On the last day of their visit, Jaden and Kyler found a baby bird in the street in front of my house!  It was definitely too young to fly.  It looked like a baby robin.

We all knew that it probably wouldn’t survive, and it would be best to just set it off in the bushes and not think about it too much.  But  – sigh – it was impossible to ignore.  It kept making hungry demanding noises.  So we fed it.  With tweezers.

We tried worms, but it was not interested in wiggly food, so we checked online and switched to a mixture of wet catfood and mashed up strawberries.  The baby bird loved this, and would point his little yellow beak straight upward, open wide, scream PEEP at the top of his little feathered lungs, and devour catfood by the pinchful.  Every twenty minutes…

It was supposed to get cold that night, and there are outdoor cats all over the neighborhood, so I set the bird up in a box on the porch overnight.  We padded the box with leaves and grass, and I filled an old gym sock with rice and heated it up on the microwave, to make a little heater for the baby.  The next morning he was snuggled up next to the sock, with his ugly little head tucked under his grubby wing.

I checked with the local nature center and some animal rescue places, and quickly learned that 1) he was a mockingbird, 2) there was nothing wrong with him whatsoever and he didn’t really need to be “rescued,” and 3) he was going to be in big, big trouble with his parents, who’d probably been wondering where the heck he was all night.

I had been under the impression that baby birds leave the nest when they are ready to fly; they assured me that in fact, some birds boot the babies out of the nest when they are ready to hop, and then the parents just keep track of where the babies have hopped to, and fly back and forth to feed them and keep an eye on them, until they can fly.  The little birds are vulnerable, but certainly two adult mockingbirds are more than a match for the average neighborhood cat.

Basically, he wasn’t a baby who got lost – he was a teenager who stayed out after curfew.  So, with some trepidation, I turned his box sideways (so he could hop out when he was ready) and put him back out in the yard.  I waited on the porch to watch for cats, just in case.  It wasn’t half a minute before both parents were perched on top of the box, alternately scolding him and feeding him bugs.  They flew back and forth to his box all day long, and by evening he was gone.

I miss my little bird, though.  Every little mockingbird I see now, I think, “Maybe that’s him!”  And maybe it is…