It's story time.
A few weeks ago, someone *cough* was powerwashing the back patio. Why do we powerwash the back patio? We have ducks and chickens, and they like to wander, and they're very generous with their tithing. But I digress. So, someone was powerwashing the patio. When someone *cough* happened to see something that looked like a clump of dirt. So they sprayed it and it rolled under the barbecue.
It turns out that the clump of dirt was alive.
And it was young, and restless. And also a bird.
That's right. We rescued a baby bird, which had fallen out of its nest which is attached to the house near the roof. How birds do that, I'll never know. But its parents didn't appear to care, so we took the bird in.
We cleaned it up and set it up somewhere warm and basically saved its life.
Feeding the bird was interesting; Aubs and I had to make a midnight run to wal-mart to find worms in the fishing section, only to find out that the bird was not interested in worms unless they had the texture that food gets when mommy bird regurgitates it. So we used a blender. Not on the worms, mind you (they were alive, that would be rather cruel and unusual ), but on fruit and nuts and vegetables and grasses and stuff that birds eat. And eat, it did.
The baby bird's eating habits were simple. It cries out every now and then, you approach it, bird opens mouth/beak thing while still simaltaneously squawking, you deposit mashed up food, bird eats, opens up for more, and then decides that it's had enough until 30 minutes later.
Fickle thing, it was.
Anyway, the bird began to grow and mature, like a budding lilac but hungrier. Actually, nothing like the lilac. Forget the lilac.
It grew and grew, and eventually would eat solid foods, like the worms. Although it still relied on us to feed it by hand; it didn't show much interest in food unless you were holding it.
It got to the point where keeping the bird inside was silly. Although we had set it up in a laundry basket next to the window, with a bird swing included, it clearly wanted outside. So we cleaned up the old rabbit hutch and put little unnamed birdy in there. And it seemed happy. I called it Larka, because that sounds like a bird name. But I didn't tell my family that's what I was calling it. They just called it "that bird".
We think it's a European Starling. At least, it kinda looks like one.
One day, Aubrey was playing with the bird outside, and it was perched on her arm. She let the bird go on the lawn, and it was hopping around. Other similar-looking birds came and joined it, and it flew away with them. But it wasn't gone forever. No, it came back.
Whenever one of us went outside, it wasn't long before we hear the tell-tale squawking that by now we recognize as a call for food, and sure enough, there's little birdy, flying up to greet us. It has learned to eat on its own, but it still likes to come up to us and act like it wants more food.
We leave some food and water on the table in case it really is just hungry. I think it just likes attention.
The bird doesn't come up to just us, though. One day we got a call from a neighbor, "there's this bird that's at my window and it's making a lot of noise and won't go away and whenever I go outside it comes after me...is it Aubrey's?"
Aubrey has a reputation in the neighborhood for being the animal girl. Yeah, if you want someone to babysit your goat, call my sister.
The bird might fly at you if you're walking up the driveway. Or walking anywhere around the yard, really. It's quite friendly, and if you're deemed trustworthy enough it will perch on your arm or shoulder or something. It's really fun when visitors come, we can act like we've never seen this bird before and then they're all freaked out that it's so friendly and/or assertive.
It's a hoot!
The bird pretty much sticks close by. Whenver I've seen it fly away, it always goes to this tree:
And it likes to hang out up here in case we open the door and it can come in for a visit:
So there you have it. That's our wildly domestic bird. So if you come to our house and a bird comes out of nowhere, screaming and trying to find somewhere to land on your body with its sharp talons, don't worry. It's not the devil, that's just our starling, introducing herself.
No comments:
Post a Comment