Hope Is a Calf, Hope is a Bird

Beeches dance in the greening woods. Their leaves are frozen as if being blown by an invisible west wind. On the east slopes where they get some sun, their leaves are still russet; deep in the hollers they have bleached to ghost white. That doesn’t make sense to me, but it’s what I’m seeing. Sometimes the things that don't make empirical sense are the interesting ones. 

Not the cattle I was watching, but I found this photo from April 30, 2015, that shows those fresh calf-whites so beautifully. Oh, I love seeing little calves pop against the spring grass! 

In one of the games I play to keep my brain moving forward, I’m gunning for 7 woodpeckers today.  I’ve got pileated, red-bellied, red-headed, yellow bellied sapsucker, hairy. The sapsucker and the red-headed are real scores. I identified both by their sounds: the sapsucker drums an irregular staccatto tattoo that no other woodpecker does.  Tak-a-tak, tak-tak, tak...The red-headed yells QUEERK!! like no other woodpecker. And now all I need is downy and flicker to complete the complement of 7 possible species here, or in Ohio overall. Unless I'm forgetting one, those are all the woodpeckers possible in my state, and I can get them all on one hike from door to door! Nerdy? Maybe. I prefer to think of it as "tuned in." As the day wears on, I'll eventually get the downy and flicker right in my yard, but it would be cool to get them all here at the overlook, about 3/4 mile from my house. SEVEN WOODPECKERS IN ONE WALK.

 I stand for 15 minutes watching, through binoculars, a dot that is a black cow lying in a still,  seemingly morose heap on a distant hillside--one I really can't reach from my high hilltop perch. I know she must have a calf to be lying down like that. By angling around I finally spot a little black bundle with a snow-white forehead lying behind her. That's the calf. You'll never see white like that on an adult cow unless they've just been shampooed for the county fair. But the freshly laundered whites of calves are unmistakable. The tiny calf is motionless, lying on its side. 

My worst self immediately leaps to the small rock of possibility that the calf was stillborn, and, my mental state being what it is, and being a writer after all, I cook up a tragic scenario. The bereaved mother might have cleaned her calf's little body and, with nothing more to do, lay down next to it to grieve. My better self argues No! it’s only sleeping, you ninny! The business of being born is hard work. I keep watching, and listening for woodpeckers. Finally, after I’ve counted all the woodpeckers there are to count, (stuck at 5) and walked back and forth along the fenceline, shifting my gaze from side to side, looking for any movement, the calf raises its  head, revealing an orange plastic tag in its left ear. Not only is it alive, but the farmer has already met it, pierced its ear, proclaimed his ownership. The calf is not dead. The cow is not morose. There is no mission for me here. I can now get on with my life, and my springtime walk. 

The mother cow no longer looks sad to me; she is Easter itself. All that, from the waggle of a little calf’s head. 

I’m a fixer, for better or worse, a helper. As I paced back and forth at the overlook, I was already sketching out a plan of action to see if I could help the calf. Why can’t I just look and not touch? I pondered this as I hiked the rest of my loop, the hike that kept me sane while my kids were babies, the hike that still sets me right in the morning. 

As I drew close to the house, already thinking about the mile long to-do list I was about to tackle, I saw a little figure on the porch. I recognized it as the same American goldfinch I had spotted last evening, huddled on the back patio near the sliding door. Last night, I had crept up to open the patio door from inside, hoping to capture it, only for it to fly away, weakly.  If they can get away, they don't need you yet.

Now, here it was on my front doorstep, and it was breathing so hard I knew it was actively dying. Over the course of the winter I’ve seen six such goldfinches in my yard. This was the seventh. I’d been able to catch two, and both died within hours of being taken in for treatment—wasted to skin and feathers and bone. I don’t know what they had—I was guessing salmonella—but the antibiotics I’d tried hadn't worked. There was no eye swelling that might have indicated Mycoplasma, the awful house finch disease that had me nursing 30 goldfinches back to health last winter. So I'd never tried Tylan on them.

Here we go again, I thought. You’ve come to both doors, as plain as pleading for help. What is it that makes a bird do that? Is it knowing where to come? Figuring that the human who lives in the house and puts out the seed every morning might know what to do? I think back to last spring, when not one but two blinded goldfinches fluttered down to the patio on different mornings while I was having breakfast there. They landed right in front of me and Curtis, seemingly waiting for us to take them in. We did. They lived to fly again, after three weeks of rest, abundant food, and the antibiotic Tylan. 

