The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

We apologize to the birds

I volunteer at a wildlife rescue center, one which specializes in aquatic birds. Sometimes volunteers and staff apologize to the birds.

 

What's that you have in your hand? Oh, a camera? Are you sure? It can't take temperatures, can it?

 

 

A Red-throated Loon is brought in and has an intake exam, in which we try to figure out what is wrong with the bird. What made this wild creature so ill or hurt that it fell into human hands? What are its problems? Are they things we can fix?

 

We handle it, pull its legs out and study its feet, extend its wings and fold them up again, stare into its desperate face with our huge monster faces. We draw blood from one foot. We take its temperature, and it flinches as the thermometer goes into its cloaca. “I know. I'm sorry,” murmurs the person inserting the thermometer.

Adult Red-throated Loon, suspicious of photographer. Chicks in background show a fish what a loon can do when it's not being pestered.

 

 

We'll learn more about his condition when we get the results from centrifuging his blood. We can already tell the bird is skinny and cold. His temperature, which would be a fever for a human, is low for a bird. We keep an eye on his temperature, and end up moving him into a warm intensive care room.

 

These are wild birds, and our practice is not to talk to them, and to minimize talking around them. We work quietly. But occasionally apologies slip out.

 

You don't put any tubes down my throat and I won't put any beaks in your eye. Deal?

A lot of Western Grebes have been brought in lately. An indignant grebe has just been examined, and is being returned to a big pool where he can swim around with other grebes. He's wrapped in a towel. Right before we put him back in the pool, we'll give him some medicine, and a feeding through a tube, because he's still too thin, and doesn't really have the hang of eating dead fish out of the basket on the side of the pool. He doesn't want the tube down his throat, and we don't blame him. He struggles. “Calm down,” the other volunteer tells him. As he jerks his head, she says quietly, “I don't like it either. I apologize.”

A rude gesture? I don't know why you would assume that.

 

 

Some of the people who work here have pet birds at home. Those birds understand human tones of voice. Not these wild ones. Soothing voices don't soothe these guys. In their natural lives, they're never around terrestrial mammals. They don't have much intuition about our noises.

 

So why do we apologize to them? It's not to help them. They don't understand the words, or the tone.

 

We say we're sorry, and we go right on doing it. We're sorry in the sense that we don't want to hurt and frighten them. We regret the necessity, but we do think it's necessary. Taking the loon's temperature gives us information that's likely to save its life. Tube-feeding the grebe will keep it alive until it's well enough to eat on its own. They'll both go free when they're healthy enough to survive.

 

The little sorries just slip out. Maybe we're apologizing for our own sakes, to stay aware of where we are on the long slick slope of our concern for them. On one end of the slope we would take over their lives, make them into pets or livestock or exhibits. Unwild. On the other end we'd treat wild animals as wholly other, wholly responsible for their own welfare – we'd let them die, or at best, “put them out of their misery.”

 

One reason we don't is that wild creatures no longer live in a world that humans haven't affected drastically. We've changed their habitats: we've shrunk, depleted, invaded, and tainted those places. Humans have taken away some of the resources wild animals use to support themselves. This wildlife rescue center came to be, and specializes in aquatic birds, because of oil spills.

 

So we've placed ourselves somewhere in the middle, neither disclaiming responsibility nor trying to manage them like unruly pets. We work at not going too far toward either extreme. Maybe saying sorry helps us keep that balance.

 

The loon told me about you. Sicko.

Here's a Red-necked Grebe, with wounds on its feet. For these birds, foot injuries are dangerous. Like bedsores, they can rapidly turn ugly, grow, spread infection through the body's system, and kill. The birds need to have decent feet before we let them go.

 

 

At night, in winter storms, some birds try to land on rain-slick surfaces that look like water to them – roads, roofs, or pavement. They may break bones or tear up their feet. Maybe that happened to this grebe. Its feet are starting to heal, and to help the process along we have to debride the wounds. That means someone has to take (sterilized) retractors and pick dead tissue out of the site. Sometimes it hurts the bird.

