Florence Nightingale, Meet Elmer Fudd: Still Helping Goldfinches

Well, folks, I'm still at it, doctoring, feeding, and cleaning up after --would you believe it--a total of 17 American goldfinches, installed in five different cages around my house. Capacity is at an all-time high as of this writing on March 26, and I'm actually blogging about it now so I don't forget in the excitement of the coming week, when I get to release a bunch of them at long, long last! My "morning practice" of heading out to see the sun rise has, since February 20 when I caught my first sick goldfinch, been replaced by janitorial duties. That's OK. I just postpone the hike with Curtis until they've been fed, medicated and watered. 

Since I wrote "Caught in the Whirlpool," admissions have slowed but not entirely halted. In the last three days, I've caught two more, and I have my eye on a little female who can still see well enough to evade me.

The huge flock of goldfinches--60  or more--that deposited these waifs at my doorstep is long gone. The tube feeders that attracted them are, too, likely never to be used again. I really want out of this loop, but I'm much more sanguine about it now that I have some releases coming up and recruitment of patients has slowed to a trickle. This is a typical scenario for me in the past month or so...

I make a delicious lunch of cranberry pecan chicken salad over tower-grown lettuce and head down to the new patio with a happy sigh to consume it in the spring sunshine. Self-care, yep! I'm doing it today!

And while I am sitting there, before I even get to take the first bite, the unbelievable occurs again...

a blinded goldfinch flutters down to the patio. This is the second time this has happened. 

How is a bird rehabber to get anything to eat? 

I put my salad on the terrace wall and advance.

 Can I document the hand-capture of a wild American goldfinch two times in a row?  It really helps when they're finally and totally blind. But I have to say, I am mystified and enchanted by the fact that two blinded birds--both females-- have raised the white flag and come to me when I least expected it. 

I got the bulk of my patients by creeping up on the tube feeders and snatching them off their perches. It was pretty easy to block their dim view of me using the feeder posts. After I took the tube feeders down, having made the connection between the feeder ports and disease transmission,  I had to get craftier.

I took to using my koi net, which has a long, telescoping handle. This is a really groovy way to catch the birds, since you don't have to get right up on top of them to nab them. I owe this Elmer Fudd video tribute to Shila Wilson, who, unbeknownst to me, was standing in the studio and ready with her iPhone when I grabbed the opportunity to try to catch an extremely elusive bird. Shh. Be vewwy, vewwy quiet. I'm hunting Gowdfinches!

Don't know about you, but I find this video unintentionawwy hiwawious. Something about the way there's nothing happening, and then this black net just cweeps in from stage left...and then you have me, so totawwy focused on the stalk...it's just hiwawious. And perfect that I didn't catch the little blighter after all that trouble.

Another bird who gave me the swip again and again is this one. I kept cweeping up on him with my Fuddnet, and he kept swipping out from under it wike quicksiwver. When I finawwy got him I was ewated! 

I named this bird Mr. Netinyahoo, because he was so hard to catch.

           

I'm sure Mr. Netinyahoo is a career criminal. Just look at that shifty face. He's plotting even as I grip him in my Gentle Cobra grasp. I'd only had him for a day when I opened his Pet Taxi to re-up his food and water and he flipped right out the door. Straight up to the clerestory windows he went, well above the reach of hand or net. 

That meant only one thing. I would have to bring the dreaded 17' extension ladder into the living room. 

This ladder is very heavy and unwieldy, and getting it in the front door is an adventure in cussing and trying not to not break something (window; Hoosier cabinet, mirror, lamp...) Luckily, once a goldfinch picks a window to flutter against, they tend to stay there.  Unlike hummingbirds, which rapidly switch windows, making you set the ladder up several times before you finally are able to nab them. You can see the tiny dark blip of Mr. Netinyahoo's head in the middle clerestory. Obviously this isn't my first rodeo, catching birds in the clerestory windows. 

I tried a bunch of times to extend the ladder but it kept collapsing. No way was I going to extend that thing only to have it suddenly retract and send me to the floor. So I said a prayer that I'd be able to reach him with the ladder unextended, called Shila to tell her I was about to do something dumb, and climbed up. At least somebody a half hour away by car would know I'd fallen... I caught him handily and started my descent. I couldn't see the underslung last step as I came down and missed it. Tumbled into a straw ottoman which nicely broke my fall. I rolled a bit, holding my precious cargo high in my right hand. He was unharmed, and so was I! But his little eyes were both screwed shut, which I found very touching. He probably thought he was toast when I went down.

