Letters To Michelle

Dr. Burgwardt is not only a veterinarian and a licensed wildlife
rehabilitator, but also a member of a club called "The Wheelmen."
(www.thewheelmen.org ) Members of The Wheelmen restore and ride antique
high-wheel bicycles and get together annually in different locations for the
annual National Meets of their club. At the end of the 2005 National Annual
Wheelmen Meet in Salisbury, Md., a young member named Michelle (age 10) found
some orphaned baby birds. Dr. B. took the babies to try to raise them. The
next year at the National Annual Meet in Waterloo, Ontario, Dr. B. got
Michelle's email address to send her pictures telling the whole story of what
happened next. Here is the story Dr. B. sent to Michelle:

Hi Michelle!

Sorry I haven’t had time to send this to you since getting your email address at this year’s Wheelmen Meet.  Do you remember the baby birds you found as we were all leaving the Meet in Salisbury, Maryland last year?  There were two of them, but one was very tiny and just hatched.  Neither one had any feathers yet.  You wanted to keep them but your Mom and I explained that they are very hard to take care of and most of the time the ones that are that little when they get orphaned don’t make it.  But I am a veterinarian and also a wildlife rehabilitator, so I have a lot of experience with knowing how to take care of birds that small, so I took them with me to try to raise them.

The littlest one didn’t live very long—he had some injuries from falling from the nest onto the concrete.  But the other one did great!  We named him Silas Sparrow from Salisbury—or just Silas for short.  I’m going to send you some pictures of him now so you can see how he grew up.

First, here are the two babies in their artificial nest (the paper cup lined with paper towels we put them in at Salisbury).  The nest is on top of a container of hot water to help them stay warm while we traveled.  Next to that is the dish of special baby bird food and the syringe with no needle that was used to put that food deep into their mouths at feeding time.  Notice that their eyes are tiny and closed, most of their skin is pink, bald, and see-through-thin, but they have some dark areas where the feathers are being made deep in their skin and are just starting to poke through.  Baby birds have a hole in the roof of their mouths and have to keep their heads up or else the liquids from their stomachs can creep up their throat and into their mouths and get inhaled into their lungs.  This is part of the reason why bird nests are so small and the baby birds always look so cramped and crowded in them—the edge of the nest props up their heads so they don’t inhale things but rather things go down their throats and STAY down!  The other reason nests are so small is that without feathers, baby birds lose heat very fast and can die of hypothermia (getting too cold) very quickly—keeping the babies crowded close together helps them share body heat and stay warm.  When we raise baby birds by hand, we know we are not as good as their real mother or their natural environment, so we have to find other ways to help them stay warm and keep their heads up as much as possible.  The yellow beak on the right is Silas.  The tinier pale yellow beak on the left is the much-smaller and very weak other baby that didn’t make it.

Next is a picture from a few days later.  Now we were home and down to just Silas.  His artificial nest is now inside a cardboard box that sits on a heating pad, and the box helps prevent drafts.  Silas has now learned to “gape”—that is, to open his mouth to beg for food to be put into it.  Normally they just do that for their mother, but he has already learned that food comes from me now, and when he sees me, he gapes—even when he’s already HAD some food—you can see some deep down in his throat but he is still gaping for more!  Baby birds eat a LOT and eat very often—every 15-20 minutes at this age, but at least they stop at night!  Unfortunately they START before the sun is even up, so you have to be ready to start feeding them VERY early!  Notice how much his feathers are already coming in?

One more thing to notice in the picture above—there is bird poop in the box but not in the nest.  Baby birds poop over the side of the nest so that they don’t get the nest dirty while they still have to live in it.  When baby birds are hand-raised, sometimes the paper towels get in the way and they get pooped on and have to be replaced.  But in the wild it is a very clean system to have the baby birds keep it out of the nest.

