You Are Not My Baby! Eek!

THE CARDINAL’S NEST

July 6, there is a small mystery bird at the vet. I do not want it. All my birds have flown out my window and I am done for the season. I will spend time with my children. My middle child starts school this year, something I never foresaw. I want to come up against the last five weeks of him exactly how he is, before school begins the process of growing him up and taking him from me.

I do not want the small mystery bird.

I am happy enough with a cardinal tending two babies in a shrub outside my window. I know all about them because I have checked on the nest every day since I found it, when it housed only eggs and the buff bird with the orange- red beak. It was her beak that brought my eye to the rest of her and her efforts.

True to last year’s cardinals’ domestic expertise, when they put their nest in the wisteria vine above the gate, not six feet from the ground, and the cat killed all the babies as soon as they hatched; this time they placed their broodery in a Rose of Sharon at the end of the gravel driveway, at eye level when I stood on the cooler. It was loosely woven and insecurely held in a careless collection of vertical branches.

We were not going to lose our babies this time. I wanted lots of lipstick colored birds flapping around my house. I decided to improve on Nature.

The first thing I did was clip off the tops of the tall branches, allowing the plant to pull itself, nest and all, back under the protective eave of the house. It wouldn’t do the have the babies getting a sunburn, or worse, drenched and blown out of the nest and onto the sharp gravel in a summer storm. Then I took a bungee cord the size of a wormsnake and connected the branches a little below the nest, a preemptive strike against one deciding to reach a different way and causing the nest, no longer in perfect balance, to fall victim to a whim of gravity. Our nest was safe and secure.

I still didn’t want to care for another orphaned bird. I wanted to see my kids without running from them with wet dog food and mealworms, yelling behind me “I’ll do it for you in just a minute, I’ve got to feed the babies……..”.

It was suggested that perhaps the Cardinals would take him in. I mulled on it for a second then decided that it was a wonderful idea. Think of the pictures! Cardinals will feed anything! The bird will get cared for and I’m off the hook! The next thing I knew the bird delivery man showed up in his new silver Volkswagen Beetle, flower vase, flower and all. We poked the naked baby in with his two foster brothers and waited for Mama to return.

She flew back and all was well. No screams, no shouts, no kicking him out with her small- clawed tridents. She just settled in and fed everyone, business as usual. And in her newly improved home. I could not have been prouder.

Until the next morning when I stood on the red cooler to admire my hatchling triumverate, only to find its number reduced by one. A frantic search of the ground found nothing. And worse, there was one of each style in the nest. I had no idea who was what. I wanted to remove the implant, but I couldn’t identify it. I thought about taking them both so at least there wouldn’t be another incident, but that would be kidnapping. I decided that since the nest population had returned to its original number all was well in the universe and there was nothing left for me to do except enjoy watching this unmatched set grow up together like true brothers. The Mama returned to the nest and fed.


I checked them before I went to bed, and again at three in the morning. They were fine, although the mother wasn’t with them. Are they like people? “Honey, the kids are asleep, let’s sneak off to the other nest”.

I checked them at eight in the morning and there was no them, just him, and an apparent landslide in the nest. It looked like the lost baby was just poured out. I obviously didn’t intervene enough with the architecture upgrades. Again, a frantic search of the ground returned nothing. Once again, my tampering with Nature paid off, but for the God of Hubris, not for me or Nature.

I found myself in the midst of a roiling mass of questions:

Which bird is left?

Is she practicing infanticide or is she a victim?

How did my nest cam fall down?

Would this have happened to her two chicks had I not invaded?

Is my idea about reinforcing the nest a good one?

Will the last baby disappear tonight or should I take it and save it from the unknown?

Would that be kidnapping?

Why am I doing any of this?

I took the baby in and fed him. In the meantime I made a shallow drawstring bag from some rubbery shelf liner, put the nest it and secured it to the shrub framework in many places. Nothing would be falling out of that nest again. I put the baby back and checked hourly. He was always fed, but I never saw the mother near him.

The next day was the same. Success!

Doom didn’t strike from another 36 hours. I checked on him and he was unhappy. More feathery than when he arrived, and obviously well fed, he stood in his nest, looked at me and cried. All day, whenever I checked he was alone, standing on his tip-toes, crying.

That’s it, I decided. She dumped him. He’s mine now. I got the mystery bird I didn’t want, and helped lose another clutch of cardinals.

I took him in and fed him, and he quit crying. I went back out to see what the Cardinals were doing. “Chip” from the trees, “chip” from the bushes, “chip” from she sky. A terse, discreet, reticent sound. Over almost before it begins. As if they regret having to say anything at all. The male and female talk to each other all day like this, sifting their tiny cheeps out of the rest of the summers hedgerow cacophony. So different from the baby’s loud, demanding, plaintive cry. And then it dawns on me. The cry is what gave him away a non-cardinal, an imposter, and sealed his fate as a bird that would be raised by a human.

July 22 - In sixteen days the little orphaned mystery bird has become a respectable sparrow. Gone are the days last week when he jumped onto my hand to get a bite.

He spent the day in the flight-pen today. When I brought him back inside he had already forgotten that he was raised by me, a large mystery animal without feathers or beak.

I have heard people say that when babies are born they forget past lives. I think that when wild birds that have been raised by humans discover their wings they do the same thing.

THE END

LINK GRAB BAG!!! DIVE IN!{/red}

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