And there may be yet a third way to catch a goldfinch. I'm getting cwaftier and cwaftier! I recently installed a New and Improved Secret Studio Feeder, which avid readers and social media followers will remember from 2017, when Jemima visited it for chicken breast, basmati rice, pecans, sugar snap peas, raspberries and the like. I went looking for a nice narrow plexi drawer organizer that I could wire up under my crank-out studio window, installed some plastic cups, and now I have a steady stream of awesome birds right up close to enjoy. My idea was to be able to offer some special foods like Zick dough and sunflower hearts to my beloved regulars without attracting big flocks of house and gold finches who would carry disease.

And wouldn't you know, a little female goldfinch with one squinty eye figured out how to get in there and eat. Bless her little heart! Needless to say, I'll be ready when she's finally robbed of her sight. I'm so touched that she spotted the sunflower hearts and had the courage to come in for food. That's a stretch for a goldfinch. They are sweet birds, but they are not innovators, the way titmice, Carolina wrens, blue jays and even chipping sparrows, to name a few, can be.

I am delighted to report that on March 29, this bird's good eye finally closed and I heard her toenails on the plexi of my new feeding station. Oh my gosh, there she was. BUT the screen was in, and the window was closed. Well, it was worth a try. Stealthily, I removed the screen. Still she sat and ate. Even more stealthily, I cranked the window out. The bottom of the window brushed the top of her head as it oh-so-slowly opened. Still she sat! One pounce of the Gentle Cobra and she was mine--the last of the last of the last sick goldfinches, I pray! I was beyond delighted to finally have her in my mitt.

So the saga continues. I sincerely hope to be able to stop running a goldfinch hospital in the nearish future. As is, with the birds I've got, I'll be caring for birds into the third week of April. Good thing I've done my taxes.

And speaking of taxing, I humbly thank you all for reading, and staying with me on this bizarre journey. Special thanks to those of you who have chosen to support my madness with blog donations. You don't have to! I got this! but you are very kind and I am grateful. I keep doing it because I feel terrible that goldfinches seem to be succumbing to the disease, usually mostly the province of house finches, in such alarming numbers this spring. I don't know why that is, or what has changed--has the bacterium mutated? But it's clear that their resistance to this awful disease is poor. 

I keep doing it because I love goldfinches, and if I have had any part in making them ill, I want to make them whole again.

I keep doing it because there's nothing quite like helping a blind bird see again. The only thing that's better than that is seeing a caged bird fly again. To my dear friend Donna I owe this poem excerpt, which she sent me on hearing my caged goldfinch singing. 

Everyone suddenly burst out singing; And I was filled with such delight As prisoned birds must find in freedom Winging wildly across the white Orchards and dark green fields; on; on; and out of sight. Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted, And beauty came like the setting sun. My heart was shaken with tears and horror Drifted away ... O but every one Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Sigfried Sassoon

The best little singer of the bunch really tuned up in the four days before his release. Since his cage was in the foyer, I got to enjoy it all day long from the adjacent studio.

And now, watch that beautiful singer and his female friend go free!

Goldfinch Hospital: The 2021 Mycoplasma Outbreak

It's March 8, and I have just caught, by hand, my eighth American goldfinch for treatment for Mycoplasma gallinae infection. This is the disease my blue jay Jemima had, for which I treated her successfully, and wrote about in Saving Jemima: Life and Love with a Hard-luck Jay. 

 (Yes, that's a link, because I'm selling signed copies off my website now, whee!)

But I'm going to take you back to February 21 for my first patient's story. This was the first goldfinch I found that succumbed to the disease, and I tried to catch her for at least a week, but she was too quick for me. I sneak up on the bird quietly and slowly and snatch it with my hand, either from the perch on the tube feeder or from the ground. This one was so cagey she had to be completely blind and sitting in the snow on a subfreezing day for me to finally grab her. By then, she was skin and bones, and she didn't make a peep when my hand finally closed around her. 

Little did I know what would unfold from there.

