Wild Things

My daughter and her children volunteer at wildlife rehabilitation center that is vastly over burdened and dependent solely on donations and volunteers. She travels some distance each week to lend a hand and I told her I would love to help if there was something I could do at home. That’s how I came to have wild birds in my home for a ‘soft release.’ She brings me cages of juvenile birds. They have been robins and finches so far but I lobbied (unsuccessfully) my husband to buy a dog run for the crows.

The birds she brings have been injured, rescued and nursed back to health by others. My part is to place their cages in the backyard with a cloth over the top to conceal them from the sharp eyes of raptors overhead and feed them 3 times a day. The hardest part has been decapitating the mealworms. Live mealworms, swallowed whole by robins, can eat through the crop of the birds thus killing them. At night, I cover the cages and bring them in for protection from nocturnal predators from whom the cages trap them with insufficient security. I do all of this silently, suppressing my natural inclination to coo reassuringly to them that I mean them no harm as they thrash about the cage when I change their water or food dishes. They are WILD THINGS and fear of humans and other predators will serve them well and protect their lives in the real world so feed them & clean the bottom of the cages as quickly and quietly as I can and withdraw, leaving them to become familiar with the sights and sounds of the backyard. I follow this routine for three days and on the fourth day, after they have had breakfast, I open the cage doors and retreat.

I watch them through a window as they chatter nervously and flit about deciding eventually to leave the security of the cage and fly away. I leave food out for a few days while their survival skills are honed. Each young bird has its own personality and are not unlike my own children as they left the nest. One in the group flies out immediately flying quickly up and over the roof without hesitation. Another tentatively flies to a nearby tree, leaps among the branches, flies back into the cage chirping encouragement to another and then the two fly confidently out, up and out of sight. Others linger, flitting with agitated chirping, pausing at the open door and retreating back into the familiar cage and finally flying to a nearby tree. The last timid bird calling desperately for his cage mates finally flies in small bursts from tree to tree and branch to branch, lingering in the yard for sometime and returning for a few days. Eventually, they are all gone.

Out of sight, I watch prayerfully, asking that our God who is mindful of each sparrow that falls, (Luke 12:6) will watch over them, lead them to safe shelter for the night, guide them to find food and alert them to predators. I pray that they will find joy in their freedom and become able and strong and skilled in taking care of themselves. A few days after the first release of six robins, a huge flock of robins noisily descended in my front yard. There were many juveniles searching for worms and bugs on the ground while several adults watched from the trees. Were some of my ‘babies’ among them? I hope so. The young Wild Things are free to fly and struggle to survive. They have no way of knowing some of us caged and nourished them out of compassion and hopes of stacking the odds of survival in their favor. More young birds die from accidents and predators than can be helped; and on the scale of things, our efforts have no effect on the natural world but these small wild things enrich my life.