Laura Erickson's For the Birds

Last week, the DNR office in Grand Rapids sent me a nestful of mystery babies—four tiny, unfeathered mites and one unhatched egg. The people who brought the dismantled nest to the office claimed that the mother had abandoned it. It took all day to find someone driving between Grand Rapids and Duluth, and by early evening when they arrived at my house, they were starvaceous, but still had well-formed droppings, indicating that they had well-formed droppings, indicating that they had eaten that day. They were tiny, and without feathers I wasn’t exactly sure what they were, but suspected by the shape of the beak that they were some kind of flycatcher. It was the unhatched egg that established their identity—it was the lovely shade of pearl without any splotches or flecks, maybe three quarters of an inch long by half an inch wide. More precisely, I measured it as 19x14 mm, exactly the color and dimensions of an Eastern Phoebe egg.

This pretty much confirmed another suspicion of mine. Both male and female phoebes care for the young, and the probability of both parents disappearing at once is remote. I bet some arrogant humans just didn’t want a phoebe family nesting on their porch light or under their eaves and tore down the nest. The fact that there were baby birds inside didn’t stop them, and bringing them into the DNR office probably assuaged whatever guilty feelings they may have had.

But as sure as the sun is hot, baby birds need their parents, and parent birds need their babies. I’ve been feeding them throughout daylight hours for nine days now, taking them wherever I go, but I’m no phoebe, with access to proper baby phoebe food. I use a complicated mixture of high protein dog food and other ingredients and vitamins and minerals, and also a commercial baby bird food mixture, throwing in meal worms and beetles as I can, but they’re growing more slowly under my care than they would have with their real parents.

Once they fledge, I won’t be able to teach them the best techniques for flycatching, or the tastiest and most nutritious insects for eating, or how to get additional protein by scarfing up mosquitoes by the hundreds—they’ll have to discover all that through trial and error on their own. Once they reach the stage of fledging where they’re loose in my yard, I’ll keep feeding them until they’re independent and wild, but this period of dependence will be longer than in natural raised phoebes. My little guys will have to figure out migration on their own, too—they won’t have adults to guide them.

If the babies have a poorer prognosis than they would have with their real parents, imagine the distress of the poor parents, losing their babies. I believe many birds are capable of genuine grief, and in the case of parents losing their young, the loss is exacerbated by the effects of hormones. When nestlings are involved, parents have a fierce drive to search for insects just to stuff into the hungry yellow mouths. If people really did disrupt the nest on purpose, I hope these parent phoebes renest miles away, leaving these ungrateful and arrogant humans to be sucked dry by a host of mosquitoes.