Last Thursday morning, being behind-hand on the laundry as always, I rush downstairs to get my jeans out of the dryer to wear to work. On the way, I pass by the downstairs bathroom and hear "chirp, chirp, chirp." I KNEW it! A while back, I SWORE I heard a bird in the bathroom vent, but never hearing the noise again, I assumed maybe the bird got stuck--and upon never detecting the impending smell, I assumed the bird just gave it up and moved out to better accommodations. NOPE. There is now a CHORUS of chirps coming from the bathroom. Now, I'm not quite fully awake yet, and since this is the bathroom I hardly ever use (it's the designated "kids' bathroom"), I go to turn on the light--and hit the vent switch instead. YIKES! Well, after a bit of flapping around, I still hear the chorus, so I figure the birds are way up there, and all's good. Not being able to do anything about the poor birds at the moment, I grab my jeans, and go about my morning of getting ready and getting the kids up.
20 minutes later, Keith is rushing in the bathroom to do his business and says, "Mommy, I can't go in here, it smells!" I check it out, and now I've got pieces of nest and bird crap all over the floor. By the time John is up, we can actually see a little bird leg hanging out of the bathroom vent! Great! I demolished their nest! Great! It's time to go to work!
Upon arriving home from work, John gets out the screwdriver and removes the still squawking baby birds. He finds three--two in pretty good shape, one which is barely moving and obviously already knocking on heaven's door. Upon inspection outside, we see the tiny little vent hole where mama had built her nest, the rest of the nest on the ground, and another baby who didn't survive the great fall. (Now I'm wondering if the nest--having been built in such a precarious place in the first place, had collapsed during the night whereupon the three fell deeper into the vent, and the one fell outside which is why I could finally hear these obviously weeks-old birds which we couldn't hear before).
Well, we stick the babies in a box, and I'm trying to reach animal control (which is closed at this point). Now, in a book I had read as a youngster, a family finds a baby wren and are able to raise it. In the book, the mother had put the baby bird in the oven to warm up and had made a mixture of flour/milk on the stove which she fed to the baby with tweezers. I'm too freaked out to put the birds in the oven (sing a song of sixpence?), but I do decide to at least warm up a little milk and feed it to the remaining babies with a medicine dropper. The two alert birds are going crazy and obviously love it! I try to get the not-so-alert one to take some, but it barely opens its mouth. Just as I got one dropper-full in each little alert beak, John yells from upstairs, "It says here [on the internet, obviously] NOT to give them milk or ANY kind of liquid." Apparently the baby birds could suck it down so quickly that they could choke themselves. Oh. Well, so much for childhood books as resources.
John gives me the number of some local wildlife preservationist to call. I leave a message. The babies are still chirping away--for about the next 20 minutes. Then they all quiet down. And they are all cold. I guess following his internet advice, John puts them in a planter and hangs them outside in the hopes that their chirping (which they are no longer doing!) will call the mother. Nope. They've stopped squawking and now they are apparently orphans. We bring them back inside since it's going to be a chilly night, put a dish towel in with them, hang them up in the utility room where Tarquin can't get at them, and hope for the best. But warning the kids when we put them to bed, that "it doesn't look good."
Next morning I rush down to check on them, and just one is barely twitching. I hang them back outside on the shepherd's hook knowing that this is the end. I tell both kids as they get up that "the birds didn't make it." Poor Keith starts crying immediately. Mary took it a little better. Both kids did pretty well in the long run. Lots of questions. Lots of answers. And while they seem to be handing it well, I can't help but wonder if I could have helped the birds more. What if we'd just used our heads and put them outside in the first place? What if I hadn't fed them milk? What if that @#$% preservationist had ever called back? What if I hadn't flipped the wrong @#$% switch? Good grief! I now have the weight of the death of four little baby birds on my shoulders! And all I can think of is that poor mama bird grieving over the death of her little ones and wondering what that awful whirring noise was that scared her off and broke up her little nest. *sigh* Humans suck. Especially meddling ones....
4 comments:
Don't worry carrie.. you did the best that you could. You actually did alot more than most people would have done. This happens alot more often that you think, and I am sure the animal control would have been little to no help anyway. It's a circle of life kinda thing.
The folks, annually, had some chicks stuck in the vents. The last year that it happened, one found its way to the hottest pipe and cooked nastily. With rabbit/chicken wire, I bound up the furnace stack so that no nest could be planted. There was a concern, with ice fomring on the smaller holes, but that hasn't happened either.
Wasps, now, are a possiblity, but can be killed with chemicals on the "out vent", so no one smells the rotten chemicals.
The birds looked sorely at me when I buried the burnt one, as well as the occasional animal that I find in the street or on the lawn, courtesy of accident, predation, and the like.
It wasn't your fault, in fact if you ever watch doves -- a great deal stupider than wrens, they barely know which end to feed. Wrens, ubiquitous and birthing more than once a year in good climates; perhaps not New York, will again be at your door.
BTW: I assume this isn't your new house, as you mentioned it being a common problem, right?
Thanks for making me feel better, guys.
Nope, not the new home. But you did remind me of when we lived in Canterbury Green. Just two weeks before we moved out of THAT apartment a morning dove built a nest in my planter outside our balcony. I gave the plant to the next-door neighbor and upon leaving the mama had transitioned over to her new home five feet over no problem. I sometimes wonder if those eggs ever hatched.... Anyway, getting beseiged by birds before important moves seems to be a common theme here. Hmmm....
I wouldn't get worked up about it. As Dave said, "circle of life." Animal Control probably wouldn't have cared. My sister is a vet tech and would routinely have people bringing in squirrels they had hit with their car. Most of the time the squirrel would bite the would-be rescuer, who then needed injections to protect them from disease. And they'd have to put the squirrel down anyway. I can't see them spending time/money/supplies on an injuried wild animal like that.
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