Remind me to keep my big mouth shut…

Remember that breezy comment last week that the previous week had been a bit “easier”? Yeah, well, the rehab gods and Murphy were listening and collaborated to make sure this past week was a killer.

So here’s a list of what LWR received last week alone, bringing the total intakes thus far for JUNE only to 65 (at about 150 for the year, I think)—an all-time high for a single month: 5 nestling mockers, 3 nestling barn swallows, adult cardinal, fledgling downy woodpecker, pre-fledgling brown thrasher, 1st-year red tailed hawk; adult Mississippi kite, downy screech owl, 2 unrelated fledgling mockers, downy Mississippi kite, 3 red bellied woodpecker nestlings, 5 nestling chimney swifts, another fledgling mocker, 3 unidentified hatchlings, and a nestling mocker.

Good Lord, I’m exhausted just typing that. Okay, that’s this week’s update. Gonna go nap between stuffing gaping beaks…

Seriously, it really was a killer week.

Okay, let’s start with releases: all four red bellies flew the coop, and as luck would have it, I was in the flight when the last one to leave took advantage of the escape hatch, so we have a very short video clip of that to augment the release pix.

The cardinal also flew the coop, as did the blue jay.

The adult red shoulder with the wing injury is now flying like a pro around the raptor flight, as is the juvy red shoulder.  The juvy has yet to kill his first live prey, but that should happen this week. I’m waiting to hear back from the man who brought me the adult, as I’m hoping to release the juvy with him. No photos of them this week; they were uncooperative snots all week long.

The mourning dove is still not growing back the feathers ripped out by the cat attack several months ago now, so I’m beginning to lose hope she’ll be releasable.

The great crested flycatcher also has some lingering issues from her probable spinal injury. Her balance is off, making perching an iffy proposition for her on small branches, and she’s managed to ruin her tail feathers spending so much time on the ground in the flight. Still, she’s a sweet bird and as long as she’s eating I’ll give her a while longer to see how things develop.

And there are currently so many mockers in the flight I feel like I’m breeding the noisome little rascals. I haven’t even attempted pix of them; they’re all doing the typical mocker fledgling thing of staying on the ground begging. Right under foot. Constantly. I no longer walk in the songbird flight; I shuffle to make sure I don’t inadvertently step on a mocker underfoot!

Early last week a nest of hatchling mockers came in. The rescuers had been enjoying watching the parents feed the babies, and then suddenly both parents disappeared.  The hatchlings did very well the first two days and then began a steep decline. As I mentioned last week, birds hatch with sterile guts and their parents’ saliva as they feed them insects provides the gut flora they need to be healthy. My guess is these babies didn’t get enough of that gut flora; they didn’t make it.

Brown thrashers this young shouldn’t be in the middle of the road. That’s how this little fellow ended up at LWR. He’s skinny, so apparently his parents were having trouble finding enough food. We’re working on that…

This first-year red tail was confiscated from people who’d apparently been trying to raise it as a pet. The right wing was injured, probably broken. Steve Hicks of Bubba and Friends transferred him to LWR for x-rays to assess the severity of the fracture, but weeks, possibly months, of a crappy diet, took its toll and the bird died overnight.

Another transfer for x-rays from Steve was this adult Mississippi kite, whose wing was too badly damaged to be repaired. He was euthanized.

It took three rehabbers and two volunteers to get this downy screech owl to LWR. He was dragged in by the finder’s cat, so God knows what happened to his sibs.  She couldn’t drive to meet me; I had too many birds to drive halfway across the state to meet her…We seemed to be at an impasse. Luckily, one of my volunteers suggested contacting a deer/small mammal rehabber couple in a town halfway between me and the screech finder. They in turn contacted one of their volunteers, who not only drove all the way to get the screech but then drove it all the way to me. God bless the network we have going here!

As you can see, he’s still very, very young, likely only a few days old when the cat dragged him from his nest. There will be no further photos of him until his eyes open; he stays in a dark “nest cavity” just like he would in the wild to avoid potential damage to his vision.

Hot on his heels came a downy Mississippi kite. The rescuer had been watching the nest and found it destroyed on the ground after a severe storm in her area. This little darling’s sib was killed in the fall.

Barn swallow nests tend to be fairly sturdy initially, but they will reuse them year after year, and time, weather and the added weight of “repair” mud and nest lining can cause a nest to fall. That’s what happened to these babies. Their rescuer found them and a dead sib in the remnants of the nest and tried to place it where the parents would return, but when her efforts—which were logical and well-thought-out—were unsuccessful, she called LWR.

In case you’ve never seen the inside of a barn swallow nest, here are a couple of photos, one with the babies still in place and one after they’d been moved to an easier-to-clean nest. Pretty neat how they use the feathers from larger birds to line their nests, huh? My parents’ barn swallows use cattle egret feathers; some of the ones on this nest look like mallard breast feathers!

And here we have the sweet little loves in “rehab nesting”—easier for us to keep clean!

After another storm, callers reported having unnested blue jays, which turned out to be three nestling red bellied woodpeckers instead! They had no clue where the nest cavity might have been. These are voracious, aggressive little rascals, nowhere near the calm temperament of the nest of red bellies just released. That makes me think food was scarce for these babies, although they weren’t skinny at all on intake.

When people call about unnested chimney swifts, I always try to encourage them to give the parents a chance to feed the babies at the bottom of the fireplace.  A rehabber’s mantra is “The parents can raise them better if there’s a chance for that to happen.”  In this case the finder not only removed the unnested babies from the chimney, he WASHED them, as they were “dirty”. Well, DUH. They nest in chimneys—not exactly a sterile surgical environment there. Adding insult to injury he placed them sopping wet on a bed of leaves, broke up a Vienna sausage around them, making no further attempt to feed them, and offered them water FOUR times in 24 hours.

First, NEVER give baby birds water or other fluids. It’s all too easy to get into their lungs and kill them almost immediately. (Hummers are the exception to the “don’t feed” rule. Offer them nectar, preferably homemade and not the nasty red stuff, ASAP.) Second, would you deprive your CHILD of food for 24 hours??? I mean, really…I was not a happy camper when I got these babies and honestly, the jury’s still out on the damage done by the lack of food and bath/wet nest. They looked good for a couple of days; today, not so much. But they’re still eating eagerly, so we’ll see…

They’re in with the two swifts who came in as 5g hatchlings, so now I have seven swifts. One of the drowned swifts has a bad case of wry neck—his neck twists at an unnatural angle, which makes perching difficult for him and will make flight impossible. I suspect this is a “nest injury”, but he’s got another few days before I call it, as I want to make sure it’s not just a jammed nerve from the fall.

These hatchlings were found on the ground by young children, who called their mother, who got them to me. These babies were tiny-tiny, as you can see, so again the worry about whether they’d gotten enough gut flora from their parents kicked in…And they did so well the day of intake, pooping like little troopers, gaping properly—all normal behavior. So I was actually kinda hopeful we might pull this off and have these babies live to be properly identified.

Unfortunately, all three died overnight…And yeah, it sucks when that happens, especially before you even have a chance to know what they are…Although I’m thinking possibly chickadees…

And this morning, this cat-attacked nestling mocker came in. He’s on meds, of course, because as you should know by now—Lord knows I preach it enough—cat saliva and the bacteria in their claws are toxic to birds. That may be the least of his worries, though, as the cat managed to rip off the leading portion of his right wing—part of where the flight feathers would grow in. We’ll just have to wait and see if he’ll ever be capable of flight…

Left wing

Right wing

Folks, please, PLEASE…KEEP YOUR CATS INDOORS. It’s safer for them, and it’s damn sure safer for our wildlife.