Monday, November 25, 2013

I gave her the bird, literally

What a day.  Convalescing and housebound, with just me and Walter and the birds, lazy day in front of the television with not much going on, just chillin'.

Then the bird hit the window, a big one making a loud thud.  I went to look and saw a female pine grosbeak down in the snow, knocked silly. This happens once in a while and they usually sit there for a minute or two, gather their wits and fly off.  Not so with this one and so I worried and finally went  out, gathered it up and brought it into the house.  I found a way to confine it  and let it warm up but wasn't sure what to do beyond that.
In the picture the bird looks red, like a male, but in real life she was
more of an orange color, definitely female.

I messaged a bird-knowledgeable friend but she wasn't online, so I put a post on an Alaska birding bulletin board called akbirding@yahoogroups to see if anyone knew what could be done.  I joined that group last winter during the invasion of the redpolls. What I was told was that about all I could do is what I was already doing, keep it warm, let it wake up and when it was lively let it go. What is amazing is the number of responses that came back to me.  A dozen people at least responded, all of whom had pretty much the same advice which was what I was already doing.

When I saw the bird standing with her head up I tried to put her outside.  I picked her out of the cooler and she perched on my finger and stayed there. I gently guided her to the top of the wood pile hoping she would fly off, but when she did she just fluttered to the ground.  Not good.  I tried to catch her but she flopped along in the snow into the woods then stopped and I realized I was just stressing her with the chase, and, too, trying to discourage a very curious Walter. 

A few minutes later I went back out and collected her and brought her back inside where she now sits in a cooler with a screen over the top.  I am not optimistic now and I don't want to let her go after dark for the neighbors' cats to have a meal. 

Then as I was trying to figure out what to do next, I received a message from Chris Maack at the Bird Treatment & Learning Center in Anchorage.  I had already received a note about taking the bird there, but the one out where I live isn't accepting injured birds and the TLC is 50 miles away in Anchorage. It doesn't help that part of my convalescence prevents me from driving a car because jerking my neck around could cause serious problems.

Then someone came up with a solution. Someone who volunteers at the center lives near here and can stop on her way home to pick up the bird.  She hoped to be here around 10 after she and her daughter who was returning from college took in a movie first.

Meanwhile about the time the arrangements were being made I had to face a crisis of personal identity. Just coming on TV at the moment, Lady Gaga was due on the Ellen show and the Monday Night Football game was about to start. Not saying which one I chose, but as a hint, the game goes on for two and a half more hours while there was only half an hour of Gaga with Ellen. And, San Francisco won, so, do the math.

Meanwhile the night went on and a little later I  heard from the woman volunteer from TLC and said she was leaving Anchorage and would pick the bird up on her way home about 10 p.m. or so.

The conclusion: As of 10:30 p.m. the woman had stopped by and I gave her the bird which is now on her way to TLC.  By the time she left, the bird was pretty scrappy, squawking and flapping around, so she might make it. Anyway, my work here is done, except to hang the warnings in the windows for them so it doesn't happen again.

Pine grosbeak

1 comment:

  1. Checked the blog to see how you and Walter were doing and hope the grosbeak will do well, too. Heartwarming post, Tim.

    Jerrianne

    ReplyDelete

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The best way to know you are having an adventure is when you wish you were home talking about it." — a mechanic on the Alaska State Ferry System. Or as in my own case planning how I will be writing it on this blog.

"You can't promote principled anti-corruption without pissing off corrupt people." — George Kent

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Why worry about dying, you aren't going to live to regret it.

Never debate with someone who gets ink by the barrel" — George Hayes, former Alaska Attorney General who died recently

My dear Mr. Frost: two roads never diverge in a yellow wood. Three roads meet there. — @Shakespeare on Twitter

Normal is how somebody else thinks you should act.

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Me: Does the restaurant have cute waitresses?

My friend Gail: All waitresses are cute when you're hungry.

I'm not a writer, but sometimes I push around words to see what happens. – Scott Berry

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Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stared at walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. – Meg Chittenden

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. – Franz Kafka

We are all immortal until the one day we are not. – me again

If the muse is late, start without her – Peter S. Beagle

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain Actually you could do the same thing with the word "really" as in "really cold."

If you are looking for an experience that will temper your vanity, this is it. There's no one to impress when you're alone on the trap line. – Michael Carey quoting his father's journal

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. – Benjamin Franklin

It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of. – Shirley Hazzard

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence -- Bertrand Russell

You know that I always just wanted to have a small ship to take stuff from a place that had a lot of that stuff to a place that did not have a lot of that stuff and so prosper.—Jackie Faber, “The Wake of the Lorelei Lee”

If you attack the arguer instead of the argument, you lose both

If an insurance company won’t pay for damages caused by an “act of God,” shouldn’t it then have to prove the existence of God? – I said that

I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. – Eugene O’Neill

German General to Swiss General: “You have only 500,000 men in your army; what would you do if I invaded with 1 million men?”

Swiss General: “Well, I suppose every one of my soldiers would need to fire twice.”

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.—Gloria Steinem

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It is a very simple mind that only knows how to spell a word one way.—Andrew Jackson

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Hunting is a “critical element for the long-term conservation of wood bison.”—a state department of Fish and Game official explaining why the state would not go along with a federal plan to reintroduce wood bison in Alaska because the agreement did not specifically allow hunting

Each day do something that won’t compute – anon

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