cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In for a Penny, In for a Pound. The story of the fledgling sparrow unexpectedly continued after work on Friday. On leaving the office I thought I'd better look around for the bird and see how he was doing. Long story short, I found him laying down in some ground cover with his eyes swollen shut and a disturbing number of red ants crawling over his body. The bird was clearly badly dehydrated. To their credit, the parents had been fussing over him right up until I walked out into the courtyard and scared them off. Yet it was perfectly clear that their attentions at this point would not be enough and the bird would be dead by dawn. I gently picked him up and brushed the ants off of him. We went back into the office where I found a cardboard box to take him home in. On arrival the kids were fascinated with him. They thought it was marvelous that I had brought this baby bird for them to see. It was the best thing going since the rescue of Squeak the toad last month. I emptied a 20 gallon storage bucket of its toys and set it up in the living room with a towel at the bottom where I set the bird down. The first thing to do was to treat the acute state of dehydration. I sent Trish to the grocery store to get some Gatorade (to restore electrolytes) while I gave him a bit of water. The way to do this is to put a few drops on the top of the bird's beak so that he can sort of suck it off at his own pace. If you try to put the water directly into the bird's mouth then you risk putting some down the wrong way and giving the bird pneumonia. Within 90 minutes or so I'd gotten a fair amount of water and Gatorade into him. The red discoloration of his neck abated and he became more active. I mimicked the call that an adult sparrow makes to its young and he answered. We went back and forth like that for a while. The eyes distrubed me. It was not clear whether the eyes were just swollen shut or if the cornea had actually dried out and permanantly blinded him. If he was permanantly blinded then obviously there could never be any hope of reintroducing him to the wild. I tried to get him to eat a variety of things and he wasn't having any of it. First I tried some dog food soaked in water at room temperature (this is what any professional wildlife rehabber would usually do). Then several different species of moths. He had no interest in any of it. The best I could do was get a few calories into him by dissolving a bit of dog food into the water I was giving him every 30 minutes or so. Incidentally, I was in horrible pain the whole time with the tendons in each elbow mercilessly swollen and sore. A storm blew in suddenly and the power was knocked out. Yet again, I was well prepared with the flashlight that I keep in my pocket at all times which I am so often mocked for bothering to carry. Trish and the kids went to her parents' house for the night, in part because our well and pumped septic system does not function without electricity. I stayed at home to look after the dogs and the fledgling sparrow. It was good to see that the bird responded quickly to the shift to darkness by tucking his head and going to sleep. Which told me that his eyes were at least functioning enough to tell light from dark. I woke up around dawn on Saturday morning to the sound of the sparrow chirping. I gave him water and tried some food on him again unsuccessfully. The good news was that by 10 am one of his eyes had opened very slightly and I could see him blinking a bit. Birds need a tremendous quantity of calories proportionate to their body weight. They have very fast metabolisms and particularly such a young animal that is still feathering out and growing has need of a constant flow of protein and calcium. For a fledgling to go several days without eating is probably a death sentence. So I decided that something had to be done right away. I called in a pro. A few minutes with google found me a network of licensed wildlife rehabilitators. I called them and left a message and about an hour later I got a call back from a woman who told me to bring him by. She said that she suspected bacterial conjunctivitis to be the culprit behind the swollen eyes. It was a longish drive to her house with the sparrow. Ironically, she happened to live only a few miles from a wildlife management area where I have hunted doves half a dozen or so times. I stopped at a grocery store to buy a big bag of puppy food along the way, because wildlife rehabbers always need more of that and I didn't just want to drop off a new responsibility for her without giving her some kind of assistance. And there I left him. I walked up to the porch with its row of large cages holding talkative crows and a morose dove and I rang the bell and we said a few words and I gave her the dog food and the sparrow and that was that. I don't suppose that I will ever find out what became of him. I did not dare give him a name, although Ida christened him 'Chirpy' after the fact. _________________________________________
I found another piece of a cedar log, quite sound and perhaps 8 or 9 inches in diameter and 6 feet long. This log I placed on the ground against the posts as the base of the wall to be. It was my intent to keep going, but Ida insisted that we start fishing. So we sat on the log and fished. We had very little to no success for several hours since I'd neglected to bring any worms. Eventually I managed to hook a large sunfish. We cut its head off and chopped it up to use it for bait in order to catch the bigger fish that we wanted to eat. The fish guts proved an admirable bait and we could have caught any number of bluegill with them. Then Ida had the brilliant idea of using the entire head as bait. This way we would not be troubled by bites from smaller fish than we cared to eat. Only the real monsters would be able to eat that head and take that hook. I wove the line through the gills and out the mouth several times to secure the head. About 10 or 15 minutes after we'd started using this head for bait, I felt a very strong tugging on the line. I pulled in against a shockingly heavy weight. Up to the surface rose a large snapping turtle of probably 18 inches or so in diameter. We stared at it in awe for a second or so before he sank back down into the water. I reeled in my line and saw that he'd bitten off literally about half of the fish head in a single bite. We were very fortunate that the turtle had not actually taken the hook, because just imagine what would have followed. What in the fuck would we have done when we reeled it in? A snapper like that can literally take your finger right off.No way I could have gotten my fingers anywhere near its mouth to get the hook out. Meanwhile, I'd foolishly left my backpack containing my snub-nosed .38 revolver back in the car so there would have been no way of killing it. Having figured out that good things were to be had where we were, the turtle kept hanging out around where we were fishing. Several times I had to jerk the line and the large hunks of bait past where he was waiting to grab it. Its presence also had the effect of scaring off every fish in the area. Around dusk I gave up and Ida and I went home. We are now intrigued by the possibilities of fishing for snapping turtles. They are legal to take on my fishing license and are extremely common animals. Trish's father says that they taste very good indeed. Ida suggests that we use a stout rope instead of a fishing line to prevent the possibility of the turtle breaking the line. This is probably a smart idea. We will also need some larger hooks. I am thinking of using a milk jug for a bobber. Naturally we will make a point of being better armed next time so that I can quickly dispatch the creature with a shot to the head before pulling it all the way out of the water. Ida and I are curious as to what turtle tastes like. So many other things that live in muck taste very good. Lobsters, oysters, clams, crabs, catfish, etc. It would be nice if I could manage to preserve all of the bones for purposes of comparative anatomy. I know of a number of methods for completely defleshing the bones that could work in this case. I have never tried to assemble an articulated skeleton as a model, but I should think that a turtle would be a very good candidate for learning how to do that with. Normally a spine is very hard to get right, with so many vertebrae to get into the right order and in the specifically correct posture. But in the case of turtles, most of the vertebrae are fused together along the underside of the shell (which is in fact actually the turtles spine, covered with thin protective plates of keratin). There are probably the usual 7 or so to make up the neck, plus those of the tail, but it still has to beat putting together all of the vertebrae of a lizard or a mammal of similar size. Ah, wait. Is it really such a good idea to go shooting the turtle in the head if I want to preserve the skull? Definitely not with a .38 special. I may be forced to reconsider the means of execution. Perhaps a .22 would kill it without completely shattering the cranium? A clean little hole of only 0.22 of an inch in diameter would not be so bad. 11:50 a.m. - 2009-07-20 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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