 

The small grebe twitches, tries to jerk its foot away. Softly, the caregiver says, “I know. Sorry, buddy.”

 

They love their Halloween costumes so much I didn't have the heart to make them change. They're warrior ninja grebes and I have to warn you: I have NO CONTROL over them.

 

 

 

Note: This post is the first ever to be cross-posted on SorryWatch and The Nature of the Beast.

 

My possum and her chicken

Young and charming.

A long time ago, I had some baby possums. Their mother had been killed by a car while crossing the road with her children on her back. A teacher who found them gave the survivors to me. (At the time there were no wildlife rescue centers in the area.) Fortunately, they were more or less weaned. I carried them around in my shirt pockets.

They were lovely then. They had soft silver fur with black rings around their eyes. They had little white-furred hands, and if you gave them a slice of apple they would sit on their haunches, hold it in their hands, and eat it the way people in cartoons eat slices of watermelon. They had prehensile tails, with a little soft white fur on them, and if you forced them to, they would hang from your finger by their tails. They loved to clamber about on your body, checking out your pockets.

Visibility: poor.

Although they trusted me, they showed no signs of loving me or anyone. As they got bigger, their beautiful silver fur grew coarse, which is why you so seldom see possum-fur coats. Their tails coarsened, too, scaly and ratlike. Their 50 teeth became more worrisome to see, although they never bit a person.

While under one of my relatives' care, one of them, Stong, escaped. He trashed a neighbor's cat which foolishly attacked him, and went on his merry way. The other one, Buckley, went to college with me. He learned but little.

Male possums can raise and lower their (large) testicles at will, and it was amusing to watch Buckley waddling over rough terrain, raising his testicles over obstacles. He had a full suite of instincts and was astoundingly good at locating ancient rotten fruit, baby robins in the shrubbery, and other toothsome snacks. He would hiss when I took these things away from him, but not bite. Despite these skills, he feared the forest and would climb my leg in a panic if he thought I was leaving him. If I tried to stroke him, he would flatten his back to avoid my touch. (Thus if you tried to stroke him while he was crossing a testicle-snagging obstacle, he would become quite flat.) He didn't like to be scratched either. He didn't care for dogs and cats. He enjoyed eating, sleeping, and sniffing things.

 In addition to Buckley, I took my dog and cat to college (I lived off-campus). Then there was the chicken, whose name I have forgotten, let us say Dave.  

 

An adult possum, stealing grapes, unrepentant.  

My friend Laurel was taking embryology. In the lab there was an incubator full of fertilized chicken eggs developing into chickens, commercial Leghorn crosses. Periodically the class would dissect a few to see how the embryos developed. Some never got dissected and hatched into dear little fuzzy chicks. The professor jovially offered to put them down, but several students said no! they would adopt the fluffballs. Laurel, who lived in a triple, took one. Soon it was time to go home for the summer. Dave was no longer fuzzy – he was starting to get unattractive pinfeathers. Laurel was doubtful that border officials would let her take Dave to her family home in Mexico City, and certain that they would not allow him back across the border.

 So since I had a dog and a cat and a possum and lived in the US and was driving home, would I take Dave? Okay. Laurel delivered him to me, with his box, and his chicken feed, and his water dish.

I took him home and all was well. Not that my father was pleased with this addition. At night, I covered Dave's box with a larger inverted box, so he would sleep in darkness serene.

One morning I got up and began to tend the livestock. The dog and cat went out. I let Buckley out to trundle around the room sniffing things. Waddle, sniff, peer, sniff, waddle. I lifted up the top box so Dave would know the sun had risen. But unbeknownst to me, Dave had leapt out of his box and was in the space between the outside of his box and the covering box. When I lifted the covering box Dave dashed brainlessly across the floor and Buckley whirled at the speed of light CLOMP and sank his teeth into Dave's neck, killing him instantly. He hissed when I took Dave away from him.

I felt awful. I let my possum kill Laurel's beloved Dave! (At least I didn't let him eat Dave.) How would I tell her? I didn't have her number in Mexico, so I put it off.

