For the Birds

"Hey, Larissa, Barb’s feeding the baby squirrel. Want to come see?"

"Sure," I said, "Just let me finish up here."

As the other volunteer left, I finished laying out clean newspaper in the bottom of the cage. The magpie inside eyed me warily, its sleek feathers held tight against its body, and the toes of its bandaged leg quivering with anxiety.

After giving the bird a dish of fresh water, I stepped out of the Baby Bird Room and into the main warehouse of the Bird Treatment and Learning Center. I crossed the stained concrete floor and turned into the exam room, where Barb, our supervisor, was in the process of hand-feeding a little lump of brown fuzz.

Upon closer inspection, this turned out to be the baby squirrel, a roly-poly, buck-toothed critter that was drinking formula greedily from a syringe. The baby’s eyelids began to droop as the sucking grew slower, until she fell asleep entirely and was gently placed back in her nest of towels and tissues in a shoebox.

Just because we’re called the Bird Treatment and Learning Center doesn’t mean we only treat birds. We’ve gotten dozens of squirrels and other rodents over the years, even a bat or two. But, the vast majority of our patients are of the avian persuasion. Every day there’s something new. We get everything from Bald Eagles to chickadees, rare eiders to common seagulls, Great Horned Owls to the occasional lost parakeet. They come in at all ages—babies fallen from the nest, fledglings who just can’t get airborne, adults with infected wounds or broken limbs. All are taken, all are treated, and we do our best to see that as many as possible live to be released back into the wild.

The part I love best about volunteering at the clinic is baby bird season. This happens sometime between May and July, when we go from having our winter population, where fewer than half the cages are in use, to having every available space filled and extra baskets stacked two or three high in the Baby Bird Room.

I usually do baby duty, cleaning out the makeshift margarine-tub and Kleenex nests and making formula. The homemade baby diet we use is an interesting concoction of monkey biscuits, dog chow, baby food, bone meal, and all sorts of other odd things, puréed into a thick brown slurry that tempts even the most finicky of babies.

As I uncover each baby basket, several bald heads shoot up, wide mouths gaping atop their spindly necks, each little chick cheeping, "Me first! Me first!", while trying to crowd his or her nestmates out of the way. I feed them one at a time, keeping the syringe to the sides of their beaks to make sure they don’t get any formula into their delicate lungs. Once each little bird gets his fill, he cuddles down amongst his brothers and sisters, crop bulging and button eyes shut, and takes a little siesta. This peace might last twenty minutes, ten if the chicks are swallows, and then the whole routine starts again.

Not all babies need this sort of constant care, though. Birds like cygnets and goslings are precocial (hatching covered in down and ready to fend for themselves), and only need to be fed commercial game fowl granules a few times a day. However, they make up for this low level of maintenance by being exceedingly messy. I am not surprised when I come back ten minutes after cleaning a duckling box only to find the water dish upturned, duck feed scattered everywhere, and a brood of filthy little fluffballs who look very proud of themselves.

Baby cranes also require minimal care in regards to feeding, but tend to be, how shall I put this? More emotional than other species. One Sandhill Crane that was brought in was already nearly three feet tall, but he really missed his mommy. We first heard the sound just a short while after he was admitted. It was a soft "peeep….peeep….peeep…." The crane’s voice was no louder than a whisper, but it had a shrill, penetrating quality that made it audible throughout the entire building. At first it was cute, being so plaintive and pitiful. But, after three hours of constant calling, it began to get on everybody’s nerves. We gave the chick a plate of crane formula, hoping it would shut him up. He ate heartily, but didn’t break the rhythm of his cries even once, managing to alternate between swallowing and chirping. Soon he had perfected his technique, getting into the sequence of "peep—gulp—peep—gulp," until he’d cleaned his plate. With a full crop and a soft towel in the corner, the crane settled down for a nap. We all hoped that this would be the end, or at least a break, from the metronomic calls. We were wrong. As the chick dozed off, he went into automatic, and continued his plaintive peeping throughout his slumber. In fact, I don’t know if he ever stopped. We volunteers endured three weeks of his constant cries before we had him shipped off to his new home at the Oregon Zoo.

Another baby who sticks in my mind was a robin, or perhaps a Variegated Thrush. You can never tell the difference until they grow all their feathers. This bird was, to put it mildly, a glutton. I would go through several good-sized syringes at every feeding with him, while he guzzled the formula until his crop looked as though it would burst. At this point, he would stop eating and give the impression of smacking his lips. Then, he’d seem to come to a decision, and, mouth agape, beg for another ten cc’s of formula.