The next picture was taken right after that one, and it shows how see-through the skin is in such little baby birds like this.  That is my hand holding Silas after he was fed and you can see the big glob of yellowish-white food he has swallowed showing through the side of his neck.  Birds have a pouch inside the bottom of their neck to store extra food after their stomach is full.  The pouch is called the crop.  When the stomach is finished with the food it has in it, the food from the stomach moves along into the intestines and now the food from the crop can move down into the stomach.  We feed baby birds until their crop is full and then we have a little time before they need to be fed again.  So here is Silas with a full crop.

One of our dogs—Jackie—was sure that I needed some help changing the paper towels in Silas’ nest! 

At home, I had a smaller syringe than we had when we were traveling—this one feeds Silas very nicely!  The mother bird puts the food she brings for her babies way down deep in their throats, and that’s the best way to feed them when we hand-raise them.  This picture was taken several days after the previous ones—look at how fast his feathers are coming in!  And look how much bigger he is compared to the size of his “nest”!  He also is very bright-eyed and alert and is starting to have a very cute personality at this age!  Whenever he gets fed now, he flutters his wings as he gapes to beg for the food.  Baby birds do that and their parents then feed them.  If you watch birds out on the lawn or at a feeder in the summer, you will see some birds follow others around and then crouch down, flutter their wings and open their mouth toward another bird that just found some food.  These are babies that have left their nest and are still following their parents around, learning how the parents find food.  After awhile the parents stop putting food into their babies’ mouths and start making them have to feed themselves!

Look, Ma!  I can perch!!!  Baby birds are down in the nest when they are really young, but as they get older, their legs get stronger and able to hold them up and grasp with their feet.  Holding onto something with the feet and standing on those feet is called perching.  Silas is perching on the edge of his nest, and obviously doesn’t think he needs the nest anymore—he pooped in it!  He’s not ready to fly yet, but he’s not a little baby anymore!  It’s time to let him exercise those legs and get them stronger.  Once he is released, he will be perching ALL the time.

“Hey, Ma!  I don’t even need that silly box anymore!  I want to be up and out and see the world!”

“But I still expect all my meals on time!  Come on, Mom, where’s my food?!  I’m a hungry birdie!”  Notice how you can see into his mouth and you can see that hole in the roof of his mouth—it is a normal hole called the choana.  It has edges that look like prongs along both sides—they are actually very soft projections of the kind of tissue inside the mouth, and they are called papillae.  They help keep food from getting up into that hole and getting inhaled.  And look how thick his feathers are getting!  No need for a heating pad for him anymore!

Time for a cage now!  In the wild he wouldn’t need to be caged, obviously, but since we humans aren’t as good at mothering baby birds as their real mothers would be, we have to do things a little different.  He’s not really ready to fly yet—notice how short his tail feathers are.  They are needed for balance in flight.  In the wild, if a baby leaves the nest too early, its mother can follow it around to feed it and help it learn to fly while it is not yet good at it.  She can also help him deal with predators to some extent.  But when humans raise the baby and it tries to leave the nest too soon, we can’t be with it every minute and teach the same way its real Mom can.  The cage makes sure I know where he is when it’s time to feed him, and that he’s not getting found by one of the dogs or getting into a place like the dishwasher where he could get hurt.  He can’t really practice flying in it, but he can flap his wings to exercise them, learn how to hop from perch to perch and to the floor, practice getting around, and get used to a little more of the world than just the little nest that used to be all he knew.  On top of that, I can now leave food and water for him to practice pecking and using his beak and learn how to eat and drink a little on his own.  The water dish has to be shallow, because some baby birds are clumsy and get into the water dish and drown or get all wet and get too cold.