In the fall I was dreading having to tell Laurel. I didn't go looking for her. Finally I saw her coming toward me in the quad. I had to face her. She was bubbling with information about her summer, her new dorm, classes. I listened and said little, racked with misery. Finally I said, "You know your chicken you gave me to -- "

"Do you still have him?"

"No, I'm really really sorry -- "

"Oh thank God! I was dreading having to tell my roommate I had a chicken!"

I did tell her what happened, but she didn't really care, for the love of Dave had receded in his absence. Well damn. I could have let Buckley eat his catch.

 

 

Killdeer escape?

 

I had been trusted with the task of feeding the killdeer  chicks at the wildlife center. I put trays of food in the shorebird pen. Elaborate trays of shorebird dainties: freshly-thawed tiny invertebrates, insects, duckweed. I was careful to make sure no killdeer got out. It didn't seem hard, since the appalling sight of a human made them run, crouch, and freeze.  

 

But as I was walking back toward the main building, I heard a killdeer overhead. Nowhere near the shorebird pen. Now I was the one who froze.

 

Did I let one out? Oh no, did I forget to latch the door? Did they all get out? Oh no no no.

 

...sounds more like an adult killdeer – it's loud. And close.

 

Oh. 

 

*#^&+$%.

 

A mockingbird was atop a high pole, running through his imitations. Starting with some killdeer calls.

Giving me a pang of guilty fear. As if I need any more of those.

 

If he'd noticed, I'm sure he would have thought it was funny. He would do it again. Which is why it's important to stay stone-faced around mockers. Which you probably know. Because you went to grade school too.

Stowaway bird

Red-tailed tropicbirds are aces of tropical Pacific skies. They're big white birds with striking black eye markings. Each has two ridiculously long red tail feathers in the midst of its normal white tail feathers (thus Phaethon rubricauda). They catch fish by plunging into the sea from a height and grabbing them. Also squid.

The tropicbird is one of those seabirds that usually doesn't bother with land. They fly or rest on the water. But that doesn't work when a bird is in that awkward egg stage, so they breed on islands. They like to nest colonially, let's say on a nice coral atoll, tucked under a bush, or in a niche between hunks of coral.

Sometimes, apparently, a bird looking for a nice flat atoll lands on the nice flat deck of a ship, and tucks itself into a niche between cargo containers, and sits there peaceably waiting for the rest of the gang to show up, unfussed that the island it has selected is moving, like Spidermonkey Island in The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle.

Recently a tropicbird was found sitting zazen on a Korean cargo ship. When the ship arrived in southern California, the bird was brought to International Bird Rescue's San Pedro center, where she was found to be in good health. On a recent visit, I saw her there, resting on a mesh haul-out in a small private pool. She looked at us cheerfully. It seems that tropicbirds are among the island birds that have no fear of land animals such as humans.

Her pool was too small for plunge-feeding. IBR's blog has video of the tropicbird being fed fish. “Ah, they are grabbing my head. Yes, they are prying open my bill and inserting a fish. Ooh, there's a fish in my bill. Sweet.” The tropicbird swallows, sometimes with a little throat massage to urge the fish along, and sits placidly. It does not occur to her to reach a few inches forward and take another fish. That's not how she rolls.

Tropicbirds are aerialists but not distance fliers, so after tests came up negative for contagious diseases, and USFWS permission was received, the bird was put on a plane to Hawaii and then on another to Midway Island. There they put her in the water and off she flew.

Red-tailed tropicbirds breed on Midway, so with any luck she'll find a mate, and a nest site that doesn't shift coordinates, and will not depend on the kindness of Korean sailors, bird rescuers, and government agencies. Island tameness can be a disastrous feature for wild animals, but in this bird's case it worked out nicely.

Raven trading post

Bald Eagles are the specialty of the Alaska Raptor Center, in Sitka. It's an animal hospital in a forest. They treat 100-200 eagles a year, as well as other species. Many are treated and set free. Others have problems that mean they can't make it as wild birds any more. These generally go to zoos or become Ed Birds – used in educational programs of various kinds.