At the clinic, we have several slang terms for different injuries that we write on new birds’ charts, like "cat-got," meaning that the bird was attacked by a cat. We’ve had dog-got and even kid-got birds many times in the past, but as far as I can remember, only one bunny-got. A little orphaned duckling was being taken care of by a well-meaning family who had several pet rabbits. Apparently, one day, as the duckling was out on the lawn with the rabbits, one of the bunnies came over and bit the front half of his bill clean off. He was taken to the clinic, where volunteers shook their heads at the story of his misfortune. He was placed in one of the large chicken-wire cages in the Baby Bird Room, and we invented a special mushy duckling diet that could be eaten with a minimum of bill. The fluffy little duckling soon became a favorite throughout the clinic, being friendly, inquisitive, and downright cute. His injury left his little pink tongue permanently sticking out the front of his beak, and the tufts of down and pinfeathers that covered his plump body gave him a somewhat frazzled look. As he grew, his bill elongated somewhat, so that he was left with only the very tip of his tongue poking out. By the time he was fully fledged, he was eating as well as any duck, despite his lack of bill, and was released back into the wild, hopefully very far away from any rabbits.

Not all my memories of baby birds are fond, though. A baby Junco I was asked to take care of began to sicken and became lethargic soon after she was brought in. I couldn’t find anything wrong with her until, for some strange reason, I looked under her left wing. There I saw the trouble: a huge, taut air bubble beneath the bald skin of the underwing. I had no idea what the bubble was, and the baby died about a half our later. I read some months afterward that it was caused by a burst air sac. I felt awful, even worse than I had when the baby died, because now I knew there was a simple procedure that could have saved her life. If only I had known.

Working at any animal rescue is a mixed blessing. You get to see the babies you’ve cared for grow up and leave the nest, and see older ones with mended wings take their first few strokes, then fly as gracefully as any in the flock. But with these joys come the heartbreaks, when you see a tiny live thing come in, beyond hope, to hold it in your hands, knowing that there is nothing you can do, and that it will die in pain. That is when you start to see animal euthanasia as an option. Sometimes the kindest one. It is one of the hardest things to do, deciding how a creature will die. Will it suffer and flail, until its heart finally shuts down? Or will it gasp for air, then drift off into a sleep from which it will never wake? Should you let it die on its own, or be the one to do the killing? It has never been my place to choose, and I hope that it never will.

Nearly as hard as dealing with euthanasia is seeing all of the injuries and deaths caused by careless people. Most of these are gunshot wounds, from hunters’ stray (or not-so-stray) bullets or kids’ BB-guns. Some of the deaths are clean, a quick, painless cessation of life that turns a once majestic hawk or eagle into a cold, stiff mass of feathers on the ground. Other deaths are not so clean, leaving their victims with permanent malformations or loss of flight. One such incident is permanently lodged in my brain. A young Bald Eagle, freshly fledged, had been shot in the wing and had fallen from the nest. He had lain there on the ground for several days before someone found him and brought him to the clinic. By then he was severely emaciated, his breastbone jutting like a knife underneath his thin skin. But that was nothing compared to his wound. It had reached a degree of festering and decay seldom seen in a live animal. The flesh was swollen, black and oozing, stinking of gangrene, and writhing with hundreds of tiny white maggots. Volunteers cleaned and dressed the wound as best they could, cutting away the rotting, maggoty flesh around the bullet hole, and giving the eaglet a shot of Baytril, a potent antibiotic. The bird was slowly and painfully nursed back to health and built up to a good weight, but his wing never fully healed, and he was never able to fly again.

Over the years, I’ve seen dozens of fragile-looking finches and flycatchers come in to the clinic, losing balance and eyes popping from their impacts with windows. I do the best I can, feeding them an electrolyte solution drop by tiny drop, medicating them with Coke&Dex (a combination of caffeine and steroids), trying to tempt them with bits of food. And all the while I watch them drift away, bit by bit, until I uncover the basket only to find a stiff, cold body, or an empty cage with a final mark on the chart beside it. Though things often seem hopeless, every so often the birds begin to come around. They drink the solution with increasing strength, taking bits of mealworm or cornbread from the tweezers. Their eyes sink back to their normal level as the brain swelling subsides, and they begin to take their first awkward steps out of their terrycloth nests. Soon they are hopping, perching, flitting from branch to branch, and you can’t help but feel a warm glow, like you’ve accomplished something beyond the mere mundane tasks of feeding and watering. You’ve saved a life. It’s a feeling that makes you rich, with a joy brighter than the sheen of gold. And that’s all the payment I could ever want.

Creative Writing Contest

2001 winners