Best Plaid Plans

I had my weekend all mapped out. Saturday morning: Cycle 45 miles with friends. Sunday: Birding at Nelson Lake, rain or shine. My plan was to ride the mountain bike and bird the vast western stretches of the prairie to see what sparrows might be in town...

I definitely got the bike ride in on Saturday. But it's amazing how you can cover a distance that far and see so few birds. We passed wetlands and flooded fields, sunshiney woods tinged with new green buds and fine, palatial homes out in the middle of nowhere. But very few birds. 

Perhaps it's a question of focus. When you're doing your best to keep your front wheel five inches from the back wheel of the guy in front of you, it's a little hard to keep an eye out for kestrels. 

So I figured on catching up on April migrants Sunday morning. 

But then, in the middle of Saturday afternoon, our neighbor called me over. Her son had found a small gray baby bird on their driveway. It was barely larger than my thumb and sported a head of gray fuzz and the early makings of feather quills tipped in white sheaths. Parts of its body were still naked. It looked reptilian and seemed to like the fact that my hands were warm. It nestled down and didn't make a peep when I scooped it up to hold.

"What can we do with it?" the mom who lived back door asked in a voice as beseeching as it was curious. The neighbor boy wanted to see the bird survive. "I'm not sure right now whether it has a chance or not," I admitted. 

My wife and I were in the middle of a series of backyard projects, so we plopped the bird in a shoe box where for the most part it hung out and didn't make much noise. Finally I grabbed a worm from the garden, split it into pieces with my fingers and offered it to the baby bird. It snarfed down several lengths of worm and was still begging for more. I did not know if you could overfeed the thing, so I stopped after one small worm. 

By late afternoon my photographer daughter had taken photos and videos of our little guest and sent them to her most sensitive friends. "Awwwwwwwwwwwwwww! one of them wrote back. "I'm coming over!"

She spent an hour or so trying to feed the hungry little beast. It has a bright yellow bill and red throat. There's not a mother bird on earth who could resist such a craw. Neither could my daughter's friend. But the bird finally fell asleep in our shoebox and stayed that way all night.

My wife asked: "Do you think it will still be alive in the morning?"

"No way of knowing," I told her. "I raised a robin when I was a kid and it was a ton of work, that's all I know."

I could not tell the species of this bird. I'd searched all the nearby bushes when we found it, looking for a nest. Then I inspected the blue spruce under which it had been sitting. Seeing a chickadee flitting about in the branches above me, I wondered if this little bird could be a chickadee chick. Perhaps it climbed out of a nest cavity and tumbled to the ground. 

I also wondered if it could have been carried there and dropped by a predator. More than once I've seen crows raid songbird nests and carry off young twitching in their bills. 

We looked all around the yard for nests. A few neighbor kids and I then walked four blocks to one girl's house where she'd seen nests in the trees along her street. There were two nests alright, both from last year. 

My thinking was that any bird would raise the little chick if you got it back into a nest. This was admittedly not a theory based on any scientific knowledge. I'd heard cowbirds in our neighborhood the day before and figured if it worked for them it might work for me. So my initial plan on rising Sunday morning was to combine my Nelson Lake birding trip with a search for a host nest for the orphaned bird.

This plan became a little less desirable when rain clouds started to form on my way out to Nelson Lake at 7:00 a.m. It occurred to me there was no chance in hell of finding a suitable nest. Frankly I have not yet even seen an active robin's nest this year. I also realized the bird in the shoe box was probably a house sparrow. It's begging call sounded similar to the adult "scheep scheep" of an adult house sparrow. But then, might evolution have somehow have contrived to make all baby birds sound alike, just in case?

Rescuing a house sparrow actually seems a bit illogical to me. I've read that people kill house sparrows nesting in bluebird boxes and martin houses. English sparrows can be a pest. But I have nothing against them personally or ornithologically. I've learned to be less judgmental on all species. "Good or bad," common or uncommon, they are part of the bird world. Even the starling at the top of this blog looks rather dapper, don't you think? I can see why some daffy Englishman imported them to America, hoping to bring the birds of Shakespeare to life on the New Continent. We daffy humans. Always messing about with nature. 

Actually I am equivocal in my philosophy about rescuing birds at all. Even the great horned owls that nested in a tree on the Kane County Court House lawn did not gain my sentimental favor. A couple times their young wound up in a window well, and I thought, "That's because the parents are stupid. They should not be nesting where the safety of their young is at such risk. That means they should not survive."

But I know there are dedicated people who figure wildlife gets such a raw deal from people that it is our responsibility to help orphaned or injured wildlife. This is the God instinct in us. Never mind that the process of evolution has killed off 99% of all living things that ever existed. Our view that "life is precious" separates us from the real fact that nature is not always kind. Nature is benign to all that at best. But the perception that nature is cruel is also our impetus to impose human emotions on circumstance, which rules all. We live in a random material universe, but it is our choices that determine the order of our emotional world. 

That is why I drove 12 miles out to the Fox Valley Wildlife Center with that cheeping little bird in a shoebox. I'd promised that little boy next door (and his mother) that his bird would be safe. There were a few moments yesterday when I thought it would be better (and frankly more naturally just) to let the bird die, make its way as a meal or back to carbon where we all belong.

Instead I woke early and zipped past the Dick Young/Nelson Lake Forest Preserve sign on my way to Elburn. I actually followed the forest preserve ranger from Johnson's Mound out Hughes Road to 47, then up to Route 38 and over to Elburn. He unlocked the gate at Elburn and I parked my car and birded there for 45 minutes because  the FVWC does not open until 8 a.m.

I left the bird back in the car and rode my bike through the dank morning light to find bluebirds, an Eastern Towhee singing high atop an oak tree and kinglets everywhere. A pine warbler paused in the oaks, and there were yellow-rumped warblers too. We called them Myrtle Warblers when I first went birding in Elburn woods 39 years ago. I was a kid, just learning my birds with my brothers when we happened upon a Myrtle Warbler and a White-throated sparrow on the railroad tracks in the fog. It was a magical moment. The reason you keep birding is moments like these, especially at the beginning. Such gorgeous, beautiful things, these birds.

When I got back to the car it was time to deposit the bird with the FVWC. The young gal working the receiving station was so patient and non-judgmental about my humble cargo. "We know their diet," she told me. "Generally these birds need to eat every 10 minutes."

I pulled money from my wallet knowing that it was only half the minimum suggested contribution. My relationship with FVWC goes back a few years. One of the organizers used to call me when she had rehabilitated birds to release. "Where can I find some cedar waxwings?" she once asked. "I have one to release and I want it to find a flock of its own kind."

The question stumped at the time, and it stumps me still. Cedar waxwings are highly mobile birds. Unless you know a berry tree where they like to hang out, there is no way to predict where they might be on a given day. Even if you released a rehabilitated bird near a flock of other waxwings there is no guarantee they would have any beneficial effect on the released bird. 

There is no question wildlife rehabilitators do good work. After man-made tragedies like oil spills, there is no substitute for rehabbers who clean birds and get them back into the wild. 

But there is a chance we recognize that all our environment is now a man-made tragedy. That's the statement we might be forcing ourselves to accept by saving even the tiniest bird from its natural demise. And because a little neighbor boy needs to believe that some good can come from an act of kindness.