Chapter 43 (Animals I’ve Known and Loved, cont.)

Not a Sparrow Falls without His Knowing:

The problem with loving animals is that one’s heart is so often broken.

A boy named Jessy Smith brought me a catbird to raise. He hadn’t realized that the mother bird would have been still attentive, even after the nestlings get too big for their nest, and this catbird was well feathered and almost ready to be on it‘s own. I called a local bird-watching club to find out what to feed it. They suggested medicated Chick-feed, so I went down to Agway and bought some. While I was there I got some clover seed to help nourish the back lawn (clover returns nitrogen to the soil. [I never weed out any clover anywhere it grows…ever]).

In the mixing of the chick-feed, I was amazed how the feed was in perfectly round and very tiny pellets. The bird ate it well, and later, it being on my mind, I thought to check the other package from Agway. The other looked more like a mixture for chickens. I had fed this poor bird clover seed. I didn’t know what effect it would have on it. I had borrowed the bird cage from the Garbers, as they kept canaries, so I called Mr. Garber to ask if he thought I damaged the bird. He said, ”Probably not. Just keep an eye on his droppings, as that can tell a lot about the health of the bird, and reported back that they looked normal. I then gave the catbird chick-feed every hour on the hour until sundown, then covered the cage until early the next morning, and feeding it every few hours throughout the day.

As soon as the catbird showed signs of wanting to fly, I brought in a cut tree, which I anchored under the high windows of one of the children’s rooms. This sweet bird was almost ready for his independence. The same morning of his demise, he had nestled into my hand when I held him. I felt a warm thrill as it had shown me that it loved and trusted me. Later he flew from his indoor perch on the tree to the floor, just behind the closed bedroom door just as one of the children burst through, and our catbird was instantly killed. It was an accident, and I didn’t compound it by letting my child know what had killed the bird.
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A year or so later we got more practice on raising a bird. This was a sweet little miracle. It was a hot spring day when my son Alby almost stepped on what looked like a giant cricket. When he looked closer, he realized it was a baby bird so young it still had no feathers, and at that stage, baby birds are really ugly, which Alby thought was cool, as it resembled a prehistoric bird, and he was in that dinosaur phase I swear all children go through. There were no nests in the young maple trees on our lawn, and we couldn’t figure out where this baby bird came from. Later I figured the only answer was that perhaps a blue jay had plucked him out of a nest, and dropped him there, as blue jays are known for stealing nests of other birds. This poor little bird was so helpless that it could hardly lift its ugly head to peep. First thing we had to do was to give it water with an eyedropper. Then I had the children scoop up this baby bird and place it in a cardboard box cushioned with rags and we placed it safely in the branches of a tree hoping the mother bird would come and feed it (doing all the work). No luck. We were again to play mother bird for a hatchling, feeding it every hour for awhile.

We went to our next door neighbor and resource for bird information, Fessy Washburn, who was one of the bird-watchers. She recommended the same recipe that my own mother fed the robin hatchlings so long ago: a mixture of mashed potatoes, egg yolks, and milk, mixed thick enough to gather up on a wooden match stick to drop it down its throat. (The main worry was not to let go of the matchstick, as when feeding this “ugly duckling of a bird”, it would open its mouth wide enough to peer down to its stomach, and it would gulp at the food as if trying to ingest it stick and all.) With this bird the children were a big help feeding the bird every hour. We got a break each night as after sundown we could cover his box while he slept, only to be awoken with his hungry chirping at dawn to continue the feeding the next day.

Soon Chip, as we called him, demanded less frequent feeding, and we again got the chickfeed at Agway, and had him on that as well as other snacks. Soon Chip's downy feathers began developing and he was beginning to look pretty nice. Alb kind of missed his dinosaur look. I was hoping that this would be some kind of a rare bird.

Chip was getting old enough to be brought outside, and I’d take him on excursions, sometimes the kids would help. We’d try to capture grasshoppers, ants, any crawly critter to tempt his gullet, but he wouldn't eat them unless we put it into his beak. I’ve since seen this: baby birds will not feed themselves even when they are as big their parents. They seem to have an instinctive timetable that flips almost as fast as a switch… they only take the food from their parents, and then “click” their instinct has them catch and eat their food like experts.

Mrs. Washburn stopped by on one of our outdoor excursions told us that our Chip was a sparrow. “I hope it’s not an English sparrow,” she said. She thought them a nuisance as there are so many of them--one of the most common birds. The children didn’t seem to care; they loved the bird no matter what. It more or less had to run of the house. Our old cat Muffin seemed to distinguish our pet birds or hamsters from the wild birds or mice. Chip would spend most of the time on window sills looking out at the world and practicing flying from one to another. The kids laughed at the way Chip would do a little dance on the window sill when we approached him to give him a ride on our fingers or shoulders.

As its plumage grew in, more and more it resembled an English sparrow. I was wishing it would be something rare, as I felt that because it was so loved, it deserved to be better than a nuisance bird. He began catching bugs that would land on the screen, and we realized that he was ready to find his own food. We had planned to release him the next day. Meanwhile, Joanna had let a young stray orange striped cat follow her home from Vestal Center. For some stupid reason we didn’t think a thing of letting the cat into the house. The first time the cat spied the bird, it caught and killed it in a flash. Though we dashed after it and pried the bird from its jaws, it was too late. We never felt so badly about losing a pet bird before or since.

I told Mrs. Washburn about it, and Fessy said to bring it over. Although it was a young English sparrow, her bird club had a mounted display of a every local bird and had none of the English sparrow in its young plumage phase. At least Chip served as a teaching tool when we had our young sparrow mounted.

Back then I was still going to Church, and I was doing the children’s sermons at First United Methodist Church in Endicott. I wrote a sermon with a better ending about our sparrow, Chip, but it was still an English sparrow in the story, and the little girl in the story was disappointed… that is, until one Sunday when they read the line from Matthew 10:29, “Not even the sparrow falls without your Father‘s will.” Then she knew that there was no such thing as some bird that was too common to be a part of God’s intentions. I still believe that… no matter what you call him: God, Lord, Allah, The Force, or Mother Nature …we are all a part of the whole scheme of things, and important in our own way.

Postscript:
As for the orange cat, we found him a very nice home. We were given directions to the new owners house. We were to look for an orange mailbox on her street. We found the mailbox… and the house was orange too. When the lady opened the door, you could see she was one of those redheads who had very orange hair. She welcomed us into her home. The furniture in the living room had orange upholstery, and the kitchen floor was a dappled orange linoleum. (There should be a poem there… like “the crooked man, crooked mile and crooked stile. Crooked cat, crooked mouse, …etc.) …”And they all lived together in a very orange house.