this hurt skunk has really stretched the limits of my ingenuity and forced me to be patient and wait for slow improvement. I like to fix things. I like to fix people and animals, if I can. I use nature, positivity, time and good food to do my witchery, sometimes a little medicine. But this skunk cannot be fixed neatly or quickly. That's not to say he can't be fixed at all.

 SugarBean showed up March 7 and had been more and more dependent on my food subsidy as the weeks went on. There were a few days near the end of March when it actually hurt to watch him crippling around the yard. One beautiful warm day he sort of lay around on the grass in broad daylight, and when he wanted to get up he had to use his head to roll over on his side and kind of pry himself up. That was really hard to watch. That was when I got kind of frantic about him and started trying to dream up ways to catch him in a carrier and transport him to the Ohio Wildlife Center in Columbus. I was able to get him in a cat carrier, where he slept overnight in a rainshower, dry and protected. So OK. I could easily catch him... but for what? Once I found out that Ohio Wildlife Center likely would not try to operate on him, I had to fish or cut bait. I thought of calling a couple of people who might be willing to come shoot him for me, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. If he still showed interest in food; if there was even the whisper of a chance that this poor little wreck could turn out to be a viable skunk, I owed it to SugarBean to keep trying. He was certainly trying!

So I adopted the role of nurse/caregiver, and kept the nutritious food coming. I was pretty much winging it, trying to keep SugarBean well supplied with protein and calcium. So far, soft-boiled eggs, cottage cheese, chopped spinach, chopped pear, strawberries, fresh corn off the cob, mandarin orange,  sunflower hearts, sliced almonds, and cooked chicken have all been hits. Kitten chow and dog kibble are both appreciated. I'm not sure there's much you could offer a skunk that it would refuse. I've managed to feed that little skunk most every day for almost two months. I didn't mind. It was a privilege, and I have thoroughly enjoyed interacting with him.

Phoebe came around the corner of the house, looking for me, and found this scene. She'd been calling for me, but I didn't answer, for obvious reasons. I heard her breathe, "Oh my GOD" in a sort of "This would be going on whether I was here to witness it or not" voice. I quietly handed her my phone and she grabbed a couple of shots of her Crazy Skunk Lady mom, living dangerously as usual. 

I was a lot closer to him than I wanted to be. I had just set the dish down when the skunk ambled up, and I didn't have time to back off! At that point it seemed I'd do more harm by trying to waddle backward, and probably tip over like a brown marmorated stinkbug, lying there waving my legs, than just by staying in place until he was done eating. Good thing my knees still work pretty well. Ha ha! That was an epic squat. 

Taken with my iPhone. I was right on top of him!  And that's how Phoebe found us. I love the possessive little paws, placed right in the food. As if, once I'd given him the meal, I was going to rescind it? You never know...

Obviously, a telephoto lens is to be preferred for both parties' comfort and safety. 

Mmm, chicken.

Pignosin' his kibble. I just love the snowy Afro.

I took to setting his food and water just outside his little mailbox home so he wouldn't have to use that poor busted leg so much. 

He took to that mailbox like a duck to water, and he spent the better part of two weeks sleeping almost around the clock in its toasty soft confines, coming out only to eat and poop. I love to creep up, peek in there and see ebony fur. 

Each day, he'd emerge to poop. I cleaned up his little noodly piles with a shovel. But not while this gorgeous little moth, a Grapevine Epimenus, was doting on them! Now you know what skunk poop looks like. I'll confess I didn't, before this. But whoa. 

Come to find out, I've already used the tag "skunk scat" on this blog, so I'm gonna have to go see what I said about it!

Here is a video of SugarBean motivating toward his carrier on March 30, before the mailbox palace was in place. At this point I still thought it was a female, so pardon the narration. This was as well as I had seen him move since he first appeared, and hope sprang in my heart that he might eventually be OK after all. His locomotion is certainly not great, but it's a whole lot better than it was. I'm so amused at the thought that a wild skunk would willingly go into a cat carrier and spend time in there. Just one of the many lessons this little mustelid has to teach me.

           

 SugarBean has sure taught me a lot about skunks, about trust, about patience and love.  And about dog training! My hope is that, having come to know this one virtual skunk, some readers might not be so quick to freak out, call pest control,  or at the very least, run around shouting and waving their arms. It's just a small, calm, sweet, black and white animal, who happens to be packing a bomb. Your job is to stay cool so he doesn't have to deploy it.