I made a little video of the goldfinch so you can see what sad shape it was in. If you can see a bird breathing, it is in extremis. There is a video going around on the Internet of a hummingbird asleep and "snoring." Isn't that cute? To someone who knows birds, an audibly breathing bird, one whose bill is opening with each gasp, is in a heap of trouble. It's neither cute nor sweet nor charming. It's sick. So goes cute stuff on the Internet, sometimes.

I've perfected a move I call The Gentle Cobra. Here it is in action. Very slow, soft, and silent, until the final grab. Boom. Bird is yours.

I took her right inside and gave her Tylan with a dropper. I kept her in a small plastic Critter Keeper while she was so weak she didn't need to move around. She seemed a lot better by nightfall. The next morning she was so much livelier that I fixed her up a hospital cage in the foyer.  Here she is about midday the next day, just before she went into the cage. I gave her another slug of Tylan with a dropper, and of course put it in her water dish. Tylan-laced water will be her only water source for the next three weeks. 

I still don't know for sure what she has, but it's extremely responsive to Tylan (my drug of choice for Mycoplasma). It makes me wonder if she and all the other six goldfinches that have turned up sick in my yard have had Mycoplasma, but it's just not manifesting in swollen eyes this year. If that's the case, that could be why I can't even begin to catch them until they're literally dying--because, weak as they become, they can still see to get away from me. 

That said, her right eye was slightly inflamed. I strongly suspect Mycoplasma gallinae, just presenting differently. Her miraculous recovery argues for that as well.

On this, her fourth day in treatment, she is ricocheting around the cage like a completely wild and well goldfinch. Just 17 more days of treatment, and then she gets to go back outside. By then, it'll be spring for sure.

Hope is a calf, hope is a bird. 

My Bird Feeder Clients

 As I write, the wind is roaring again, and the newly flowering maples are tossing their heads and arms like they're at a rave. Practically every minute, something changes out there. A fox sparrow arrives and beats up a house sparrow.  My beautiful red-winged blackbird comes in for peanuts, as he has for several springs running. 

It's not every redwing that will climb on a peanut feeder. He's special!

Yeah baby! Get you some peanuts! And then he flies off to his territory at the nearest pond, about a half mile away as the redwing flies. Fergus the Frog's pond, if you must know.

On March 30, my darling male chipping sparrow returned from wherever he spent the winter. He immediately checked out every single feeder (all new to him). 

and fearlessly worked his way under the protective dome over this hanging platform. 

I just love birds' intelligence and adaptibility. He checked for Zick Dough where it used to be before it was mobbed with house finches, and finding none, decided to take advantage of what was there. I can't wait to see if his funny little mate with the spiky eyebrows comes back again this spring. 

You see, I have deeply personal feelings about the birds who come to my feeders. I follow them from year to year. They're my friends, and that's nothing to minimize in a pandemic.  So when I see them under threat as a result of something I am doing, it bothers me deeply. 

This old photo from March 8, of my beloved male hairy woodpecker mobbed by goldfinches at a tube feeder, is hard for me to look at now that I've made the connection between tube feeders and disease transmission. You can see the messed up eye on the lowest left goldfinch.

And his mate, with a sick goldfinch on the opposite port! You can see that scabby eye..the woodpecker perhaps saved from infection by her longer bill, which allows her to dip into the seed without contacting the port. However they have escaped it, I am so grateful. But this is what fuels my ferocious focus on taking the vectors out of the equation.

What fuels it is my love for all of them. 

This is a much safer way to feed. No ports to contact. Just bird and peanut and gone.

And what of the ones who brought this contagion? Why have I treated and (hope to) release now 18 American goldfinches, and no house finches? Well, this is something I've been thinking about a LOT. 

I see house finches with symptoms. And here's the thing: I can't even come close to catching them.

I'm trying to figure out what's going on. From what I have observed, house finches seem to be managing better with the disease than goldfinches. 

This is the first mass infection of goldfinches I've witnessed. I've never seen more than one or two American goldfinches with conjunctivitis, before this late winter/early spring of 2021. 

And suddenly they are overwhelmed. First one eye closes, and then the second. And when the second closes (which can take a couple of weeks), the bird is helpless, and it's then that I can capture it. IF it is a goldfinch.

But house finches seem to go on with the disease, seem to be able to continue to see well enough to get by. I suspect this is at least partly behavioral (as in, they have learned how to rub their eyes on perches to open them when they get stuck shut). But it may also be that house finches are building up some kind of partial resistance to the disease that the naive immune systems of American goldfinches as yet lack. They may be able to live with it, as goldfinches can't. I ache for their suffering. Their eyes look so sore, and the feathers around them are always matted and messy, as if they've been rubbing them, trying to get their eyes open. 