 

Some of the Ed Birds are in outdoor aviaries. When I visited this summer, one of the Ed Eagles, Volta, on a perch outdoors, became agitated when we passed by. My guide speculated that Volta remembered me unkindly from a previous visit.  (Although I am a friend to all animals, on that visit I was taking a course in eagle rehab, which involves doing a number of things that might displease a bird – captures, pedicures, beakicures, etc.) But it turned out that Volta was agitated about a wild eagle flying around the aviaries.

 

We moved on to view Gilly, an Ed Raven. Gilly came to the center in 1997, as Gilbert, a youth of three months with an elbow so shattered by a gunshot as to rule out wild life. Gilbert became an Ed Bird and at some point, I suppose, was revealed to be female. Gilly was in an outdoor aviary and gave us a haughty uninterested glance. She has a more complex life than one might guess an Ed Raven would have. She was once housed with two other ravens, but they are a couple, who demonstrated loyalty to each other by harassing Gilly, so she was given her own space.

 

Gilly has a wild friend, Romeo. He visits her frequently, so the Raptor Center thoughtfully put an extra-long perch in her aviary, which projects out through the wiring. Romeo can perch on the outside, and Gilly can perch on the inside, and they can sidle up to each other.

 

I do not know if Romeo and Gilly are romantically interested in each other. Ravens are fond of shiny things, and Romeo brings Gilly shiny things, and passes them to her through the wire. Gilly accepts them and passes Romeo bits of her food. She's no fool – she doesn't give him her salmon or her meat. She gives him vegetables and popcorn. Maybe she's concerned about his weight.

 

They won't do this if you're standing right there. But if you're a few aviaries away, you can look through several wire walls and see Romeo arrive and the subsequent exchanges. I long for the Raptor Center to set up a RavenSwapCam.  

 

It may be love, it may be commerce, or it may be a happy mix of the two. In any case it shows the complexity of ravens.

 

 

We love our stinky kids

The story about the smelly babies isn't true. Birds don't reject their nestlings if people have handled them and gotten human scent all over them. Most birds can't smell much, anyway. (But don't say this around a vulture. Or a kiwi. Or a fulmar.)

 I don't know how this story got started, but I certainly heard it  when I was a kid. Somehow it had an appalling plausibility –  our very touch turns innocent babies to pariahs.

(Not the actual baby robins I'm talking about.)

Fortunately for three small birds I met recently, it's nonsense. These robin nestlings fell out of their nest on a windy morning. They hit the sidewalk uninjured, and a kind passer-by picked them up (intelligently noting the address) and took them to the nearest animal shelter. The shelter had the expertise, and the feeding formula, to take care of the young birds. But they knew the best upbringing for robins comes from robins. They had eight million things to do besides feeding screaming baby robins every 20 minutes. A wildlife rescue organization would try to get the robins back to their parents.

 I'd been told that the best thing to do for uninjured baby birds is to get them back up in their nest, or near their nest, or at least up in the branches of their tree out of cat-reach, and let their parents take care of them. I believed it. But I had never done it. (What if it were as false as the human-stink story?)

We inspected the site. With the address, we could identify the home tree, but it was leafy and no nest could be seen. Besides, that nest was clearly a slipshod dealio that baby robins fell out of in a high wind, a flimsy sieve, a deathtrap. We'd have to rig up a substitute. The worrying part was that there didn't seem to be any robins there. The parents were supposed to be hanging around calling for their children. But no. No one was around but blackbirds. By this time the babies had been away most of the day. Had the parents given up? 

 We thought we'd try anyway, so we went to get the chicks. They were past the naked blob stage, into the partially-feathered lump stage. They were starting to have robin faces. Maybe a week from fledging, they were correctly-behaved bird children. They alternated between gaping and screeching, twittering softly, and squatting silent and motionless like little lumps of ugly. The shelter gave them a feeding, which would last them in case their parents never returned and we had to bring them back.

