Ardath Rekha

Good stuff and bad

5/31/09 06:23 pm - Good stuff and bad

First, the good:

-- I babysat Mitchell the baby robin on Friday. Magical. I ended up digging up a whole bunch of worms for him because those are his favorite thing in the world. I will be babysitting him again on Tuesday and Wednesday. GLEE!
-- Shortly after we returned him to his foster parents, we got a phone call; a woman had found a baby starling who had fallen out of its nest and was bringing it to us the next morning to take care of. Said baby starling is a little girl named Star, and she is a sweetheart. She prefers pill-bugs, crickets, caterpillars, mealworms, and grubs. And she's hysterical to watch with them. She's still young enough that I generally pop them into her mouth for her, but she IS trying to figure out how to pick them up herself. So I let her mess with the container a little and she pecks at things and then, when it doesn't work out too well, opens her mouth and begs them to climb in. I can almost hear her saying "Get in mah BELLEH!"
-- 3 As and 1 B. Awesome. :D
-- My mom's birthday today. I got her a book about Christian the Lion, and the Born Free DVD. She loved them. :)

Now, the bad:

-- Wrenched my back a few days ago. Blargh. I'm not sure if all this digging makes it better or worse.
-- Financial Aid office says I have 23 credit hours left to attempt as an undergrad before I must graduate, or pay my own way or something. Ironic given that a number of them were not paid for with any financial aid, but still apparently count against my eligibility. I may wrangle, or maybe not; I really DID want to go half-time in the spring (my final semester) anyway.
-- I just smashed the little finger of my right hand between two bricks while hunting pill-bugs and grubs for Star. Ow. Ow! OW! It's a good thing I'm left-handed, but this is going to make things really tricky for a few days. The nail got cut but should be ok... it'll probably have a clot behind it, though. Fortunately I rarely use that finger to type with... Still. OW.

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5/31/09 09:10 pm (UTC) - nihilobstat

Are you working with a rehabber? lol baby birds are like the bane of my existance. I care about them and all but they are oh-so-needy and I never wanted to be a mom :P

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5/31/09 09:23 pm (UTC) - ardath_rekha

I've been rehabbing wild animals since I was a kid, actually, as has my whole family. Once licensing was needed, my father took the requisite courses... and along the way discovered that our results blew away virtually everybody else's, including the pros. Generally speaking, any animal we get, assuming it's able to survive the trauma that brought it to us in the first place, will -- after release -- assimilate into the local population and stay in contact with us, and will generally outlive the norm for their species.

Probably our most spectacular success was a baby starling with a middle ear infection. We were advised to euthanize but didn't; he recovered most of his ability to balance, became releasable, and lived in the wild for another twenty years. We knew it was him because he still twitched a little, and he'd picked up some human vocabulary while he was with us that he liked to shout at us from the treetops. XD

I actually love the whole "cuddle me for hours mommy!" thing that baby birds do. :) Star is very physically affectionate and would rather perch on my finger, or hand, than on a regular perch (and she'd prefer to perch in my hair to all of the other options!) and she likes to nap on me. Fortunately, I'm a sedentary enough person -- or can be, as needed -- that this is actually fun for me. XD

5/31/09 09:53 pm (UTC) - nihilobstat

Good to know you're licensed. It's a very different experience than what I've had (I work for a professional organization). Here, avoiding habituation is the immediate priority after keeping them alive. We don't do any interaction with them other than feeding them (which often requires wearing disguises or something so they don't imprint on humans). But we don't work with the same type of birds, so I'm not sure what the practice is with starlings or robins around here.

I much prefer working with gulls. They try to rip the flesh off my arm, but at least I don't have to feed them every hour on the hour XD

6/1/09 06:09 am (UTC) - ardath_rekha

LOL, I don't think I could handle not being physically affectionate with them. We actually think that the fact that we do it is what gives our babies such an edge over other rehabbers' charges. Of course, we're not raising the sort that imprint irrevocably on the first creature they see; those generally aren't allowed out of the pros' hands anyway. XD

Gulls are fun. I've never raised a baby but the two injured adults we took in were a blast to work with.

6/2/09 08:27 pm (UTC) - nihilobstat

sorry i didn't reply to this sooner. it's funny, after this post someone here was talking about the difference between your kind of rehab and ours. cos both are very important - we refer starlings/robins/crows/etc to people like you all the time. (we're just seabirds if i didn't say that before - ducks, gulls, pelicans, etc) so it's interesting that you have such a different experience yet it's the same vein of work.

rock on with yo' rehabbin' self XD

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