Wildlife rescue
Jun. 11th, 2013 06:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
urbpan
It's baby songbird season, and the poor stupid things are everywhere. I call them stupid with a lot of affection. They hatch from tiny eggs, grow ridiculously fast, and are out of the nest in just a couple weeks. Fledglings like this one take the plunge out of the nest and then, unable to really fly, hop around like idiots while their parents fly down and stuff insect larvae into their gapes.
The mortality rate for songbird chicks is up to 75% for some species. As I often tell people, if they weren't supposed to die young, they would only lay two eggs. They get smart or they get dead, and they do it really quickly. Most songbirds are sexually mature after a year or two, if they make it that far they usually live 4 or 5 years total. Exceptional individuals can live 10 or 20 years. I'll state it again at the risk of overstating it: most die young, like within a month of the egg being laid.
In most cases, when a fledgling bird appears to be in distress, my advice is to try to forget about it. Probably the parents are nearby, but with or without their help the baby has a better than 50% chance of dying. Your help is not wanted nor required. But...
The exceptions are those cases when the animal is suffering directly because of human causes. It's appropriate to intervene when a wild animal has been hit by a car, attacked by a domestic animal, or struck an man-made object. Most interventions take the form of humane euthanasias. Few small creatures survive vehicle collisions or the septic bites of domestic cats. Flying into a window is survivable--what looks like a broken neck is the fact that songbirds have twice the number of vertebrae of mammals. Birds that strike windows die of head trauma, not broken necks. Many are simply stunned, and if given a quiet safe place to recover, will come to and fly away.
I was following a feral cat, hoping to chase it off the property. Everywhere the cat went, a flock of grackles followed overhead, noisily protesting. From behind a maintenance building, through the empty dinosaur exhibit, right into a thickly overgrown behind the scenes area. I was grateful to the grackles, because there were times that I could not see the cat at all.
Then I saw this:
It's a fledgling grackle, one wing caught in a kite string in a tree. I decided the cat chasing project was less important (and probably futile) and started working on how to free this bird from its predicament. It was well over my head, and the tree was unclimbable (curse you, buckthorn!). I called my coworker Jim on my walkie-talkie and had him come meet me with a ladder. He climbed up and cut the kite string, and handed the bird down to me.
We brought it back to (this part is important) the animal hospital at which we work, and brought it to the vet on duty. She examined the bird, determined that it's wing was not broken, but the soft tissue was inflamed. She put a bandage on to gently immobilize the wing. She also noted that the bird was thin (you can feel a bird's chest, and the amount of flight muscle around the keel gives you a good idea of body condition). We ended up setting it up in a small cage with food (soaked dry dog food and mealworms) and water and holding it over night. Today my boss brought the bird to the New England Wildlife Center to finish its rehabilitation.
Fledgling grackles always look grumpy.
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