Back at the tree, we scanned for robins. Nothing. Using a ladder, we wired a plastic tub into the branches, making sure it wouldn't tip in the wind like certain shoddy constructions. We'd made drainage holes so liquid couldn't collect in it. That was the nest. The shelter staff had made a nice lining with pine needles and bits of a feather duster. While the wiring took place, the nestlings hunkered low inside, pretending not to exist.  

 We took the ladder away and looked around. No robins. We peered around with binoculars. Nothing but blackbirds. We crossed the street and sat on a bench and looked. No robins. So we got in the car and drove away, but then came back, and parked across the street, taking advantage of robins' inability to read license plates or tell a Delorean from a Hupmobile. We stayed in the car. Blackbirds flew over the tree, perched on a wire above the tree, and squeaked at other blackbirds, but there were no robins.  

 Until suddenly there was a silent robin in the tree next to the nest tree. With something in its bill. It silently dived into the nest tree. It had been 16 minutes since we walked away from the tree.

To be sure it was true, we walked down the other side of the street, crossed, and casually walked under the tree, glancing up for just a second as we did. An adult robin was perched – silently – two feet from the nest tub.

 It makes sense that parent birds would approach the nest without making giveaway sounds, but I'm still amazed that they so quickly detected that their kids were back (in a nearby location, with a new pre-fab house) and resumed food deliveries.

 Mostly, I'm delighted that they overlooked the fact that the kids must have reeked of rescuer stink.

 

Follow-up:

I went by the nest tree about two weeks after we put it up. Since the young robins had been about a week from fledging, I wasn't worried about disturbing things. Everything was the same. The nest was still up there, if you looked, and no robins were in sight. I was relieved that the plastic nest hadn't been distubed.

Going back later to remove the nest, I saw that the tree had been heavily pruned since the last visit. It was no longer a thickly-leaved place where you could hide a nest. Whoever had pruned the tree had carefully left the plastic nest. It was a touching gesture, although the nest was now too exposed to be safe. I was very glad that the pruning had happened after the babies had fledged. I took the nest down and examined the lining. It appeared well used.

Babies are often brought into rescue centers when trees being pruned or felled turn out to have nests -- baby birds, squirrel pups, dragonets.* It's better to prune out of nesting season.

Early this morning, I went back to look for young robins, and saw this squirt in the little park across the street. The spots on the feathers show that this bird fledged this year and hasn't gone through the preformative molt yet -- that it's just a child.

It could be some other robins' child, but it's the right age and the right place to be one of the three rescued fledglings.

 

(*Okay, probably not dragonets.)

 

Mystery pigeon

I was reading Indian Summer, by Thomas Jefferson Mayfield, an account of the years Mayfield was raised among the Choinumne Indians of California.

 It's an interesting account, which includes a description of an ingenious traditional method of pigeon hunting. This involved building a blind from which one could snare pigeons with thin nooses. It had to be built in the right place, where pigeons would come to drink at dawn. “They liked to water at a spring or water hole near tall trees, especially pines. They... all tried to water at the same hole,” Mayfield wrote. “They would light in such numbers that sometimes they would strip the limbs from the trees. It would take these large flights from one to three hours to water. When they left a water hole, it was as badly drained and trampled as though a thousand sheep had watered there.”

That sounded oddly familiar. Huge destructive flocks of pigeons breaking branches off trees with the weight of their numbers? I'd heard that before – but it was always about passenger pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius).

“When they alighted on the trees their weight was so heavy that not only big limbs and branches of the size of a man's thigh were broken straight off, but less firmly rooted trees broke down completely under the load,” wrote Pehr Kalm, in 1759, of the “marvelous multitudes” of passenger pigeons.

I had learned this in a 1911 issue of The Auk, the journal of the American Ornithologist's Union. (Which I was reading at the exceedingly cool Prelinger library, where they have amazing old journals as well as books.) This sad issue was dedicated to the passenger pigeon, describing a bird that seemed to be extinct in the wild (and would soon be extinct in captivity) – but holding out the hope that there might be a few left.