I'm not a scientist. My observations are all anecdotal. But I can't help but keep chewing on this problem. 

One thing that's not going to happen: these goldfinches I've worked so hard to get back to radiant health are not going to find tube feeders to share with house finches when they finally ply the sky again. They're going to have to go out and find the foods they're supposed to be eating. Or take the occasional treat from my hanging platform feeders. Watching like a hawk. So far, so good. Three birds twittering in the foyer cage, the last remaining. Two will be released tomorrow, April 14. That will leave one, #19. 

Captured April 7, Hey 19 was sitting on the platform feeder with two healthy goldfinches, his eyes completely shut. He was able to open them just enough to get there, but, once fed, he just ran out of steam. I crept up and nabbed him by hand. He'd spend almost two days in intensive care, with tiny dishes of food and medicated water, and droppers of medicated water given by hand, before he could see again.

He was completely blind until April 9, when both eyes opened blearily and he could make out his surroundings. These photos were taken that day, when he had graduated from his plastic Critter Keeper to the big cage. I always love to see their eyes open, see them see again. It keeps me going.

In this photo you can see I've lightly cut the tips of his right tail feathers, just enough to tell me who he is, in case I catch more that would be caged with him. Sincerely hoping he's the last of the last of the last. He'll be with me until April 28, and then maybe, just maybe, this epidemic will have run its course. 

So far, I've taken in 19 goldfinches. I lost one after a week to what I suspect was a secondary fungal infection that Tylan doesn't touch. Hey. 18 out of 19 ain't bad. I'll take it! I love these little chitterbugs.

Easter Release!

 Three weeks is a long time in a human life. Imagine taking antibiotics for three weeks. After ten days, I'm ready to jump out of my skin. Now imagine being a very small bird, weighing less than half an ounce. You could mail two American goldfinches with one letter stamp. Well, as of this writing you could...

Some of these birds have been in this cage since March 4. Over the next four days I caught so darn many, snagging them off the tube feeders, that I just put that batch together in the largest cage I had (17 "x 20" x 25." The last one was caught March 8, so I had to hold the entire batch of six until that one was finished with its 21 day course of Tylan. 

Two large cages are sequestered in a quiet back bedroom that once belonged to Liam. When he came home this weekend I had to put him in a different room. He didn't complain--he was just glad to be home in a comfy bed, hanging with his mom and pet curdog, instead of his "cot" at college. And oh was it nice to see him for a few days! 

 This cage faces out onto the east hill, so the birds can see where they will fly soon. I keep the three sides facing into the room covered with a sheet. When the sun comes in I can spy on them. Keep your eye on the little female who starts the video popping up and down like popcorn on the left side of the cage. She then moves to pulling at a thread hanging from the cage cover. Oh, do these birds want OUT. 

And out they shall go. I wanted so badly to document it! I lay awake for several nights in the wee hours, trying to figure out how to execute both the release and a slow-motion video of it. I made a stiff cardboard false top for the cage and thought about pulling it off the cage with a string while manning the camera. Dumb, dumb, dumb, and I might inadvertantly injure a bird in doing it. Julie. You idiot. Just call Shila and ask her to make the dang video! I finally succeeded in fighting back Pioneer Woman long enough to make the call, and my faithful and talented photographer friend drove out to make this video. This is typical behavior for me, but it's exacerbated by long isolation.  I exhaust every possibility before I finally admit I need someone to help me. Shila is almost always that someone! I am so blessed to call her my friend.

 

Sharp observers will note that one goldfinch (probably the one who pulled threads and hopped up and down like a kindergartner) failed to leave. Never worry. She got out in the next wave.

Extra sharp observers will also note that I have gotten a MUCH needed haircut since this release video was made. If you thought you were reading a lifestyle and beauty blog, my presence in this video should serve to alert you that you're in the wrong place. In subsequent slo-mo release videos, I am going to endeavor to try not to look so much like I'm giving birth to a barnyard animal.

It feels SO GOOD to let these birds go. If this months-long ordeal has taught me anything, it's that I have less than zero desire to cage any bird, for one minute longer than I have to, in order to help it. 

And as I'm writing that sentence, an Eastern Phoebe lands on a low wall right in my sight. She flutters to the patio and looks hard at two twigs lying there. She's thinking about nesting! Two nights ago, a phoebe who might have been her spooked off the roost around 9:30 pm when I turned on the porch light to take Curtis out for his last wee. It blundered around the front stoop, bonking into the lit windows and hopping on the ground, until I caught it and brought it inside to spend a safe night in a Critter Keeper. Not going to let that precious bird fall prey to the screech-owl who leaves big white puddles on my front porch! 