Mycoplasma, or house finch disease, affects more than 30 other species of wild birds. It started off with domestic poultry, and Eastern house finches first caught it in 1994. Because the Eastern population of house finches is terribly inbred, all being descended from one release event at JFK Airport in 1939, our house finches have little to no resistance to the pathogen. (Western birds apparently do!). Mycoplasma causes conjunctivitis that is painful and which, in the space of a few days, can rob the bird of its eyesight. That's when I creep in and make my grab. 

This is the worst Mycoplasma spring I've ever experienced. Hey, why not? Pandemics are the thing. Seriously, though, I suspect that the bitter cold and snow cover that hung in here in Ohio for about three weeks may have caused otherwise healthy birds to succumb to the germ, which is everywhere in the environment, but especially concentrated around OUR FEEDING STATIONS. Yep, humans are behind this, as we are behind almost all of the mishaps that befall wild birds. 

Look at this: Humans keep domestic fowl in crowded quarters so they often get sick, and poor husbandry allowed the disease to pass on to wild birds. Humans kept house finches as pets before passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, importing them from California to pet shops in New York. And it was humans who released a shipment of house finches, and caused them to spread throughout the East. Our feeders encouraged the wildfire spread of this American native (but exotic-to-the-East) species. Because of inbreeding depression, these Eastern finches have no resistance to new pathogens. And what do we do? Keep feeding them; create concentration points for unnatural numbers of wild birds. Yes, it's our feeders that encourage the spread of Mycoplasma to more than 30 species of wild birds. (I'm looking out at my one freshly bleached tube feeder, kept full of seed for the express purpose of catching sick goldfinches, and I see three more goldfinches and one house finch out there with goopy eyes). I'm caught in a whirlpool here, trying to remove all the sick birds from this enormous flock of 60 plus birds, disinfecting and raking...tending cages...arrgh. It's a lot. Hence no blogposts for almost a month. But on with the story...

First stop for a completely blind bird is my hand, with a dropper of Tylan-laced water, which they guzzle down eagerly. That sets them on the road to recovery.  This bird is drinking from a little pool of Tylan water on my knuckle. (I can't administer the medicine and make a video at the same time). 

Then they are confined in a small plastic Critter Keeper, with shallow dishes of food and water that the bird can feel underfoot.  Almost all of them begin to eat and drink on their own; they're starved and very thirsty by the time I am able to catch them. Generally, within 24 hours, the stuck-shut swollen eyes show marked improvement and the bird regains at least some its sight. Some need force-feeding and more droppers of Tylan for a couple of days before they can see well again and are strong enough to make it in the larger cage.

Once they're sighted and eating on their own, they go to one of two larger cages I've got set up. One is in my foyer, and one is back in Liam's room. (sorry, Liam; I put a dropcloth down!) Both face out toward windows so they can see where they are going once they're better. I think that giving them hope of returning to the wild is so important in wildlife rehab. I hate to see creatures kept in dark, shrouded quarters, even as I understand that in a busy clinic, that can be the only choice. 

I keep the side toward the window clear, but I use a tablecloth to cover three sides of the cage facing into the house. This works very well. The birds swiftly associate the blank cloth with safety, and don't panic and flutter against the bars when they hear me walk by. I can service the cage once a day, replacing food and Tylan water and changing the papers, and then leave them in peace until the next morning.

Ideally, I'd have nylon-sided caging, but this is what I have, and it works pretty well.

In this video, the Feb. 21 bird has dislodged her cage cover and freaks out when Curtis and I come up the stairs first thing in the morning. It's hard to believe this wildly fluttering creature is the same bird I picked up off the snow, only four days later. Oh, the miracle drug Tylosin does a beautiful job on Mycoplasma.

I think the word got out that there was a nice lady treating sick goldfinches in Whipple, Ohio. It wasn't long before I had my hands--and cage--completely full. I've gotten a little too good at grabbing the partially-blinded but still flying birds off the tube feeders. I guess it appeals to the hunter-gatherer in me. I find it thrilling to stalk softly, ever so slowly advancing so the poor nearsighted thing can't tell I'm there. And I absolutely love the grab. I strike like a gentle cobra--lightning fast but softly. It's an art.

Soon I had more birds than I could handle in the foyer cage, so I had to get the stepladder and retrieve a second, larger cage from the rafters of the garage, where Bill had stuck it years and years ago. I was thrilled to find it intact and needing only a good scrubbing to go back into service. Here's the first cage, before I got the second set up.