The AOU had offered rewards for passenger pigeon nests – and been deluged with mourning dove nests. “It now looks as if the worst fears of the American naturalists... [are] confirmed, and that we are 'in at the death' of the finest race of pigeons the world has produced,” wrote C. F. Hodge.

Wallace Craig described the calls of passenger pigeons as he remembered them, in hopes that this might help people find survivors. “[I]f you tell a boy to look for a bird of the same general appearance as the Mourning Dove but larger, he will be sure to mistake some large-appearing Mourning Dove for the Passenger Pigeon. But tell him to look for a pigeon that shrieks and chatters and clucks instead of cooing, and the boy will be less likely to make a mistake.” Among other calls, Craig describes the keck, the
kah-of-excitement, and the keeho. He provides musical notation for pigeons he observed in an aviary, including  the notes given by the male “when just about to tickle female's head.” The last passenger pigeon died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo. Martha, she was called.

Wait, so what did Mayfield see? Passenger pigeons ranged North American forests east of the Rockies. They were never in California. Mayfield just called the birds the Choinumne hunted “pigeons.” I think these were band-tailed pigeons (Patagioenas fasciata), birds which are hunted in California to this day. They live in forests west of the Rockies. 

Mourning doves also occur in California – and across the continent – and are also hunted. But they prefer open and semi-open country. I've never heard of their flocks breaking branches.

I wondered if band-tailed pigeons were a west-of-the-Rockies version of that east-of-the-rockies bird, the passenger pigeon. Putting the names of both pigeons into a search engine, I saw that a brand-new study of pigeon and dove DNA had been published in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. Contrary to the previous belief that the passenger pigeon's closest relative is the mourning dove (pointy-tailed, both of them), the study found that the band-tailed pigeon is the closest relative.

Kevin Johnson, one of the authors of the study, makes the point that a band-tail is not super-closely related to a passenger pigeon. "This bird is pretty diverged from its nearest relatives, meaning it had a unique place in the world. It represented a unique lineage that's now gone," he told Science Daily.

Well, obviously. A band-tail doesn't even have a pointy tail. Nevertheless, this is the closest thing we have left to a passenger pigeon and I plan to cherish the species on that basis.

It seems I am not the only one who find band-tails a workable substitute for passenger pigeons. Passenger pigeons were afflicted with a species of bird louse. Because the species was described only in 1937 (by  Malcomson – I shall call it Malcomson's bird louse) and because it was believed these lice had lost their last home when Martha died in 1914, they were called Columbicola extinctus. But guess who else suffers from Malcomson's very same bird louse? Yes! Band-tails do.

It so happens that I had a band-tailed pigeon once, long ago. I found him on a lawn under some trees, too young to fly. I had no idea what to do to help him except take him home and feed him and name him Bertrand Russell.

(I now know that the best thing I could have done was to put him back up in the trees, even if I had to tie a shoebox to a branch for him to squat in, and then leave him alone. That way he would be out of the reach of ground predators, like dogs and cats. His parents would have come and fed him and said encouraging things to him as soon as I left. I wish I had known to do that. I still feel okay about naming him.)

I took good care of Bertrand Russell. He was old enough to know that he was a pigeon and I was not. Though he accepted food from my hand, he didn't like being around humans and that included me. He resented the whole deal. He perched on a high shelf on top of Walker's Mammals of the World (the binding still shows the traces) and thought bitter thoughts.

 

I raised Bertrand Russell until he was feathered out and could fly. I released him in good band-tailed pigeon habitat, a forested area where birders regularly saw band-tails, but it was an abrupt transition for him, what they call a “hard release.” I still feel bad that it was the best I could do.

In 1834, the traveller Thomas L. McKenney was crossing Lake Superior in a storm when a desperate storm-tossed passenger pigeon landed on his boat. He prevented the boatmen from killing it, fed it water and crackers, put it in a mocock (a birchbark basket), and took it home. “[T]hough only a pigeon, it came to me in distress, and if it be its pleasure, we will never part.” He named it Me-me. “It knows its name, and will come when called.” Boy, that doesn't sound like Bertrand.

