Reaching goals and setting goals

First, a huge THANK YOU to everybody who donated to the LWR “We’re HUNGRY” fundraiser. I’m happy to report we slightly exceeded our goal, with a total of $2010 by June 30!

As for goals to be set—well, primarily, I’m aiming at having the screech released within the next week. While I haven’t seen him kill prey, I know he can. Ya see, it seems a wharf rat decided the top of the flight pen would be a good place to nest and have babies…and it seems the screech figured out how to get between the mesh and the hardware cloth to raid said nest…His little belly was quite full when I retrieved him from his self-made “crawlspace” and buffet! Our weather prediction looks good for most of the week, so somebody’s about ready to take his place in the big, wide world.

The possum doesn’t seem to be gaining weight like he should, even though his little belly is round and firm after each feeding. Possums tend to be skinny little things anyway, but his lack of weight gain worries me (and yes, he’s been wormed, so that’s not the issue). He also seems to be suffering from some sort of dry skin condition; the skin peels off UNDER the fur but he’s not losing actual fur. Weird…

At this stage his little life still consists of “eat, sleep, poop”, so aside from his weird issues, there’s not much else to say about him…

The oldest of the chimney swifts had to be euthanized last week. He wasn’t gaining weight; in fact, he dropped down the point that he weighed less than the smallest and least-developed swift from the nest of five.  Rather than watch him continue to decline and become more and more emaciated and sluggish, I called it on him.

The other five seem to be stable. As I said last week, chimney swifts and LWR don’t have a good history, so I refuse to be more enthusiastic. We take it a feeding at a time: so far, so good.

The great crested flycatcher gained weight like crazy last week and is flying beautifully, so as soon as she (gender arbitrarily assigned) gains a few more grams and shows me she knows how to snap insects from the air, she’ll be good to go, as well. I really do adore these sweet little birds (I know—I say that about nearly every bird that comes into LWR…); their coloration is such understated elegance.

And on an otherwise quiet July 4th, I heard a distressed baby bird in my own back yard. After locating the bird, a nestling Carolina wren, I then found the nest in the tool shed. There were three other nestlings. I replaced the wandering baby, checked on them a couple of times before dark and topped them off with a little formula each time, and went to bed that night sure that the parents were caring for their babies.

The next morning, however, I found just three babies still in the nest, lethargic and dehydrated. One looked in pretty bad shape, in fact. So now I have three more Carolina wrens who’ve perked back up considerably since being rehydrated and getting regular feedings. I still have no clue what happened to the parents or the fourth nestling, but these three will have a chance at life, at any rate.

Who doesn’t enjoy watching birds bathe? I have an old bread rack in my back yard, the top of which has three small water dishes for birds to use as bird baths; they seem to prefer them to the larger, more traditional bird bath sitting next to the rack. As luck would have it, yesterday, three of the recent releases—the robin, goldfinch and tanager—and a house finch who may have been one of my earlier releases put on a good five-minute show, and I was able to tape the whole thing, which I’m sharing with you!