The phoebe was not amused to be Gentle Cobra'ed and brought into the bright light of my kitchen. Please pardon my impudent digit; you can see more of the bird with that middle finger out of the way, and there's nothing I can do about it. Gotta love that rapidly snapping bill. I never knew phoebes did that. The two I hand-raised never had occasion to be that afraid or defensive. 

Cages have their place, and this spring they're all over my living space,  but my favorite thing to do with them is open the top and let that bird fly. Off it goes, into the sunrise!

 Remember Mr. Netinyahoo, the evil little goldfinch who evaded capture for days, then flew up to the clerestory windows in the living room? Here he is, feeling EVER so much better, on April 4. Still ornery though!

I can attest that he is fat as butter! Oh how I love to see them come back to life, and get sleek and fat again.

I caught him this morning to put him in the last cage, which will be released April 17. As of Easter Sunday, I am down to five birds in two cages, and after caring for 18, that feels like quite a load off my shoulders. 

I had better clear some bird care space, because the bluebirds are not wasting any time! Without any supplemental food at all, this little gal has five warm eggs as of the morning of April 3. Holy cow. In a hurry, she is! And that little phoebe I kept overnight? Already setting on eggs in a mud nest under the back deck. 

My, how Spring marches on. We have to just try to keep up, lurching along in her wake. 

We had two nights in the lower 20's, April 2 and 3. I figured my daffodils, roses, lilacs, bluebells, daylilies were all toast. Still I covered and fussed. And all but the poor kiwi vine came through with flying colors--literally!

As is usual with Nature, the joke was on me. 

Happy Easter from my little family to yours. 

Caught In the Whirlpool

Heads up: It's taken me more than a week to write this post. So it's a bit of a chronicle, rather than a summation.  I took down the last tube feeder today, March 10. It sounds like such a simple thing to do.

But I lay awake night after night and even wept about it. Isn’t that a weird thing to have to confess? 

 

For weeks, I have been caught in a whirlpool of guilt and obsession. Those two things always seem to be swirling in the waters of my misery. I had this thing going, and it was rolling along, dragging me down with it. Here’s what I've been doing. I would disinfect my tube feeder every day, and keep it filled with sunflower hearts, so I could continue to attract the sick goldfinches I would then catch and take inside to treat and heal.

And here’s the flaw with that: I kept thinking that at some point I would run out of sick birds, and then I’d be done catching them, and keeping them in hospital cages.  I’d keep each one and treat it for three weeks, and I’d release them all, and that would be that.  I’d be done with this horrid epidemic for this spring.

 

 

This poor little gal's whole head is swollen. No worries--she is back to normal proportions now. She can see fine, but has three weeks in sick bay to go.

But what happened in actual fact, while I was continuing to feed, is that more sick birds showed up every day. That is not what was supposed to happen, to my mind. It wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted this to stop. I thought I was doing something to help. As I look out at the lone peanut feeder that remains, there are eight sick goldfinches and at least five sick house finches hopping forlornly around on the ground underneath it, looking for crumbs. And it breaks my heart in two. How can it be that I have nine birds in the hospital, and 13 more outside who need help?

 

Well, I figured out the answer, but I had to smash and claw through multiple layers of rationalization and denial before I got there. Yesterday I sat down with my binoculars and watched the blinded finches feeding at that carefully disinfected tube feeder. Their swollen, goopy eyes rubbed against the feeder ports as they went in for each seed. I realized that I could take that feeder in and switch it out with a disinfected one three times a day, and I would still be infecting birds. All my precautions meant nothing. And my rationale, that I was “helping” the birds by continuing to feed them so I could take them into care simply fell apart, because I had a sick finch factory right in front of my nose.  I was so blinded by my own zeal to care for them all that I failed to see the mechanism of transmission. I had lost sight of the big picture, if I'd ever seen it at all.

 

Because I am someone who needs to understand how everything is connected, I have explained in a previous post how the wild bird trade, a deliberate historic release of house finches in New York, and their resultant inbreeding depression have made Eastern house finches helpless against this scourge. But this current epidemic in my yard, I’m tracing back to plant genetics. I don't know if my theory holds true anywhere else, but it's a theory.

 

I’m sure this sounds weird, but stay with me. A few years ago, the sunflower feeder I’d used for decades, which is a big cylinder of hardware cloth with two metal pie plates on top and bottom, stopped feeding seed. Here's my favorite picture of my favorite feeder. So simple, yet so functional. The beauty of it is that birds don't contact anything but the seed. They pull it out of the mesh and they don't have to rub their eyes on any surface to get it.