I never saw bird lice on Bertrand Russell, missing a chance to meet a species back from extinction. But I saw Bertrand himself, a grim bird intent on survival, even if he had to put up with the attentions of a teenaged human. It's the closest I'll ever get to a passenger pigeon, and in retrospect, I'm thrilled about it.

Tiny tar pits for the home

Glue traps are nasty. Animals caught in them die slow horrible deaths. Some people don't mind that for the mice and rats they intend to trap, but are upset when some other creature falls victim.

 At a wildlife rescue center, someone recently brought in a glue trap with a mockingbird hopelessly plastered to it. The bird had been bounding along on mockingbird business when it hopped onto the trap and got its feet stuck. It struggled to get free, striking down with its wings, getting its wings trapped, hitting the trap with its bill, getting its bill stuck, and so forth until it couldn't move at all. It was immobile, terrified.

The person who set the trap found it while the bird was still alive, and rushed it to the rescue centre, swearing they'd never put a glue trap out again.

 What you do in such a case may or may not start with cutting away with the base of the trap. You may sprinkle open areas of glue with sand or some kind of powder, so if you free part of the bird it won't instantly get stuck again, and so your hand or glove won't get stuck. Then you apply an oil like canola oil, to dilute and loosen the intensely sticky “glue.” (Some people use powder for this step too.)

 Now the bird isn't gluey, but it's seriously oily. Still terrified but maybe also starting to feel peeved. It wants to leave.

 Then you have to wash the oil off the angry bird. (Warm water with 1-2% dishwashing liquid.)

 Then you have to rinse the soapy water off the furious bird.

 Then you have to dry the enraged bird, probably with a heat lamp.

 The process is so traumatic that you don't do it all at once, since the bird probably wouldn't survive the shock and horror. It may also have torn feathers out when struggling in the glue.

After the mockingbird had been through all this, was unglued, clean and dry, it had a day or two in a warm dim quiet place (with food and water) so its condition could stabilize, and was transferred to another wildlife rescue center with better facilities for small perching birds.  

When the bird had recovered from its ordeal and had preened its plumage back into passable condition, it was set free.

 

I looked on YouTube for videos showing animals being freed from glue traps and cleaned. There weren't many, and the best one was too long to put here. (It's an eastern phoebe. Rather than saying the classic “phoe-be!” or even giving an alarm call, it's clacking its bill in a threatening way. 'I'm clean enough! Stand back! Okay, now I'm mad! Watch out!')

 The video search was depressing. It showed that many people think animals getting caught in glue traps is hilarious, and some people think that other people getting stuck in glue traps is incredibly sexy.

 On the other hand, I did find these excellent video clips suggesting that being stuck in glue is funny when it happens to a perpetually unsuccessful yet irrepressible coyote. Who was the one who put the glue there in the first place. (Think about that, setters of glue traps.)

 

 

 

Lucky swan, secret sorrow

Earlier this year, a wildlife rescue center took in a mute swan (Cygnus olor).

Mute swans aren't native birds. In North American we have tundra swans, whooper swans, and trumpeter swans. Some people buy mute swans, the lovely birds of classic European imagery, and place them on ornamental water to make it even more ornamental. Sometimes the swans go wild, move to wilder waters, raise families there. Because they're not native, they don't have the same legal protections, and because they're not native, some people disapprove of them. (It's said that they're hard on aquatic vegetation and ecosystems.)

But this swan wasn't feral. He dwelled on ornamental water where he had been placed, only now he was very sick and looked like he might stop dwelling at any moment. He was too weak to stand, a pancaked fowl.

Since he was a private bird, he might have gone to a private veterinarian, but vets who see swans are rare, and the wildlife center has waterfowl experience. The swan was lucky.
 
Once I found a sick bird on a beach. We were in an unfamiliar town, but I eventually got a number for a wildlife rescue center. “I found a bird...” I began, but a bored voice interrupted. “We only take native species,” it said. “You
probably have a starling. We don't take them.”

