The Story pg.2

A Foundling

WB was a foundling. The most amazing part of that statement was how that happened. The story Pops tells is that he was in the backyard. Mayday came from the frontyard and sat down at his feet. He didn't think much of it until Mayday started to whimper. When he didn't notice her, she continued to whine. He finally looked down at her and she had something she had layed on the ground she obviously wanted Pops to see. When Pops reached down to pick it up he realized it was a baby bird. Later he would discover the remains of a mud nest and two other babies on the ground. Sometimes when it is very dry the mud nests will not stay attached to the wall of the house and with a breeze will fall to the ground, shattering the nest and any contents. But this time, there was a survivor, WB. Think about that- a 5 month old mix breed mutt discovers a wiggling baby bird, retrieves it, and delivers it to Pops with an expression of "look here" and as Pops would later say, her eyes asked "what are you going to do about this?"

And what were we going to do about this? A baby bird to raise? Baby bird described is: no more than a day old, eyes still closed, absolutely no feathers, not even pin feathers, purplish pink wrinkled skin that is wiggling and opening its yellow edged mouth. After talking about it for a few minutes we decided we would give it a try. Fortunately cousins Walt and Martha had experience in raising baby birds they had shared with us so we had an idea of where to start. First was to be sure the baby was warm. Next to get it to eat.

Not being ornithologists and with absolutely no visible clues on WB as to what kind of bird we had, we just had to guess about food. W and M had explained how they would take dried cat food and soak it in water to feed their young birds, so that was what we decided to do. But how do you convince a one day old bird to open its mouth to take the food. Holding it near, tapping it on the beak didn't work. Pops solution was to scoop a little food on an orange stick (you ladies know what that is) and pry the baby's beak open. It took only two or three times before WB knew exactly what the tap on his beak and our voices was all about. Within a day all that was needed was for one of us to say something and that little beak flew open, anticipating another morsel. Feeding for the first week was around the clock. We fed every 2-3 hours and WB thrived.