Each time I capture a goldfinch, I tell it, "Your day just got better, sweetie. You don't know it yet, but you're going to feel so much better by tonight! And tomorrow you'll be able to see again! 

Now, before y'all go rushing out to try to find Tylan and set up your own goldfinch hospital, there are some things you need to know. First, Tylan is available by prescription only. Second, it's expensive--my little 6 oz. bottle of powder cost an eye-popping $75.00. Third, and most important, you have to know what you're doing, and have licenses, both state and federal, to take in, handle and treat migratory birds. I've got those permits. And fourth--you have to keep the birds on Tylan for 21 days. Trust me--it's an eternity to have to feed, water, clean up after and listen to that many birds for three weeks.

And no. You absolutely cannot put Tylan in your bird bath and try to treat the world. Tylan-laced water has to be the bird's ONLY water source, so it won't work because your feeder birds can get water elsewhere; you have to change it every three days; and the likelihood that they'll hang around for three solid weeks is very low; and healthy wild birds absolutely don't need a strong medication. And we really hugely don't need to encourage a drug-resistant variant of Mycoplasma to develop out there. This one is bad enough!  And no, this is NOT the same germ that you may have heard is causing a lot of finch deaths in the West: that is salmonellosis. Birds with salmonellosis are lethargic and puffed up and sneezy, but they don't get swollen eyes and go blind the way Mycoplasma-infected birds do. 

I am being very explicit here so I won't have  so many questions to answer in the comments section. My time and answers are necessarily short this spring, because caring for eight goldfinches takes a lot out of me. But oh, the rewards. In my next post, I'll tell you the story of one of my patients who will touch your heart: 

Patio Finch.

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.

Release the Kestrel!

A month went by, as months do when Christmas is coming and you're traveling with your kids in Spain (I'm not done with Spain! I just had to tell you about this bird!). A few days after admission on December 12,  the kestrel had X-rays and a thorough exam at the Ohio Wildlife Center hospital near Columbus. Coracoids were fine. However there was a left carpal issue--the hand part of his wing was hurt.

He received light oral inflammatory treatment, laser therapy to promote natural healing, and physical therapy. He was kept in the hospital for a few more days, then taken out to the pre-release facility with its big flight cages to test his wings. I got this precious information from my friend Connie Ray, a volunteer rehabilitator for Ohio Wildlife Center. I so appreciate a little glimpse into their workings, especially when one of my special birds is recuperating in their care.

I was hoping perhaps to pick the kestrel up when we got back from Spain on Dec. 30, but he wasn't quite ready. He was flying, though, and the veterinarian was hopeful. So was I. I just couldn't imagine this jewel anywhere but in the sky, hovering over the vast fields of Barlow.

photo by Lee Hermandorfer

Finally, I got the email from Ohio Wildlife Center that I'd been hoping for. The kestrel was ready for release!

I can't tell you how grateful I am that I don't have to get in the car and drive 2 1/2 hours to go pick these creatures up, or take them to care in Columbus. All I do is text Lee, and we coordinate. She budgets the time to go by OWC and get the bird; we meet up. But this time Lee would be in on the release, and I was so happy about that. It was only right.

I also have to tell you how amazing it is to have been able to release two raptors this winter. The percentage of raptors that meet up with barbed wire fences and cars, and come out of it releasable, is so vanishingly small. And it is so heartbreaking to field one after another, send them up, only to hear they've been euthanized for their injuries, too severe to be healed. It's very hard on the heart, especially when it's a big sweet old barred owl with those liquid eyes, or a beautiful Cooper's hawk, wild and crazy but oh so broken. I just don't feel that I can or should pronounce on these birds; I feel like I have to give them the benefit of a full veterinary exam. And yet most of the time I know what the answer will be. That's what makes it so hard.

But I had a good feeling about the barbed-wire redtail, which was richly borne out, and I had a good feeling about this little kestrel. His eyes seemed to say, "I've got this. I need time, but I'll be coming back to you."

And he did.

Also attending the release: the Yost family, with their Miracle Dog, Frank, who was lost this winter for a couple of months, but who was found again, much to their joy. 

Anastasia and her kids are the ones who caught the falcon when they realized he was hurt. 

These kids...the sweetest. 

They walked and scooted and strollered from home to attend the release!