SugarBean's New Home

Mid "stride:" SugarBean has to hop to get that bad right hind leg forward.

 It's really hard for a born empath who is also a wildlife rehabilitator to watch a very small skunk sort of drag-hopping around with one hind leg that's of no use. I want to do something, anything to help. And it kills me that, if SugarBean were an opossum or woodchuck, I'd have dragged her off to a veterinarian a month and a half ago. If only she weren't fully loaded with such a deadly weapon!

So when she spent the night in that cat carrier with its straw bedding and doormat roof,  I knew I had to do better by her. I made a sleeping box with a skunk-sized entry hole, and stuffed it with sweet dry meadow grass that I gather and use to replace my bluebird nests in blowfly season. This is the box my book, The Bluebird Effect, comes packed in. Space for 12 copies is just about right for a small skunk.

 

I then put the box in a great old steel mailbox that I've had since I lived in Connecticut. They don't make mailboxes like this any more. Its twin is currently in service at the end of our driveway. Somebody tried real hard to rip that one off its post, and they couldn't. All they did was bend the tab. That's my kind of mailbox. I kept this one because you can't get good heavy steel mailboxes any more. And maybe I knew that somewhere 30 years hence, I might need to make a skunk palace.

On March 31, I removed the cat carrier while SugarBean was out, and put this weatherproof setup in its place. The first one to check it out was a tufted titmouse, who thought it might have been put up for her, decided it was too low to the ground, and settled for stealing some grass from SugarBean's nest. You can see here there in the doorway.

 

I put a nice dish of food in the sleeping box. Around 5 pm, SugarBean came trundling up, following her nose.

She climbed up on the porch as if skunks always go into mailboxes.

 She checked out the surrounding area.

Cast me a look which I decided to interpret as thankful.

Went inside to have dinner and check out the mattress.

My heart almost burst when she scuffled around in there, arranging the grass, and stayed, curled up, for a nap. The nights were still in the 40's and it made my heart sing to know that, even if she was broken, she was warm and as comfortable as possible. I don't know where she'd been sleeping, but I can't imagine she could get down into a burrow thus compromised, so she may just have tucked herself into the trumpetvine tangle to sleep. Poor thing!

I can't tell you what a treat it has been to really get to know a skunk. When we first moved here in the early 1990's, there was a beautiful skunk who came around on some summer evenings. It was all white down its head, back and tail, and, unlike SugarBean, it had very strong BO, so I could literally smell when it was around. I gave it the highly imaginative name of Stinky. Whatever works.  I had no dog to worry about, so I started accidentally leaving the odd bit of chicken, pork or what-have-you along the skunk's yard route. It wasn't long before I could walk up, talking softly, and lay a treat before Stinky's nose. Skunks are trusting animals, and they catch on quickly that you mean no harm. They catch onto it even more quickly when you're a good cook. Stinky was around for a few weeks, and then ambled on, as skunks do.

But my relationship with SugarBean is at a whole 'nother level. I know it's not a good idea to feed wild mammals, and I would never even consider leaving large bowls of kibble out at night, like I've seen people do for packs upon packs of raccoons, opossums and skunks. I have no desire to artificially boost the concentration of predators in my surroundings. But I did very much enjoy my brief relationship with Stinky.

Providing good food, clean water, and excellent housing for this car-crushed waif seems like the least I can do, given her pitiful condition.  I doubt SugarBean would be alive now but for this intervention, and her life is precious to us. I'm so grateful to this skunk for schooling Curtis in some sorely needed etiquette, for keeping her cool with a hot-headed cur around. It is a definite risk to have a wild and fully loaded skunk in one's yard, but it's worked out amazingly well, given the odds.

Watching her make herself at home in the fancy new digs was such a thrill. I couldn't stop smiling. A while later I saw movement out there and came out to see what was going on. SugarBean was on her porch again, busy grooming her fur. 

 And what to my wondering eyes did appear

But a miniature...Huh?

My apologies, SugarBean. I have been using the wrong pronoun all along. I took you for a girl, being so small and delicate. You must just be a yearling.

And you've now seen a skunk's junk, and no surprise! Cute eyes, ears, nose, toes...even the junk's cute, too.  We'll keep the name, because you're no less sweet for being a boy.