 Oh. And there's a scarlet tanager there, checking it out, because checking out what other birds do is how birds learn. I call this photo "A Few Red Birds."

This feeder served me for 20 years. But in the last few years, I could fill that thing up on a frigid snowy winter day and the birds would take it down maybe an inch. Before, I could fill the thing twice a day in such conditions, and barely keep up with the demand. What was going on? 

Though I’ve not read this anywhere, it looks to me that black oil sunflower, which was once a slender, elliptical, small-diameter seed, is being bred to be bigger and plumper—wider around, more teardrop-shaped than elliptical. Shiny now, too. It's a lot prettier than the skinny dull gray black oil seed we started with, but the shiny fat seeds won’t fit through the mesh of my trusty, more hygeinic feeder. The seed goes in, but it just won’t come back out. Before, birds could cling to the outside of that feeder, grab a seed and work it easily out of the mesh without touching anything but the seed itself. It was a much cleaner way to feed the birds. Now, it's a Hotel California for sunflower seed. I suspect my mesh feeder is not the only one affected. 

 

During the extreme cold snap this winter, I took that old trusty feeder in and retired it. It just wasn’t working any more, and with weeks on end of deep snow cover, I needed to deliver a LOT of seed to hungry birds. I turned back to the tube feeders that had been hanging unused in the garage for years. I missed my old large-capacity feeder, but what good is it if the birds can’t get the seed out of it? Throughout the February cold spell, my birds fed from tube feeders, for the first time in literally years. And toward the end of the snap, when the snow was still on the ground, I started finding sick goldfinches. Not sure what the incubation period for Mycoplasma might be, but I get the feeling it’s around two to three weeks.  I picked up the first blind goldfinch on February 21. And then there came a cascade of them in the first week of March. I told myself that I must have gotten  a new flock, and the sick birds had come in with them. But I no longer think that’s what happened. 

                                      I think that my tube feeders made them sick.

 

Weird to think that a quirk of plant breeding could cause me to switch to tube feeders, and worsen an epidemic that's already terrible. I'm pretty sure that's what happened here on Indigo Hill. 

I implore you, if you’re still with me, don’t glance out at your feeders, see lots of birds sitting on them, and assume they're all fine. Take the time to get out your binoculars and really look at each eye on every bird. If you see squinty eyes, dull eyes, messed up feathers on the head, or swollen, closed, blind eyes, you have Mycoplasma in your flock. If a bird has one closed eye, within a week, both will close. And if you’re feeding birds with Mycoplasma, you’re just inviting healthy birds in to catch and spread it. You are creating a bacterial hotspot, and luring birds in to get infected.

 

March 10: There’s a male house finch circling the peanut feeder, flying like a yoyo with his body strangely upright, tail fanned. That’s because he can barely see. Eight goldfinches are shuffling around on the ground beneath. Four more house finches flutter in, and I feel sick. In the foyer, the incessant twitter of three goldfinches from the first batch. In a back bedroom, constant twittering from six more, the captive legacy of my good intentions. I've been “helping birds” by feeding them and treating them with three straight weeks of Tylan in their water, without being able to grasp that I am to blame for their being sick in the first place.

 

It’s that whirlpool again, that cycle of guilt and obsession. I made them sick. I need to fix them. I’ll keep feeding them so I can catch them and make them well again. If I can just catch the last two…three…eight…thirteen…In the time it took me to write this post, I went out and caught another one who had gone completely blind today (March 10). That makes ten, and this is crazy, and it makes me miserable. And I'm still trying to fix it.

                                         Tube feeder. The round recessed seed port is the problem. 

 

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, while expecting a different result. Please don’t laud me for my “big heart” for taking care of sick birds. I'm the one who's done the harm, and doing some good is the least I can do to atone. Just go out and check your birds. If you find signs of disease, then do the right thing, hard as it is. Take those feeders down! And, if you care about your birds, retire the tube feeders for good.  It's really hard to quit feeding. Believe me, I understand. I have been there again and again. 

Mesh feeders like Ol' Trusty are better than tube feeders, but I'm certainly not saying they can't and won't spread Mycoplasma. Here's a blinded female house finch, poised to infect three other species by sitting on the feeder tray. House finches also like to sit in birdbaths when they feel ill. I would be happy never having seen a house finch in the East. I love them, and it's not their fault they have no genetic resistance. But I wish I didn't have them around.