The little falcon was scrabbling around in his carrier. He knew where he was. His head bobbed, his eyes bugged. He was home! Why wouldn't we let him out? Well, we eventually did. Being humans, we had to yak about it for awhile first. We don't make much sense to falcons.

It was an unnaturally warm, very blustery day, over 70 degrees, but it wasn't raining. The kestrel would just have to deal with the gusty wind, and the cold front roaring toward us. It was time for him to be free at last.

I was very nervous about capturing his release in slow motion, but I somehow managed to do it. He was out of there like greased lightning. A real-time video would have shown nothing but a blur. With this, we get to revel in his amazing colors one last time, and in motion!

please note--it's ohiowildlifecenter.org   --  I got it wrong in the video. Doesn't he fly so beautifully, so swiftly, so assuredly? Great work, Ohio Wildlife Center!

If that wasn't cool enough, the kestrel made a tremendous circle around Barlow town center, sat for awhile in the big sycamore on the fairgrounds, then came back to us! He fetched up in a tree and commenced to holler.

He was looking all around, hollering killykillykillykilly as if he were calling for his mate. 

See, now, that's such a parrot thing to do, to sit up on a high perch and yell like that. 

I wish I could say that a female flew right up in response, but that didn't happen while we were watching. He'll have to go look for her.

It was SO cool to see him fly so easily, so well, and to see him return from his perch in the sycamore, where he was little more than a speck to the naked eye. 

These aren't great shots, but he was so fast and the light was absolutely pitiful. 

See that row of round white windows along the rear margin of his wing? Great field mark for American kestrel. 

Barlow is full of fields and farms like these. That bird is in tall corn. 

Michael McCutcheon is a dentist whose office overlooks the field where our bird was found injured. He said he's been watching a kestrel there for a long time. He's also Lee's dentist and a birdwatcher, so we were delighted that he and his family could attend the release. He'll keep an eye out for the bird going forward. Curtis attended, but he stayed in the car for the release, because Frank got there first. He was kind of mad at me so I brought him out and took him for a nice hike in a hemlock ravine immediately afterward.

Curtis enjoyed meeting everyone. He is becoming expert at the impromptu meet and greet events that seem to follow us wherever we go. People recognize him, and then figure out who I must be. Ha ha!!

I enjoyed seeing this little band of people, united in joy at the kestrel's release.

That's Lee holding the carrier. She has incredibly sharp and practiced birder eyes and is pointing out where the kestrel is at the moment. 

Fare well, little death parrot. Thanks to everyone who made your recovery and release possible. Thanks to the kestrel who came zipping back to holler awhile, and let us know he was large, in charge and back home where he belonged!

Wildlife rehab isn't just for broken kestrels and orphaned opossums. It's for people, too.

 I think that we all need the occasional lift of a newly freed bird's wings.

Please donate here, to keep the Ohio Wildlife Center going strong. They helped more than 5,000 animals and birds last year! and I'd be utterly lost without them.

Testing Her Wings: Redtail Update

Wildlife rehab, and especially avian rehabilitation, is not just bunnies in baby blankets, though rabbits certainly present their own unique challenges. When you're trying to heal a bird, you've got to make darn sure it's going to be flightworthy before you turn it loose.

By November 17, our barbed-wire redtail was eating voraciously and it looked as though her patagium was healing well. But would she be flightworthy? Jesse was worried about her patagium and especially the area around her wrist, which looked "abnormal," in his words.

There would be only one way to tell if she could fly well enough to be released, and that was creance flying. One person holds the bird, and a second person (Dr. Jesse Fallon) holds a long thin line attached to jesses around its legs. An ACCA volunteer releases the bird, and Jesse hauls ass behind her as she flies, like this:







Oh, that's encouraging! Let's try it again.
No good deed goes unpunished. Jesse finds a hole in the field and goes down like a thrown steer. His heartless writer wife Katie giggles. Just kidding. They're both all heart, and dear friends.






 Having recovered his composure and apparently uninjured by his spectacular fall, Jesse explains about barbed wire injuries, and this bird's injuries in particular.



He said it. The R word. Release!! Readying for release! How do you like that, Formerly Doomed Redtail? I like it very much!

At this point, it seems meet to point out that the Avian Conservation Center of Appalachia is always grateful for donations to support the free medical assistance they offer to injured and orphaned wildlife. I wanted you to have a glimpse into what they do to ensure the birds are recovering and flight-ready. It's not just bandaging them up and tossing mice into their cage--it's physical rehab, too!