“Actually I think it's a marbled godwit.”

“Oh!” the nativist cried in sudden interest. “Bring it right in!”

But most wildlife centers take some non-native species. They may not be delighted, but they won't turn you and your bedraggled find away from their door.

The swan had been admitted, and treated, and was feeling a lot better. He could stand now. His benefactors had gone on the buddy system – they didn't go alone into his pen.

Swans are big. And grumpy. Not only do they hiss and bite, but with their wings they can hit very hard, so hard that it is said they can break human bones. People are charmed by the fact that swans are devoted spouses and parents, but one way swans express that is by beating up anyone who comes too close to their family.

Three of the most common reactions to seeing a swan can be summarized as:

    “Oh look, how beautiful!”
    “Those things can break your arm.”
    “What is that, a pelican?”

I like to summarize three swan reactions as:

    “Yes, you may admire my beauty from a great distance.”
    “Not as long as you stay a great distance away.” 
    “A pelican? I'm gonna come over there and break your arm.”



No one wanted to mix it up with rescue swan now that he had his strength back. Perhaps he was ready to be returned to his ornamental water. But there was a problem. He had lost weight and he wasn't gaining it back. Despite his recovery, he wasn't eating well.

They discussed his case at morning rounds. What was going on with him? Someone asked if he had a mate. Yes, a mate and cygnets too. Ah. He was lonesome for his family. Treatment plan: reunion.

(This shows a good understanding of different species. You wouldn't ask this question about a male peacock or a male hummingbird, because they aren't family men.)

The swan missed his family. To me it also seems possible that he worried about them. I doubt a swan envisions particular scenarios – monstrous humans kidnapping his wife, falcons grabbing his children – but possibly this swan envisioned his family alone, without him on guard, and he wanted to be back defending them. Taking names and breaking arms.

 


 

Turtles in the soup, part 1: Mystic dawn rites

It seemed like a grave ceremony at a turtle temple. A silent line of identically-dressed people lifted turtles from tanks one at a time. Each turtle was carried in the same ritual position and taken through the same stations. A wand was waved over each turtle. Quiet words were murmured. Inscriptions were made. Tags were produced. Each turtle in turn was transferred to another serious person in identical garb, who examined it mutely and seriously, inspected the inscriptions, placed the turtle in a special container, and affixed the tag. Observers stood in silence.

I was in the Florida Panhandle, reporting on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and spill. This was a turtle-washing facility set up in a locked area at the back of Gulf World in Panama City Beach. Media hellhounds like me were being let in, on our best behavior, to behold an early-morning transfer of young turtles from the oiled-turtle-washing-and-stabilization center at Gulf World to a turtle-rehab center at SeaWorld Orlando, on the other side of Florida. (The turtles aren't on display to the public in either place.)

There were reasons for the eerie details. The identically-clad people were Gulf World and Sea World employees in uniform (royal blue shirts, black or khaki shorts, rubber boots). They walked in lines because there was a narrow zone between the “dirty”/oily side of the facility and the clean side. The silence was to avoid getting the turtles  used to human voices. No one wanted them to grow up into “pier rats.” The turtles were carried in the approved way for turtles this size, faced away from the human, held behind the front flippers. Some turtles sculled with their flippers as they were carried. The wand checked a microchip implanted in each turtle.

The grave atmosphere came from respect for the rare animals – endangered Kemp's ridleys (Lepidochelys kempii). It came from determination to help mitigate the oil's damage (and awareness that many more turtles had died). It came from the knowledge that everything was being recorded. (A few times I overheard an acolyte whisper the name of a departing turtle: Mikey! Buzz! It's Lance!)

Media attention was the least of it. Scientific data that might be gained was also subsidiary. (There weren't nearly enough turtles to make a study.) It was explained that the turtles were evidence. The microchips, records, re-checking of records before packing each turtle in a labeled container – all maintained the chain of custody.

CSI: Gulf of Mexico.