into her phone machine. âPick up the phone! You gotta help me!â
Jayne lifted the receiver. âDamn those raptors!â she exclaimed. âI hate those things! How can you rehab them? Iâve got a Cooperâs hawk hanging around my backyard and I know heâs going to get one of my little woodpeckers as soon as I let them go.â
âForget the raptors,â I said. âBlue jaysâIâve got baby blue jays and I donât do babies.â
âOh, yes you do!â she chortled. âYou do now, honey!â
Technically, blue jays arenât even songbirdsâtheyâre Corvids, the group of birds that also includes magpies, crows, and ravens. As Jayne explained as she was giving me a crash course in housing and caring for orphaned songbirds, I was lucky that I was starting out with a nestful of relatively sturdy birds; they could have been impossibly minuscule creatures like wrens or chickadees.
They arrived in their own large and beautifully constructed nest, six awkward, naked hatchlings sprouting tufts of down. They had oversized square heads, bright red mouths, and yellow gape flangesâthe outer lining of the mouth, which is one of the markers for identifying nestling birds. Their eyes were just beginning to open, which meant they were about three days old. By the time they arrived they had missed more than ten feedings and were lying limply, like small plants that had been deprived of water.
First they needed to be warmed up, which meant placing them on a heating pad covered by a thick cotton towel. Meanwhile I twisted a small cotton towel into a doughnut, draped another one over the top of it, covered it with a few Kleenexes, and placed the whole thing into a ceramic bowl, creating a cleanâand easily cleanableânest. When they were warm I transferred them to the new nest and rehydrated them by placing tiny drops of electrolyte solution along the sides of their closed beaks until they were alert. Then I began to feed them, something I would do about a gazillion times during the next month.
The best diet to feed orphaned passerines is another contentious issue among rehabbers, inspiring lively bouts of namecalling and slander. A rehabberâs goal is to mimic as closely as possible what the parent birds offer their nestlings, and almost all passerines feed their babies bugs. However, the parents supplement with various other wild foodsâplus the adultsâ saliva contains essential nutrients, all of which you must attempt to duplicate if you want the baby to grow up healthy. This means you must put together a complicated and carefully measured vitamin mixtureâof which there are many recipes thatare constantly being perfectedâand puree it into a hummus-like paste, into which you dip each bug and then serve it using tweezers or forceps. At least, that was the idea at that particular point in time. Jayne recently told me that she has jettisoned the dip idea in favor of a more complicated mealworm dietâsomething that might have saved me hours of work had I known about it back then.
I gratefully defrosted Maggieâs container of dip, which she had insisted I take âjust in case.â I took a portion of it and added a bit of water, cut a group of mealworms in half, and went to work. But as I discovered, nestling birds who have been yanked away from their parents and placed in a bizarre new environment donât automatically open their beaks at the sight of a pair of tweezers.
âJayne!â I shouted through her phone machine. âWhat am I supposed to do now?â
The phone clicked on. âWho is this?â she demanded. âCould it be the former raptor rehabber who has finally started to see the light?â
Armed with Jayneâs arsenal of tricks I gently tapped the sides of the orphansâ beaks, stroked the sides of their faces, lightly jostled their nest, and approached them with tweezers five different