Finally, after a long, hard winter, I can finally say… IT’S BABY BIRD SEASON!
All winter we had been caring for grown, injured animals: hawks, ducks, geese, mourning doves, skunks, possums, a fox, even a salamander that Mark and I released in Golden Gate park one rainy night. It was sweet and rewarding, but slow.
We took the extra time to clean out the motors of the incubators, and to organize and reorder supplies. We chatted. Sometimes we left early.
Then baby squirrel season hit and I got to foster squirrels again. And then that slowed down and we kept waiting for baby bird season to hit. Each Wednesday, I’d drive in, wondering. The end of March passed… nothing. First week of April… nothing.
(My dad says according to the lunar calendar, spring starts late this year — which makes me wonder who created that forecast.)
Then finally last Wednesday, I walk into the wildlife department to the eeeps of hungry baby birds.
Finches, and chickadees, and mockingbirds, oh my!
Once again, I am struck with awe and gratitude: — to the SPCA for trusting us with the birds (I get to feed and pick up that little fuzzball of a creature? You’re not afraid I’m going to drop it, crush it, or accidentally break some part of its fragile fragile being?)
– and to the birds themselves…who (mostly) decide to take it all in stride and accept food and care from these giant featherless monsters. Not only accept, but embrace — putting on a show for us that only momma and poppa birds normally get to see.
And so, my point is, we have birds! And I’d like to turn for a second to a particular subset I was working with on Wednesday…. the ducklings.
We had a crowd of ducklings in one of our bigger incubators and I got to take care of them. A bit of information about ducklings for the curious reader:
1. They’re messy! Some baby birds instinctively keep their poop away from themselves, and their food and water. Other birds seem to go out of their way to make a mess. Ducklings, in captivity anyway, make a mess. To be fair, they have only about 3 square feet of space for all eight of them, so there’s eight times the poop and eight times the quackers going at their duckmash. And also… they’re ducklings — so every once in a while, they wake up and run around the place, stomping on food, in their water, over their poop, dirtying the last clean bit of their enclosure, then settling down again.
I don’t know if they are collectively running from some dream-predator, if the alpha-duckling chases the others to dominate them, or if they just have the twitch to stretch their legs and run every once in a while, but run in circles they do. It is a hoot.
2. They can drown. Can you believe it? I mean, they’re born, mom nudges them into the water, they float and they can swim — their little paddlers move them through with water with amazing speed and dexterity. But you have to be careful not to put too much water in their enclosure for drinking or they might drown. Google it.
So I was given complex instructions for how to make an optimal amount of water available for drinking — not drowning.
3. You can’t get them wet.
Right…. Wait, what?!
So one of the earlier volunteers hadn’t quite understood the drowning bit, so they left a bowl of shallow water without the safeguards and though thankfully no drowning occurred, the little guys, in their regular spasms of activity, splashed water all over and got their previously-dry food all over themselves. Imagine ducklings after a food fight. Several of them had sections of matted down feathers covered in food.
This is bad. Every baby bird needs to be kept clean so their feathers grow out properly. So I report this and they groan and tell me what happened and ask me to clean it off best I could without getting them wet.
Now, if this were a dog, I’d put them in the tub, run some warm water over the dirty parts, and be done in a moment. If it were my cat, I’d have a bowl of water nearby and try some judicious dunking and sponging of the spot. With tiny, fragile baby song birds, I know to wet a paper towel with warm water and dampen just the feathers in question — avoiding getting the bird wet.
I have to tell you, ducklings are not fragile. Their bones are not one mm wide and hollow, like songbirds. When you pick up a duckling, she is warm and fuzzy and solid — she weighs what you think she’d weigh.
She squirms and pecks at you with its sturdy (rounded) beak — and her feet go into a run as soon as you pick her up, just in case you loosen your hold. Cute, fuzzy, and smart — just like I like ‘em.
So though it was not a surprise to be told to avoid getting them wet, I still had to mention it here: Never dunk a duckling under the faucet. It will get wet and can die of hypothermia — even in a warm incubator. (And I’m pretty sure dishsoap is out of the question!)
I gather now that their waterproofing keeps them from getting wet in the outside world where people aren’t trying to mess with them. Which makes sense, since a wet duck would probably not float. I just never thought about it before.
(If I jumped into a pond on top of my REI “waterproof” jacket would I float? I think not.)
And finally…
4. If you ever have orphaned ducklings, give them a featherduster.
It is a far-cry from a real momma duck, but they love them. They nestle and sleep under them. And when you open an enclosure with ducklings, they race around and hide behind them.
The flip side is: baby ducklings get freaked out and lonely. Ducklings are born in a crowd, grow up in a crowd, and they are mothered well. A solo duckling, one that gets separated from its siblings and brought into the SPCA, does not always make it. We give it exactly what we give a crowd of ducklings — warmth, food, water, featherduster. Even little mirrors in the hopes he thinks it’s a sister. But without the physical comfort of another duck-being, he just doesn’t have the same will to eat and live.
Sad, I know. But it is a reminder that many creatures are not meant to be alone. We need each other. Actually need — for our physical well being.
But luckily, the crowd of orphaned ducks seems to be doing well with their two featherdusters and rotating shifts of caring humans to take care of them.
A day or two later, I wandered back to Stowe Lake for some exercise, with no intention of tracking down anything in particular. And as I stepped up to the lake, my first sight was this…. Duck family!
And just a quarter turn down the lake, the geese were not to be outdone:
Right in front of me was this little guy. He is not dead, he is not blind — he’s just so tuckered out he cannot keep his eyes open. The white you see is the inner eyelid that keeps his eye moist:
How, you might ask, does a gosling safely drowse like that in the middle of a park, not three feet from a bench and well-traveled walkway?
Fierce parents standing guard.
I was heartened to see not two, but four adult geese watching over this crowd of hapless fuzzballs — confirming my theory of last spring.