And for anyone wondering about the legality of taking an Ohio hawk to West Virginia for care, I've cleared it with the Ohio Division of Wildlife Permits Officer to have this bird treated in WV, then returned to Ohio for release. Gotta keep that stuff up front and out in the open. I live two hours from the closest wildlife rehab facility with veterinary staff (Ohio Wildlife Center in Columbus). ACCA is almost three hours from here, near Cheat Lake, WV. It's tough for wildlife rehabbers in my part of Ohio, really tough. Any way you cut it, you're going to kill an entire day transporting the creature. I appreciate these two facilities more than I can say, and I sure wish they weren't two and three hours away. 

Please donate here.

Another Little Patient

She was blind, or very nearly so, and I'd been watching her for a couple of weeks, waiting for the moment when she'd be so debilitated she gave up and sat on the ground. That moment came on a brutally cold morning after a snowy night. As I went to fill the feeders, there she sat, quietly on the snow at the base of a birch. She had given up.

I have no photos of the moment, but this is what she looked like--her eyes pasted shut on both sides.

This poor little creature has taken a sunflower heart from the feeder, and brought it up to the chamaecyparis just outside my studio window to process it. She's too weak to compete at the bustling feeders.

 

 She can see just enough through one slitted eye to avoid capture. Her time will come. I hope I'm there when it does.

What's felling these birds is Mycoplasma, a dread infection better known as house finch disease. And we have house finches to thank for introducing it into the general population of native species. Not their fault--we brought them to the East back in the dark ages, when keeping wild birds in cages was an accepted practice. And when they were released, a tiny founder population of perhaps a hundred birds escaping their crate at a New York airport, they bred and bred. But they were inbred, and they had no natural resistance to the germs they found here. And so it began.

Now, Mycoplasma stalks more than a dozen species, and the list is growing--everything from goldfinches to blue jays.

This bird was incredibly lucky to be picked up by somebody with a $75 bottle of an antibiotic called Tylan, and the resolve to cure her.

She would live in a roomy cage in my bat/bird room for the next three weeks, drinking water laced with bitter Tylan and sweetened with Stevia. :) It helps. 

She hated being caged.

Most of the time she looked like this

but every once in awhile I could sneak into the corner with my telephoto and hope to capture her at rest. Yes, her tail is a mess thanks to bashing it against the wires. Ideally, she should be kept in a nylon, soft-sided cage. I'll get there. Still hobbling along with my archaic old equipment. Trying to do no harm, sometimes failing. Believe it or not, I was able to preen it back into near- perfect shape when I finally caught her for release. No feathers were broken; they were just mussed.

She pigged out on sunflower chips and drank copious amounts of Tylan/Stevia water. Good girl.




For some reason, Blogger gags on my videos. I'll post one, and it's there. Post another, and the first one disappears. Trying to post two at once is nearly impossible. I'll beat my head against Blogger's wall for hours, trying to get these videos to take.

Trying again, after both vanished. Yep. Soon as I get one posted, the other vanishes. Man, that's frustrating. I'm gonna post this quick while they're still both visible. Thought you'd be lifted up, as I am, by the little perchicoree! she voices as I open my hand. She did say thank you. :)



I'm speaking twicet at Wings of Winter Festival, Klamath Falls, OR, this coming weekend, Feb. 15-16 2019! Talking about a snowy owl's crazy journey on Friday, and about baby birds on Saturday. I cannot WAIT. Haven't been anywhere for months. And the birding there is off the hook fabulous! Come see me! See left sidebar of this blog for details!

Crazy Bat Lady

Breathing a huge sigh of satisfaction and relief. I've just put the bats back to bed. I've been feeding a big brown bat named Ambrose every night for the last two weeks. He was found by an Instagram pal of mine in a bathroom sink. Because of the weird and delicate web of Instagram, Leah knew I work with bats, knew to call on someone who'd know what to do for this wee foundling.

