By Bob Copperstone
Empty Bird Nest Grief
It’s taking the orphaned baby robins such a long time to die…
It’s breaking my heart, and I feel helpless, but I don’t know how to save them.
They seemed doomed to die, and to my horror and remorse, I’m partly, if not completely, to blame for their peril.
In a grim ritual, I check the nest every couple of hours, hoping to see the mother robin feeding and warming her babies. She hasn’t returned, though, and the babies are slipping away, weaker and hardly moving.
Yesterday afternoon, soon after I discovered the nest and looked in, they mistook my shadow for their parent, straining their heads upward, with gaping beaks, cheeping frantically for food.
I kept vigil at my window, far from the nest so I wouldn’t cruelly get the babies’ parental expectations up, and hoping to see the mother giving nourishment. As night fell, my panic increased. But the babies spent the night alone, naked to the elements and hungry.
Next morning I looked out the window. My heart sank. No mother yet.
They were still huddled together, terribly weak and barely moving. One of them feebly opened its beak, but just for a second or two, then sagged back down.
The fledglings are in a down-lined nest of soft grasses perched atop some lawn tools under the eaves of my garage, about eye-level. It was an odd place for a nest, but it was camouflaged and just fine, until I blundered in.
I was poking around the tools hanging on the garage wall. I was making a bit of a ruckus and was startled to come across the nest, almost right before my eyes. I didn’t realize until later that a robin, probably a parent, was squawking at me from a nearby rooftop.
I didn’t touch the nest, but it was too late. The damage was done, and the parents undoubtedly abandoned this nest to build a new, safer one, as mandated by their stern mistress, Mother Nature.
My death vigil continued, as I wracked my brain to think what I should do. Maybe the humane thing to do is to end their misery (and mine) myself. But I can’t. I just can’t.
I don’t know the first thing about feeding baby birds, and what if my interference scares away the parents? Would I simply be prolonging their deaths?
It had been about 22 hours since I blundered into their lives and cut off their food supply. All I can do now is watch.
It was cool and drizzling outside. The starving babies were sheltered under the eaves, so at least they could stay dry.
Until they die.
* * *
Epilogue
I’m sorry to say that I had lost track of this sorrowful saga when I was away for a couple of days.
When I caught up, the nest was empty. There were some loose down and feathers on the ground beneath, and the mangled remains of only one of the babies.
There was no way to tell exactly how the babies met their fate, outside of the certainty that a cat or other predator did the dirty deed at the end.
I did feel an uneasy relief that I wasn’t proud of, though, to be shed of the heart-wrenching ordeal. I believe execution by cat would have been the quicker death.
But I’m left with a nagging uncertainty. Did I do the right thing? Should I have fed them? Should I have given them more shelter? Put them out of their misery?
I’ll never know now, will I?
The Cute Little Rodents and How They Stunk
I actually like the idea of mice and a lot of other rodents. They’re cute -- Mickey Mouse cute, sometimes.
I love their ears, their bright, beady eyes, their twitching little noses and whiskers.
When I was about 8 years old, I wanted a hamster pet. Bob Smith, my friend Raymond’s older brother, was breeding and selling them, along with a veritable zoo-full of other beasts and fowl creatures over the years.
If I remember right, he wanted fifty cents apiece, so I bought a couple (It might have been a dollar-fifty per). We scrounged up a cage and exercise wheel and set the hamsters to work entertaining us kids.
Only a day or so later, we thought it would be fun to take them out of the cage to race them along the bedroom wall baseboard.
The hamsters, being basically wild and yearning to be free, took off like rodents out of hell along the baseboards. Like a flash, they immediately ducked into a previously unnoticed mouse hole and were never seen again.
We didn’t even have them long enough to give them names. And we never knew who won the Wahoo 500-Inch Hamster Race.
* * *
As I said, I am fond of hamsters and other rodents, including squirrels, chipmunks, beavers, prairie dogs, porcupines, groundhogs and even rats.
(When he was a kid, my cousin in California, Jack Husebo, persisted in loving the heck out of a pet white rat, even though his mother, my Aunt Betty, was terrified of the species.)
And one time I was rummaging around an old tree stump and uncovered a nest with a mother mouse and four babies clinging to her teats. That presented a quandary. Should I exterminate the pests, babies and all?
As a boy I had spent many summers at my aunt and uncle Clara and Jerry Bartusek’s farm near Ceresco, so I recognized a farmer’s corn-crib enemy when I saw one.
But I didn’t have the blood-lust a farmer might have to destroy a hated foe, so I set about rescuing mama mouse and her babies, who remained attached to the mother even as she scurried away. I scooped the whole family up in a paper cup and moved them safely away.
But in Wahoo one winter a couple of years ago, a mouse incident really tested my feelings about rodents when a family of field mice decided to come in from the cold and set up housekeeping in my newly-purchased home.
A creature-killing frost was looming, and I was really conflicted about my uninvited squatters.
I decided to cohabit with my little intruders. After all, how much can they eat? (Answer: Everything they can get their cute, thieving little paws on).
If I stayed very quiet at night, watching television, a mouse would venture out to forage for crumbs on the carpet, or I’d catch a quick glimpse of it scurrying about. Kind of entertaining, actually.
That kept on for a few days, and I was getting used to my new roommates. Maybe this could work out after all.
Unfortunately, the first little guys began to sublet their new boardinghouse to numerous others of their kind.
One day I moved the toaster, revealing a mess of damp, chewed paper nesting, sprinkled generously with the cutest turdlets and accompanying dribbles, along with the darlingest stink.
I finally had to face the fact that I no longer had a friendly real estate arrangement with a rodent -- I had an infestation.
The rear of the refrigerator top yielded a similar cache of excrement, and then I knew the mouses’ lease was up. I couldn’t continue to patrol the house carrying a bucket of soapy water, Pine-Sol and bleach, looking for nests.
So I served an eviction notice in the form of some ingenious d-Con traps, which did the job neatly and odorlessly.
I feel badly about it to this day, but a landlord’s gotta do what a landlord’s gotta do.
To my chagrin, a house-wide cleanup crew after the eviction revealed that the mice had headquartered in a large, damp nest in the bowels of the sofa I always lounged in and sometimes slept on. I hired Fonzi, a local handyman, to bust up the now-ruined sofa and haul it away.
I know d-Con is probably cruel, as it causes internal hemorrhaging and a long, drawn-out death for pests, but it saves me from seeing the mangled, rotting mouse carcasses and evidence of the death throes. The dCon is also odorless and relatively safe for pets and babies.
However, I didn’t fully escape the unpleasant aspects of the extermination task, as I had hoped.
One day about a year later, to my lip-curling horror I discovered a tightly rolled ad magazines behind the living room sofa.
I unfolded the newsprint pages to reveal the dried-out, mummified but odorless corpse of one of my former tenants. It had crawled in there to die, just as the d-Con ads promised they would.
The dreaded chore is behind me now. Each autumn I take the coward’s way out with ample d-Con applications to avoid direct mouse-to-me contact. No more seasonal mouse-nest stink, either.
But I have a tiny twinge of remorse for the many mousie deaths I am responsible for. I have just enough guilt to imagine being haunted by their Disney cartoon-image ghosts.
When I die and, with luck, go to heaven, I can only hope that the humans’ paradise is far away from mouse heaven.
I don’t want to be revenged by the ghosts of my former rodent roommates who undoubtedly carry a hefty d-Con grudge against their evil, murderous former landlord.
Share this post