Wednesday, June 8, 2016

From Loogey To Fuzzball

Dave the nuthatch finally quit coming back to the nest box, finally quit beeping from the branches, finally moved on. He'd help raise at least two babies, and at least one of them might not have been impaled on a scrub jay. There might have been more. Don't know.

Or I didn't know, until last week, when I saw Marge and Studley Windowson, our chickadee buddies, checking out the box. It seems late for them to start a brood, but I got excited. I called Dave the Man, whose job it is to clean the nest box. He took it out to the patio and uncombobulated the roof of the box and looked in. Bunch of sawdust and wood shavings. Nothing like the soft mattress the Windowsons set up every year. And what's that?

A dead baby?

Five dead babies? Five. All feathered out but smaller than the two that actually left the nest. They were probably one or two days dead by the time the successful ones took off. And now it was over a week later. They hadn't yet turned to goo, but I couldn't tell much about cause of death. Could be a lot of things, I guess. The world, it must be said, conspires against baby bird survival.

But I know who would know. Julie Zickefoose would know. There is no one on this orb who knows more about baby birds than Julie, and that happens to be fact, not hyperbole. That is why she wrote a book called Baby Birds: An Artist Looks Into The Nest. How do you learn so much about baby birds? Why, you monitor their nests, and you slip a hatchling out for a quick watercolor portrait, from nose to nubbin, once a day until they're grown. No, I wouldn't have thought of it either. And neither has anybody else. It's a first. And it happens to be true that if you've taken the trouble of painting something accurately in watercolor, you have observed the living hell out of it. You know stuff.

Julie gets in there, spirits out a little baby to paint, scrubs behind its ears, makes it a mealworm meat sandwich with the crusts cut off, picks up its poopies, checks its math homework, opens up a college fund, and snaps it back in the nest before its real mom has time to do a second count. And she does it every day until they fledge. The changes she records are jaw-dropping. It's like if you have a baby and in twenty days it's bearded, six foot tall, out the door, and already plotting to move back into the basement.

And in the course of this project, she saved the day for many of the broods. One thing I've learned from her book is that it is a sheer miracle any bird ever makes it to adulthood. I may feel real bad about Dave the nuthatch, but these tragedies are happening all the time all over the place. It's a jungle out there.

House sparrows and house wrens are a particular menace. The taxonomists say they're not closely related, but they are: they're in the Asshole Family. They'll go in a nest and spindle the eggs or even perforate the babies just for something to do of an afternoon.

Get Yours Here.
So Sheriff Julie blasts in and routs them. Relocates snakes. Thwarts raccoons. Pulls entire nests out for a quick pop in the microwave to kill mites and puts them back again. It's got to look like a miracle from the birds' standpoint: everybody's all itchy, then the Mighty Hand Of Julie reaches in and removes their bedding and puts it back all spanky clean. Basically, Julie is Bird God. She smites the mites, she visits devastation upon the enemies, and lo, she is with them always, even unto the migration. She doesn't save them all, but it's not like the Bible one has such a great record, either.

So if you want to find out exactly, and I mean exactly, how you can make an entire working bird in a few days starting with an egg the size of a Tic-Tac, and you do--you do!--check out Julie's big, beautiful book. She's got all the portraits of the birds through all the stages from loogey to fuzzball. You will be amazed. Besides, if you buy this book, maybe Julie can top up all those little college funds. And buy herself sumpin' pretty.

26 comments:

  1. So let me get this straight... they had seven babies, all told? Jeez... were they Catholic? That's just way too many young for even the most diligent parents to care for and feed. They probably have so many because they know the survival rate of chicks sucks, and if they can get one or two out of it, they consider themselves lucky. Probably they focused their attention on the obviously stronger chicks and didn't bother to feed the others if they were not strong enough to push their way past their stronger siblings for food. I've seen it happen on eagle's nests, which is why I decided not to watch eagle cams with more than two chicks. The Decorah North nest will haunt me for a long time.

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    1. At least seven! I might have missed a fledgling earlier in the day, after all. And they didn't have much stuff in the nest. I would think you'd have to be strong just to make your way up to the exit hole.

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  2. Julie's book is like a soap opera, I was on the edge of my seat rooting for those babies! Almost as hard as I was rooting for that ^&$R%#$ robin that slams into my windows 20 times a day through mating season to move on already. Despite the concussion he is a very successful parent. 8 fledged babies in 2 years. Maybe I need to move...

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    1. Gaaaah! I've heard if you hang parachute cord every four inches from your window top it prevents bird strikes. I keep trying to get around to it.

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    2. I put transparent decals on my windows They're made especially to deter birds; something about how they reflect light. Anyhow, they worked.

