THE FEEDING OF WILD BIRDS
The biggest bird news currently, of course, is on Monday, June 2nd, at 10:46 AM, Sunny, one of the young eagles we've been watching, ‘flew the coop’. Luckily I saw the event take place. J She just stood there a moment on a high branch, spread wings checking the wind, and then with a little hop, took off. Ohhhh boy! I wonder how much longer it will be before Gizmo takes that giant leap? Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Sunny found her way back to the nest and hung out with her sister for the rest of the day and night.
Meanwhile, Gizmo has been exercising her wings like crazy waiting for that moment when she felt ready to join her sister and parents in the air. This morning (Saturday) she still looked a little hesitant but finally let go only to decide she maybe wasn't quite ready and tried to get back on her perch but slipped and fell, but according to the latest reports, she found her way safely to a nearby tree where she is resting from her first flight experience and at least one of her parents has been seen keeping an eye on her. Whew!
And now on to stories
about feeding wild birds:
My Mom’s best friend who lived across the street was
something of a bird ‘whisperer’ and people used to bring injured or abandoned
birds to her hoping she could do something for them. When I was 15 a woman brought 3 abandoned
baby sparrows to her.
Janie (Mom’s friend) mixed up a concoction to feed them and they grew and thrived until she decided they were ready to join the outside world and gave them their freedom. For the next few weeks they hung around her yard in her trees and when they were hungry they’d fly to her clothesline (remember when we used those?) and cry to be fed.
When Janie’s family was
going on vacation she asked me if I’d feed the birds and showed me how to do it
with a pair of tweezers and for the next two weeks I’d go over 3 times a day to
feed them. If the birds weren’t there,
I’d call them with little chirpy noises and here they’d come, beaks wide open,
ready for food. What a kick!
Gradually they learned how to fend for themselves and didn’t come anymore to be fed. At times, however, if they were within hearing distance and we called them, they’d come flying to the clothesline for a few moments chattering away as if to say “Hi”, then fly off again. So cute.
* * *
In 2001 my husband and I were spending a
weekend at a beachfront motel at Lake Tahoe.
Our room was on the second floor with a balcony overlooking the beach and lake. My husband had brought several muffins and
coffee from the motel's continental breakfast offering to our room for
breakfast. We ate a couple of the
muffins but had a couple left over so I took them out on the balcony and
started dropping pieces of them to the geese, ducks, and seagulls below on the
sand and of course they all scurried to get whatever they could. I noticed one seagull was limping – actually
hopping around on its one and only foot – and was having trouble getting
anywhere near the muffin pieces I was dropping.
I tried tossing some in its direction, but it still couldn’t beat the
rest of the crowd to them.
After a few minutes it flew down to the water’s edge, turned around, and flew straight at me veering off at the last second. He/she did this twice before I figured out what was going on. So the 3rd time, I waited, hoping I’d get the timing right, and at the last moment, tossed a piece of muffin strait at the bird flying toward me and darned if it didn’t catch it in mid flight! And that scenario was repeated until I ran out of muffin.
By then the folks in the
room next to ours had come out on their
balcony watching the fun going on and took over. Who cared about the scavengers down on the
sand when we could have such a fancy airshow!
What a smart bird. Obviously he
or she had used this trick a time or two!
While our next door neighbors were feeding it, then, I took pictures . .
.
It wasn’t until 2015 when
we were at Tahoe on our regular vacation that I began coaxing ducks on the
beach to come eat out of my hand and naming them. This is “Sweetie”, a pintail duck, sitting by
my leg.
2015 was also the summer I
met Daphne, a female mallard who was patient with a very gentle beak - never jumping up or snapping at the food in my hand as some of the other ducks did.
Because of her patient nature
and soft beak and the fact I didn’t have to coax her at all to come to me, I
was pretty sure it was Daphne again the following summer coming to eat out of
my hand.
I don’t know what happened
in 2017? I have no pictures of any ducks
that year. But in 2018 along came Gilly
who took right away to hand feeding. In
fact, she’d come to our canopy and if I wasn’t there, she’d sit down by my chair and wait
for me to show up. J
In 2019 I met Persistent
Pricilla. She was a lively one. She’d stand on my feet and jump at my hand if
I wasn’t fast enough lowering it to her and she did snap and nip at the food – no gentle beak for her!
We didn’t go to the lake
in 2020 because of COVID, so 2021 was the year I met little Rosie who had a
twisted foot making it hard for her to compete with the other 2 ducks I was
hand feeding that summer – both mallards. Rosie was the only pintail and the only one I
named that year, and I fed her off to the side away from the others. It was a bit of a trick keeping them
separated. I had to be quick getting the
food to Rosie and then over to the other two before they tried to horn in when I was feeding Rosie, but I managed to keep them all satisfied and make sure Rosie got her fair share. J
Of course, the best of
them all is Ella, my little pigeon sweetheart who flew into our yard on the
morning of September 9, 2020 seeking water and food and hopped right onto
my arm to eat out of my hand when I offered her some.
And who liked to sit on my
knee when I was reading in my gazebo.
What a bird! Y
:->
La Nightingail
P.S.
Though he wasn't a wild bird, I often fed my little budgie, Shakespeare, by hand just for the fun of feeling his little warm feet 'tickle' my hand when he crawled into it to eat. I miss him so much. It's been almost 5 months since he left us, and I'm finally beginning to think maybe I'd like to have another little bird to love - perhaps a green & yellow one this time, and I'd name him "Murphy". We'll see . . .
Great fun hearing about your bird adventures. Birds are so smart sometimes, as well as always hungry it seems. but considering the amount of energy flying must take I dare say they need lots of fuel. Looking forward to meeting your next lovey...whether Murphy or not!
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing another fun set of your bird stories. I love the idea of a one-legged seagull figuring out how to coax a human to feed it in flight. Gives another explanation to Hitchcock's "The Birds". As for ducks, I have some experience with them as you will read in my post this weekend. When our family first moved to our waterfront home it did not take long before my mother began feeding a few regular ducks. But as weeks went on the flock grew and grew. Soon they were expecting breakfast, lunch, and dinner and my dad was buying 50 lbs bags of cracked corn. Every morning we were awaken by the squawking of dozens of ducks. It got worse when some of the larger feral domestic ducks joined in as they could get aggressive if they didn't get a "fair" share. And I won't go into the very disagreeable mess that ducks leave behind on the lawn. So later that season we stopped feeding them, cold turkey so to speak. The flocks were not troubled much and moved on to find the next naive newcomers to the neighborhood.
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