 Mesh feeders are better than tube/port feeders, but they aren't perfect. The same goes for the feeders shown below. 

 I love this hanging platform feeder, made of recycled plastic and stainless steel. Because it's open to the elements, I added a dome,which keeps the seed, if not completely dry, at least drier, and keeps droppings mostly out of the tray. 

 

The peanut feeder is a mesh-style feeder, with  no ports to collect bacteria from goopy eyes. Also equipped with a plexi dome to keep the peanuts dry. 

And my crude cinder-block construction called Cyanocity works pretty darn well to keep seed dry and keep birds safer. While birds will defecate atop the cinder blocks, I've never found poop in the chambers of the blocks, because birds tend to cling and reach in with their heads only. 

Again, this is virtually contactless feeding, which is what we're looking for in feeders. My beautiful hairy woodpecker male--I love him so much!

Meanwhile, the soundtrack in my house is still a constant twitter/ping/flutter. Seed hulls are scattered everywhere around the three cages, and it takes about an hour first thing every morning to service and clean them. I can't sit back and enjoy watching the birds; they're far too wild to suffer being looked at. I took this shot by creepin' my phone's lens under the cage cover. I keep only the side facing the window uncovered. For the brief moments I'm changing papers and replacing dishes, the birds flutter as if the most horrible monster in the world is trying to kill them. They hate my guts, and that's the way it is with wild things when they're caged. 

I let the finch collected February 21 go on March 13, after three weeks of confinement. She flew like a bullet and that felt WONDERFUL. But the exhilaration of watching her roller-coaster flight high above budding maples was short-lived.

I caught and brought into treatment Finch #14 on March 14. Even if I stopped now, I'll still be caring for finches into mid-April. So far, there are four more out there that I've got my eye on. New infections seem to be slowing down. But I'm probably not the one to ask, or to prognosticate. 

I'm still caught in the whirlpool, and I'm swimming as fast as I can.  

Miracle on the Patio

8 o'clock on March 6, 2021, a beautiful  Saturday morning. I'm making breakfast when I look out and see a goldfinch huddled on the doormat. Which says "WELCOME." Well, that's interesting. Not used to having them come to the front door!  I don't even have to lift the binoculars to know this bird has Mycoplasma. Well, I'll deal with that one later. Right now, I'm trying to fit in a little breakfast, in between disinfecting feeders and catching birds and cleaning cages.

With a heavy sigh, I put my little bowl of homemade muesli and berries together, drown it in almond milk, and take it and my sweet boy Curtis Loew down to the --squeeee!--new PATIO! I finally got sick of having to mow in this Godforsaken corner, sick of the mud around the door, and especially tired of having to dig out my hillbilly French drain every time it rained hard and long. Yep, I'd be out there in each downpour, trencher in hand, digging out the little rut from the door to the lower slope of the backyard. I'd clear away the dirt and the trench would leap with water. Otherwise, that water would come straight in under the basement door. It got old. 

So the patio's purpose was manyfold, and it finally went in this January, courtesy Thomson's Landscaping in Marietta, Ohio. Yes, it's a water control system, but it's also absolutely delicious to have a little paved court where I can bask in the spring sun. Curtis has a big old foam pad to lie on. You should see him wag when I suggest we take breakfast on the patio! If I had a tail it'd be wagging, too! I can't wait to plant some nice flowers in the terraced beds--the salvias I overwintered in the basement should do nicely. Then it'll be a hummingbird observatory! Woot!!

Curtis and I were basking, taking a rare moment to relax, when straight down from the sky came a little female goldfinch. It looked just like the one who had been sitting on the front porch earlier. It was clear from the way she flew, her body straight up and down, her wingbeats tentative, her tail spread to brake, that she couldn't see much at all. Poor wee thing!  But look how Curtis watches it, without dashing after it. That, my friends, is PROGRESS with a mountain cur! I didn't have to say a word. He just knew he shouldn't go after this bird. 

A lot of cool stuff happens to me, stuck way back out here in the wilderness. But this was one of the coolest things, and I'm so glad I thought to get video of her approaching me and Curtis. I had to wonder why that little bird, who was feeling so vulnerable and bad, came to my front porch--and then made her way down to the patio where I was sitting. Could she possibly have been trying to get help? Trying to find the lady who had been filling the feeders? Who had picked up so many sick goldfinches and taken them inside? Stranger things have happened. We must never underestimate what birds know, and never assume we understand why they do what they do. 