Being in a cage is also a good and safe way to let Silas learn what the outside world is like.  Normal baby birds grow up seeing and hearing all of the sights and sounds out there.  But a hand-raised baby has no idea what that is like!  You wouldn’t raise a child entirely inside the house and never let them meet anyone or watch TV or listen to the radio or go outside until they are 18 and then suddenly open the door and say, “Well, there you go!  Goodbye and good luck!”   They would have no idea what the world is like or how to live out there!  So Silas needs a chance to see what sunlight is, and the sky, and trees and grass and other birds and animals, but we don’t want him to be in any danger while he is overwhelmed with learning all that’s new to him!  So Silas got taken outside for a lot of the time now that he was in a cage.  And I would go outside to his cage every hour or so and feed him, so that he would learn that there is food in this area.  This way, after he gets released, since we know it will take him awhile to learn how to find food for himself, he will know where to come for food when he is hungry.  Here he was excited to see me coming to feed him—notice how he has his wings stretched out to flutter them in excitement as he begs for his food!

It was hard to get close-up pictures because they came out blurry, but here’s one pretty close….

“Hey!  Mom left my cage door open!  Oooooh—but that’s a very big, scary world out there!”  As he is ready for it, Silas can start venturing out and exploring, knowing that he can always come back to the place he is familiar with—his cage that he has called home.  Notice he has longer tail-feathers now. 

“Look, Ma!  I’m in a tree!  Hey, did you bring me any food?  This exploring stuff really makes me hungry!”  This tree is right next to the fence and rock that his cage was left near.  Silas’ next step was to get used to trees instead of his cage, starting with making this tree his new “familiar territory” that he could learn to recognize and come back to if he needed my help while he was learning how to live in the real world on his own.  I made sure I went out and fed him there a lot at first.  When he explored further and further away, I would always come back to this tree when I brought out food for him and call him to come back to it as his feeding station.

“Look, Ma!  I’m getting up into the higher branches now, learning how to grasp and perch on a wide variety of branches!”  Sometimes it was hard to find Silas—I’d hear him answer me when I called to him, since he considered me his Mom and answered, but sometimes I’d have to really search to figure out exactly where he was calling back FROM!!!

“FEED ME, MOM!  I’ve been out exploring all week and I’m HUNGRY!!!!”  Silas started getting around easier and easier as it became natural for him to fly and explore and find his own foods to eat, but like any baby bird, he still wanted his Mom to just give him a handout of food instead of him having to work to go find it!  As he got very nimble and good at flying and landing, he no longer came to the tree for his feedings, but rather flew right to the grass at my feet as soon as I came out the door.  He’d gape and flutter and get fed and then fly away, as if he had a busy schedule he had to get back to—learning about this great big exciting world!  I came out to feed him less and less often, forcing him to have to find more and more food on his own and get less and less dependent.  And as he started having less need for the feedings, he started to stay further away from me, getting more and more wild.  Notice how, even though he’s begging like a baby in this picture, he’s also looking more grown up—not so much the fluffy baby feathers but rather a sleek and smooth bird with long wing and tail feathers.

I got one last good picture of Silas.  He got to the point where he’d still come to me for feedings out of habit but then wouldn’t come close enough to be fed.  Then for awhile he’d still answer me when I’d call to him, but wouldn’t come to our feeding place, then gradually he stopped answering me.  A very successful release!  I don’t like releases where they come back for the first couple of feedings then suddenly disappear, because you always wonder whether they made it or not, or if some predator or accident got them.  It is better to see that they gradually become independent like Silas did, so that I know that the reason he stopped coming back is not because anything bad happened to him but rather because he gradually stopped needing a Mom’s help.  So long, Silas!  Have a happy life!

Michelle, I hope you know that without you, Silas would not have made it!  Baby birds that young die very quickly lying on cold cement.  Because you cared enough to pick up those baby birds and because you were smart enough to make sure they got to a person who knew how to take care of them properly, Silas got to live and to grow up.  So this whole story was made possible by YOU!  I hope you will always care about those who need help, and even if you can’t do everything they need, you can at least do your part of what it will take to make a difference for them.  I hope you know the story of the boy on the beach throwing starfish back into the ocean—if you don’t know it, ask me and I will tell you that story. 

I hope you enjoyed seeing Silas grow up and get released.  If you have any questions about this, feel free to ask me.

Meanwhile, keep riding high!

Doctor B