Baby Birds and Mama Springer

I like birds. I'm not a bird watcher who joins bird watching clubs and goes looking for birds...I just enjoy watching them in my yard. And I like helping the ones who need help. Right now I have one inside who has a thorn in his leg and he will see the doctor tomorrow. Another one is in a cage recovering from injuries sustained from a hawk attack. He is healing nicely and will be released soon.

When I moved to my home on it's 10 acres of sage brush with no neighbors for a mile in either direction, I was all alone with only my two dogs . No birds around at all, then one day a lone pigeon showed up and I put some food out for him.

The next day he was back and he had brought some pigeon friends with him. Then more and more came and they stayed . I had a couple of large cages built and eventually the pigeons were roosting at night in the cages...it wasn't long before the cages were too small to hold the growing pigeon flock. They began nesting in the cages and producing baby pigeons at an alarming rate. They are prolific producers ! Next , I built a pigeon house for the now large flock.

I have to admit that pigeon parents are smarter than I am for you see, when they determine that a baby pigeon is defective they put it out of the nest and let it die. It breaks my heart to see a tiny baby bird out of it's nest and freezing to death while the parents continue to ignore it. So I bring the little baby inside the house and warm it up and feed it and try to keep it alive. If the parents have abandoned it then it's guaranteed the baby won't make it...somehow the parent birds knew it wouldn't but I had to learn it the hard way. Even if I do know an abandoned or badly injured bird won't survive I take it inside and at least provide a place where it can pass on in peace and dignity. I guess you could say that as well as an amature bird hospital I provide a bird hospice.

Often times babies will get picked on by other birds and will be injured. It seems the parents don't spend much time caring for the young ones so when I find an injured baby, I bring it inside and take care of it. When I take a baby bird away from it's parents my children say, " mom did a hostile take-over today". In the last couple of years I probably have hand fed and raised well over a hundred little pigeons. When they learn to feed themselves and are old enough to make it on their own, I set them free.

I love to watch the pigeons fly. Being a flyer myself, I find it interesting how they lose altitude when they want to come down and land . Some of them will kind of stair step down, losing a few feet at a time then kind of leveling off and then dropping down a few more feet until they are low enough to land. Some of them will simply bring their wings up together and loose altitude quickly then recover to level flight and then land.

And the landings ! They land just like I do in my gyro...I descend to about 2 to 3 feet above the ground and then I flare the rotor blades . Flaring the blades slows the forward speed and allows the gyro to touch down gently and the birds do the same thing to land . They flare their wings ( always landing into the wind as I do ) and then they touch down gently. Well, the older birds land gently. Sometimes the younger ones will drop in a little hard or bounce on landing. New pilots, you know. But not to worry , they get the hang of it quickly.

It is so neat to see them coming in to land when the wind is blowing because they sometimes hover in the air before landing. Sometimes a couple of birds will fly to me and land on my head or shoulders. The do that especially around feeding time!

Till next time.
Marion Springer