A bunch of people on my social media feed have asked for a video of me capturing a goldfinch. Well, catching a free-flying wild bird with your bare hands, compromised or not, is NOT something you can really do one-handed while making a video. If I was ever going to be able to pull that off, it was now. I had a blinded finch in a wide-open space. I decided to give it a go. Watch the Gentle Cobra in action!

                

I was shocked at how emaciated and weak this poor wee bird was once I got her in my hand. She was by far the sickest of the now NINE birds I've captured and am treating. Um, make that twelve. So sick that she wouldn't eat, even after her big first dose of Tylan water. So she stayed in the intensive care bin for two days, and I force-fed her nestling formula with a syringe. I was elated when she finally began to self-feed again! Once she was eating on her own and could see, I could put her in the community hospital cage. Except that one was full. 

               

So I let her sleep in the ICU while I prepped another, larger cage that I put in Liam's room. Seeing her put her head under her back feathers gave a pang to my heart.

I went to the crowded foyer cage, which now had six goldfinches binging off its sides, and caught two birds to be her cagemates. Here's a male who was really sick, but he's seeing now and looks so much better! I can tell it's a male because his black cap is coming in. Females don't have a black cap.

And here's a little female who looks really bright! Oh, if you could have seen these birds when they came in just a few days earlier!

The new cage, waiting for more patients. Patio Finch went in here, with a nice window looking out onto where she was caught.

I've taken down all of my tube feeders. I'm keeping only a peanut feeder up so I can, I hope, catch the last few sick goldfinches from this flock. Once I've got them, the peanut feeder will come down. I just cannot continue to feed with this epidemic raging. I don't want my feeding station to be an infection point for innocent birds. 

And so I ask you, if you're seeing sick finches--house or gold--with swollen, closed eyes, please harden your heart and take your feeders down. Allow the birds to disperse. Don't invite them into a place that's teeming with Mycoplasma. They're better off foraging naturally, dispersed and socially distanced. Soak your feeders in a joint compound bucket with detergent and bleach (one part bleach to 10 parts water, or a good healthy glug for a full bucket). Let them soak for 15 min, and soak all parts--flip them over if they're too long to submerge completely. Rinse them and put them away for a few weeks, or--as I do now--  for the spring and summer. You might need to bust them back out for that March or April snowstorm, or that cruel May freeze, and you'll be glad you disinfected them if you do. 

Thank you.

Another Little Patient

She was blind, or very nearly so, and I'd been watching her for a couple of weeks, waiting for the moment when she'd be so debilitated she gave up and sat on the ground. That moment came on a brutally cold morning after a snowy night. As I went to fill the feeders, there she sat, quietly on the snow at the base of a birch. She had given up.

I have no photos of the moment, but this is what she looked like--her eyes pasted shut on both sides.

This poor little creature has taken a sunflower heart from the feeder, and brought it up to the chamaecyparis just outside my studio window to process it. She's too weak to compete at the bustling feeders.

 

 She can see just enough through one slitted eye to avoid capture. Her time will come. I hope I'm there when it does.

What's felling these birds is Mycoplasma, a dread infection better known as house finch disease. And we have house finches to thank for introducing it into the general population of native species. Not their fault--we brought them to the East back in the dark ages, when keeping wild birds in cages was an accepted practice. And when they were released, a tiny founder population of perhaps a hundred birds escaping their crate at a New York airport, they bred and bred. But they were inbred, and they had no natural resistance to the germs they found here. And so it began.

Now, Mycoplasma stalks more than a dozen species, and the list is growing--everything from goldfinches to blue jays.

This bird was incredibly lucky to be picked up by somebody with a $75 bottle of an antibiotic called Tylan, and the resolve to cure her.

She would live in a roomy cage in my bat/bird room for the next three weeks, drinking water laced with bitter Tylan and sweetened with Stevia. :) It helps. 

She hated being caged.

Most of the time she looked like this

but every once in awhile I could sneak into the corner with my telephoto and hope to capture her at rest. Yes, her tail is a mess thanks to bashing it against the wires. Ideally, she should be kept in a nylon, soft-sided cage. I'll get there. Still hobbling along with my archaic old equipment. Trying to do no harm, sometimes failing. Believe it or not, I was able to preen it back into near- perfect shape when I finally caught her for release. No feathers were broken; they were just mussed.

She pigged out on sunflower chips and drank copious amounts of Tylan/Stevia water. Good girl.




For some reason, Blogger gags on my videos. I'll post one, and it's there. Post another, and the first one disappears. Trying to post two at once is nearly impossible. I'll beat my head against Blogger's wall for hours, trying to get these videos to take.