 Bats that are found in heated homes in winter are in trouble, usually because their normal hibernacula (rhymes with Dracula!) have become too cold. People's pleas for help with bats they've found tend to come in when the Polar Express sweeps down from the Arctic with bitter temperatures. Bats that find themselves freezing to death, I surmise, somehow make their way from attics and sofits down into to warmer places, and that brings them into contact with people. That doesn't usually go well for the bat, unless someone like Leah is in the mix. She picked the little bat up with a hand towel, placed him in a box and taped it up securely. We met at a pet shop in town, where I was going to buy my third critter keeper so I could accommodate the new arrival (I've already got two bats in care).

Ambrose (named for one of Leah's adorable sons) came in weighing only ten grams. That's dangerously low for a big brown bat (low normal weight is 17 gm). They get as heavy as 22 gm., but after that, they're too fat to fly. I knew I had my hands full with this little guy. He was a lousy, reluctant eater, dehydrated and down. I sometimes had to coax him for ten minutes or more to take his first mealworm. Once he started eating, he'd down 7 or more at a go. I doggedly kept at it, and after two weeks, he was the bright-eyed, active little sprite you see in this video, weighing in at 16 gm. ( I weigh the bats before each feeding). I figured that was close enough to normal, and with a great sigh of relief, readied him for hibernation with a final big feeding.







Because we had three nights in a row in the 50's, I decided to wake up the other two bats, Lyle and Murcie, for a midwinter feeding. I let them sleep until nights get warm enough that, were they in the wild, they might go out looking for moths. So for three nights, I was feeding all three of them, and that took well over an hour each evening. I couldn't wait for it to get cold again so I could put them back to bed. By about 8 pm, I'm fried, and bats eat best after 9, I've found, so it was a struggle for me to stay up late enough to get them all taken care of.

I love this little unexpected flitter Ambrose executes, onto an old license plate in my bat room.

This is Lyle. He's also a refugee from a house. 

 

And here's Murcie, the biggest and strongest of the three. Also the most opinionated.

What's involved in putting them back to sleep for a few weeks is cleaning their boxes and taking out their soiled linens (they sleep in hand towels, folded over and taped to the top of the boxes). I replace the paper toweling on the floor and put fresh clean linens in.  

You see that the boxes are lined with nonskid drawer liner, extra thick. This is so they don't break their delicate finger bones on the plastic sides of the box, beating their wings.

 

Washing bat linens. It's pretty disgusting. Not going in my washing machine, nossir.

 

I keep the condos by a poorly-insulated door in the basement. It gets pretty darn cold down there on the floor, so I put the critter keepers up on a box.

I also cover their condos so they aren't drafty. The all-important thermometer gets checked frequently. It shouldn't drop below freezing. Ideally you keep them between 37-50 for torpor. I've learned to adjust the temperature by moving them closer to, or farther away, from the cold outside door.

 And there they sleep, for three to four weeks at a time, until the next natural warmup comes. Then I'll wake them, weigh them and feed them for a couple of nights. I've little doubt my bats eat more in winter than wild bats do, but I feel a responsibility to keep them in tip top condition, and I worry about them getting dehydrated, too.

 In order to qualify as a bat caretaker, I had to take a course  in handling rabies vector species from the wonderful Barbara Ray of the Ohio Wildlife Center, and I've had two rabies inoculations--you have to provide proof that you've had the course and the shots before you can get a permit to keep bats. It is not for everyone, that's for sure. There is so very much to know about them, and they're teaching me more every single day. They are my best teachers. 

I feel I'm getting better and better at handling, housing and understanding bats. I'm very fortunate to have a cold basement where they can be safely overwintered. I shudder at the thought of keeping them warm and having to feed them all winter long, especially with all I've got on my plate now. I've done that and it's a ton of work. More importantly, I think it's bad for the bats to be kept warm in winter. There's a considerable risk of overfeeding them and making them too fat to fly. I know, because I've done that. Sometimes I think learning is just doing everything wrong until you figure out how to do it better, how to do it right. Here's a post about my fat bats. 

If you just can't get enough batitude, keep hitting Newer Post for the story of Bat Boot Camp. :)

I don't overfeed my bats any more. I keep them lean and sweet. Lyle again.

I find working with bats very rewarding, because gentle handling usually results in a tractable bat. They may start out terrified and chittering, but you can win them over with time, food and gentle hands.  I've only had one bat (Drusilla) who came in horrid and remained horrid. I laugh just remembering her chewing away on my (double) glove. I loved her anyway. These three are total sweethearts by comparison.