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    3. Hawk silhouettes and stuff? They really work? I'd put one on my birdhouse-adjacent window but I don't want the nestlings to have nightmares.

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    4. I had hummingbird silhouettes. No nightmares. Just a hint that the glass is not empty air.

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  3. 2 out of 7 not great odds, but I guess enough to keep the species going.

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    1. And one of those two went to keep the scrub jay species going...

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  4. I just got Julie's book and have a long weekend coming up - looking forward to reading it

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    1. Sit down and enjoy! Ain't it a big beautiful thang?

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  5. Woo! Wasn't expecting a stealth review in the sad story of what happened to your nuthatches. Thank you!! Your praise, undeserved; your description of what I do with baby birds, pretty close to the mark. Whoa. Well, 7 babies is a normal sized clutch for red-breasted nuthatches. And for five to die, well, the first thing you suspect is avian subterfuge. House wrens will do that, peck them to death. House sparrows will too. They seem a bit big for a house wren to deal such devastation however. There is something else that can kill babies in the nest, and that's bacterial enteritis. The pathway goes something like this, at least in my yard. Had a bluebird box that was a convenient stop for birds on their way to our feeding station. What do birds do when they stop on the way somewhere? They poop. Of course. So there was always poop on the roof. And where do the bluebirds go to process unwieldy insects, bash and smush them before feeding? The roof of the box. Foreign Bird Poop + food + nestlings=bacterial enteritis. Poof, whole brood dies with swollen bellies. Not saying that definitely happened here, but it is a killer. The other that's particularly hard on chickadees and titmice, and one might guess nuthatches, is West Nile virus. I was finding whole clutches of Carolina chickadees dead when it ripped through Ohio. So I'm tossing those possibilities out. And recommending that you check your boxes once weekly, if it isn't too much trouble for Dave. xoxoxo and thank you, JZ

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    1. We're going to need a new box design, like yours. Otherwise I'll be traumatizing them with a power drill. We don't have much West Nile here, or even mosquitoes. By the way, The Windowsons, Marge and Studley, are now back in the (scrubbed) house. I'm not sure I'd have the emotional wherewithal to open up a box on a brooding chickadee! That snake routine they have would make me fill my shorts, no lie.

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  6. Infant mortality in the wild isn't much different than humans before vaccines. There is a lot of carnage and broken hearts. Rehabbers don't get enough support so let's all buy Julie's books.

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    1. Yeah, I wonder what her mealworm budget is every year?

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  7. Yay for Julie.
    Can she be cloned? Please?

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    1. She does have some stellar kids. So stay tuned.

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  8. THAT was my favorite review of Baby Birds yet for sure ("checks it's math homework; opens a college fund" LOL!) and she sure has helped me through a few baby bird traumas. I'm not sure my ACTUAL kids get as deeply observed as baby bluebirds do when they are taking up nursery space in my front yard, and with Julie's fine words and beautiful books, we've fledged a bunch. She is a dynamite resource and her books are worth every cent.

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    1. Yeah, it's not the kind of thing I usually remark about, but they're really fine quality, too--the paper and the layout and everything.

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  9. I was able to get the e-Bird version of Julie's book and love how I can blow up the pictures to see the minute details. And the text is fabulous. Definitely a book I'll go back to over and over.

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    1. Yeah...but there's something about holding that big heavy sumbitch on your lap and turning pages that simply can't happen on a screen. I live with my e-books, but my soul lives on the dead tree variety.

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    2. I like my e-reader for reading in bed (I read on my side and I don't have to keep repositioning the book every time I'm on a new page) but I love the real thing for sittin' in a chair reading.

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  10. Darn it, you made me cry again. FIVE dead baby birds? Gosh Nature is harsh. But you put a couple of Pootie photos to take away the sting a bit, so thanks.
    Round here lately, I've seen a couple of dead baby birds on the footpaths, blown out of the nests before they have even an idea of feathers. So sad.

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    1. It's such a rough world. And I have been guilty of messing up nests before. Not in thirty years--I'm more careful now--but a couple times I tried to trim a hedge or a vine and discovered the nest too late. Still atoning.

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  11. Thank you so much for mentioning this book. I lost my bluebird babies this spring. I think too much water. This would be a huge help.
    Good luck with yours.
    (Oh yeah, just followed.)

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    1. Wait--were you watering your bluebirds? Oh. I think Julie leaves pans of mealworms out on top of her bluebird boxes in extremely wet weather. Yet another thing I wouldn't have thought would matter to birds, but I guess the bugs are hard to find in the rain. Or something. Thanks for following!

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