Trying again, after both vanished. Yep. Soon as I get one posted, the other vanishes. Man, that's frustrating. I'm gonna post this quick while they're still both visible. Thought you'd be lifted up, as I am, by the little perchicoree! she voices as I open my hand. She did say thank you. :)



I'm speaking twicet at Wings of Winter Festival, Klamath Falls, OR, this coming weekend, Feb. 15-16 2019! Talking about a snowy owl's crazy journey on Friday, and about baby birds on Saturday. I cannot WAIT. Haven't been anywhere for months. And the birding there is off the hook fabulous! Come see me! See left sidebar of this blog for details!

Release the Goldfinch!

In the two weeks I had the young goldfinch in my studio, she was rarely quiet. She twittered through the day. One of her frequent vocalizations I couldn't recall having heard in the wild. It's the lower-pitched zraayzee call, given a number of times in this video. It's much louder and more emphatic than most of her twitters and twerps.

After hearing it from her, I heard a juvenile give it once, in the yard near the feeders. My guess is that it's a high-intensity contact call. If the bee bee bee twitters are "Hi. Hello. I'm here," zraayzee might be "HEY. HEEEEYYY. WHERE IS EVERYBODY?"

You can see in the video how she's holding her right wing. This pose must give some relief to the healing coracoid and the bruised muscles around it. When I'd see her sit like this, I'd think, "Oh no. I hope I'm not stuck with a goldfinch for the next twelve years." Having had an orchard oriole and a Savannah sparrow each make it to 17 1/2, and a house finch to 9 1/2 years, I know well what a commitment that is.

But we were both on a leap of faith here, and I told myself she'd be OK. There was nothing wrong with her wing--it was just the coracoid strut that needed to knit. (If you need explanation, go back three posts). She'd be able to fly. Well, I hoped so.

When a bird in rehab starts zooming around the cage, making it from the floor to the topmost perch without even trying, it's time for a flight test. I thought about setting up the nylon tent in the garage, but I was afraid I wouldn't be able to catch her if the wing had healed well. I'll never forget setting it up for the eastern wood-pewee I had on two week's rest for the same injury. And then that pewee zoomed around the tent so blindingly fast I had to catch him in flight with well-timed swing of a koi net!! Not. Good. This is the dilemma I face, not having proper facilities. Heck, even at Ohio Wildlife Center, they've been known to flight-test birds  in a long windowless corridor with a rehabber or two at either end. Whatever works. Had I known what was about to happen, I'd have used the back hall.

It can be awkward getting a bird to leave its cage. In this case, since the exit holes were at the bottom, I had to turn the cage over on its side, then coax the bird to leave this unnatural fortress. Goldfinches, as previously noted, are not wrens. They are not the sharpest tools in the shed where spatial relationships are concerned.

When she finally burst from the cage, I was in for a surprise!!

Circling the ceiling 20x = RELEASABLE. I couldn't believe her good luck, my good luck. It was too good to be true!

I'd learned something about a broken coracoid.

1. Given time and cage rest, it will probably heal.
2. If you can't get a wrap to stay on the bird, you might not need it anyway.
3. Flight test it somewhere it can't hurt itself (small windowless room or long narrow hallway)
4. Plan for the best, i.e., not being able to catch the dang bird when you flight test it.

I could not catch that bird, no matter how I tried. It was stressful for both of us. Finally, I had to remove the screen, crank the window wide, and shoo her out.

She didn't go far. She landed in the branches of a small American hornbeam bonsai that lives on a bench just outside the window.  There, she decided to eat salad. While I watched helplessly, she removed all the buds from two of its few branches. I was torn between laughing and crying. When that part of my tree fails to leaf out next spring, I'll remember this moment.

Mmm. Salad. 

Next year's hornbeam leaves, gone to goldfinch fodder.  Watching her denude my poor bonsai did make me realize that there is food everywhere for a vegetarian goldfinch. Maybe that's why they don't need to be all that sharp. No prey to outwit. 

Go on. Find your big world. The dome feeder's hanging out there, full of sunflower hearts. All your friends are in the yard, your parents, too!

Finally she flew into the golden arbor vitae and stayed there in the comforting shade for awhile.

A couple of hours later I saw a young goldfinch with a slight droop to the right wing land on the Bird Spa. After two weeks of living with her, there was something distinctly familiar about this bird.

Two days later I came out the front door and one young female goldfinch barely looked up from foraging. She flew to the arbor vitae, but no farther. Bright eyed, not sick. Just unafraid of her studio companion.  

Rehab doesn't always work out, that's for sure. But when it does, it is very sweet.