 Bats, for me, combine all the things that are most wonderful about birds and mammals. They're delicate and very beautiful, and they employ flapping flight like birds do. Yet they're possessed of the softest fur imaginable, and the most winsome faces, like very small puppies. What a combo! Add to that the ability to survive for months without food or water, and you have a very special animal indeed. Miracles, they are. Just miracles. And they help me every bit as much as I help them.

Release the Goldfinch!

In the two weeks I had the young goldfinch in my studio, she was rarely quiet. She twittered through the day. One of her frequent vocalizations I couldn't recall having heard in the wild. It's the lower-pitched zraayzee call, given a number of times in this video. It's much louder and more emphatic than most of her twitters and twerps.

After hearing it from her, I heard a juvenile give it once, in the yard near the feeders. My guess is that it's a high-intensity contact call. If the bee bee bee twitters are "Hi. Hello. I'm here," zraayzee might be "HEY. HEEEEYYY. WHERE IS EVERYBODY?"

You can see in the video how she's holding her right wing. This pose must give some relief to the healing coracoid and the bruised muscles around it. When I'd see her sit like this, I'd think, "Oh no. I hope I'm not stuck with a goldfinch for the next twelve years." Having had an orchard oriole and a Savannah sparrow each make it to 17 1/2, and a house finch to 9 1/2 years, I know well what a commitment that is.

But we were both on a leap of faith here, and I told myself she'd be OK. There was nothing wrong with her wing--it was just the coracoid strut that needed to knit. (If you need explanation, go back three posts). She'd be able to fly. Well, I hoped so.

When a bird in rehab starts zooming around the cage, making it from the floor to the topmost perch without even trying, it's time for a flight test. I thought about setting up the nylon tent in the garage, but I was afraid I wouldn't be able to catch her if the wing had healed well. I'll never forget setting it up for the eastern wood-pewee I had on two week's rest for the same injury. And then that pewee zoomed around the tent so blindingly fast I had to catch him in flight with well-timed swing of a koi net!! Not. Good. This is the dilemma I face, not having proper facilities. Heck, even at Ohio Wildlife Center, they've been known to flight-test birds  in a long windowless corridor with a rehabber or two at either end. Whatever works. Had I known what was about to happen, I'd have used the back hall.

It can be awkward getting a bird to leave its cage. In this case, since the exit holes were at the bottom, I had to turn the cage over on its side, then coax the bird to leave this unnatural fortress. Goldfinches, as previously noted, are not wrens. They are not the sharpest tools in the shed where spatial relationships are concerned.

When she finally burst from the cage, I was in for a surprise!!

Circling the ceiling 20x = RELEASABLE. I couldn't believe her good luck, my good luck. It was too good to be true!

I'd learned something about a broken coracoid.

1. Given time and cage rest, it will probably heal.
2. If you can't get a wrap to stay on the bird, you might not need it anyway.
3. Flight test it somewhere it can't hurt itself (small windowless room or long narrow hallway)
4. Plan for the best, i.e., not being able to catch the dang bird when you flight test it.

I could not catch that bird, no matter how I tried. It was stressful for both of us. Finally, I had to remove the screen, crank the window wide, and shoo her out.

She didn't go far. She landed in the branches of a small American hornbeam bonsai that lives on a bench just outside the window.  There, she decided to eat salad. While I watched helplessly, she removed all the buds from two of its few branches. I was torn between laughing and crying. When that part of my tree fails to leaf out next spring, I'll remember this moment.

Mmm. Salad. 

Next year's hornbeam leaves, gone to goldfinch fodder.  Watching her denude my poor bonsai did make me realize that there is food everywhere for a vegetarian goldfinch. Maybe that's why they don't need to be all that sharp. No prey to outwit. 

Go on. Find your big world. The dome feeder's hanging out there, full of sunflower hearts. All your friends are in the yard, your parents, too!

Finally she flew into the golden arbor vitae and stayed there in the comforting shade for awhile.

A couple of hours later I saw a young goldfinch with a slight droop to the right wing land on the Bird Spa. After two weeks of living with her, there was something distinctly familiar about this bird.

Two days later I came out the front door and one young female goldfinch barely looked up from foraging. She flew to the arbor vitae, but no farther. Bright eyed, not sick. Just unafraid of her studio companion.  

Rehab doesn't always work out, that's for sure. But when it does, it is very sweet.