A Murphy’s Law kinda week…

Oh Lordy, let’s just start with the good news: the screech from last week’s aborted release is doing fine, feelin’ his oats, and may even be ready for a second attempt at release this week. Fingers crossed!

And despite a conspiracy (paranoid? Me? After this past week, yeah, a wee bit!) between the weather, my crashed hard drive (knew it was coming; had all the important stuff backed up), and a subsequent massive editing workload to catch up on, we still managed to get the mesh up in the flight pen, thanks to my nephew and niece-in-law, Alex and Brooke. Our plans were to get the hardware cloth on the floor and the door up, as well, but—well, see above: conspiracy and all…

However, the remainder of the week’s events were…less than stellar for the birds concerned.

Upon intake, I suspected this little white-throated sparrow was a window-strike victim. He exhibited the skewed tail and inability to use his legs that frequently typifies window strikes. More concerning, though, was his labored breathing, which I was afraid indicated “blown” lungs, i.e., he’d hit the window so hard it ruptured his lungs.  Still, he was alert and did at least attempt to eat, so I started antibiotics and anti-inflammatories and hoped…

He died during the night.

Two days later, a caller said she had a “baby brown thrasher, just learning to fly” that she’d found covered with oil-based paint. Of course, it’s nowhere near baby season, so I was pretty sure we didn’t have a brown thrasher on the way. I told the caller to wrap the bird in paper towels so he couldn’t ingest the paint and not to do anything else.

Upon intake, the bird—an adult Carolina wren, covered with white latex paint—was unrestrained on a “bed” of paper towels in a plastic container…covered with a paint-soaked rag. The finder also said she’d put Vaseline on the wren. So much for following instructions…

This poor bird was a disaster. I honestly didn’t hold out much hope that the paint was going to come off, as it was caked on his little body and head, but I gritted my teeth and tried. The thing is, Carolina wrens—as you may recall—are notoriously stressy little birds. I love ‘em dearly, but they epitomize stressy. And adding to my worry, when I cleaned off the little guy’s beak and he opened it, there was paint all in his mouth. Probably shoulda called it at that point; he’d obviously ingested the paint…but he was still alert and active, the poor little fellow…

So I washed and gently rubbed feathers between my fingers and rinsed and…well, we had to take frequent short breaks to allow the Caro a little de-stressing time…And I honestly thought we made pretty good progress, all things considered. This wasn’t gonna be a one-day “clean and we’re done” deal; it was gonna take several days of washing and rubbing and rinsing.

He was in fairly good shape by lights-out; the pretty brown and black barring on his wings and back was visible again. I was hopeful but not optimistic that he might survive the night, but less than two hours later he had died…

Here’s hoping this week has better outcomes for our wildlife…