Dearest Jessica,

Birds, birds, birds...

You can tell the difference between a male and a female budgie by the color of their cere (the skin covering their nose.) Blue is for boy, and a grayish pink is for girls!

Hello Fellow!

My life has been surrounded by birds in the past couple of days. Starting last Thursday I began working at a Wildlife Rehabilitation Center (and when I say work, as always, I mean volunteering.) My friend Alyssa, a coworker (co-volunteerer) at the zoo, works (as in with pay) for her father as a receptionist. He’s a physical therapist, and one of his patients just happened to know of this volunteer opportunity. In being a youth volunteer at the zoo, we’re not allowed to actually handle the animals, even if it’s a rat, thus she jumped at the opportunity to gain some hands on experience. She’s been my ride to the zoo from the start of this year and knew I’d be interested too, so we met at our favorite frozen yogurt place, and began filling out our applications. We turned them the Saturday before last. We were supposed to get an orientation to let us know what we’d be doing and how to do it, but Thursday we got a call saying “We need help!” So both Alyssa and I rushed over. It was 12 in the afternoon and we didn’t leave until 5.

When we first arrived we were immediately thrown into work, first they asked us to do the dishes, which were easy enough, and we finished within 10 minutes. Shortly thereafter we were being rapidly taught by another volunteer how to prepare formula for birds, which birds to feed, how much to feed them, where to record the amount

fed, the time intervals in between each feeding, and what food to feed which birds. It ended up going as so: we had to feed
2 baby wrens
a baby robin
one woodpecker
5 crows inside the bird room
4 crows in an enclosure outside
5 baby birds that I can’t for the life of me recall their names
and one elder bird of that same type

It took about half an hour to feed all of them, and the intervals at which they had to be fed varied from half an hour to an hour, so we had one half hour in between to rest, then we started the process all over again. All of the birds ate a formula called

Mazuri, with the exception of the woodpecker who ate only meal worms… and lots of them. I believe I ended up collecting around 50-70 meal worms that day (from a bin in the kitchen.) The larger birds got their food switched out from Mazuri to a dog food type thing.

(meal worms...yum...)

Surprisingly the baby birds were easiest to feed. When I even came near their cage, the 5 baby unknown birds immediately all opened their mouths and began squeaking for food. The key to hand feeding birds of anytime, I learned, was that you needed to get the food past their trachea, or else they’ll choke (this was told to me, I didn’t learn it the hard way thank goodness!) The elder bird of the same type was one of the sadder of the birds. He was blind in both eyes, it looked like from some infection, so I had to pick him up, and open his beak for him so Alyssa could feed him. He was scared most of the time, understandably

so, as he didn’t know that we were feeding him, until we got it into his mouth.

The woodpecker was amusing bordering on obnoxious. He had his own little tub with a lid that had a screen on it. When we lifted up the lid he’d hop onto the side of his bin, covered in blankets so he could grab onto it, and make these funny squawking noises. I’d pick up a wriggling meal worm with tweezers and he’d open his mouth for me to drop it in. He wasn’t quite good at catching it, and I found myself bending over trying to find these meal worms the majority of the time. When his feeding was done, that’s when it got difficult. He never wanted to go back into his bin, so I’d have to take the lid and try to push him down so I could close it. I would push at him, to the point where I thought he was in, then I’d see his talons still grasping onto the blanket and find that he’d just gone entirely horizontal! Eventually

I’d manage to do it each time.

He looked exactly like Woody Woodpecker!

but more realistically like this!

The crows were the most difficult. They were all injured in some way, a broken foot, a fractured wing, there was one that was blind in one eye, and that sightless eye was white and bulged out of his head, it was really tragic to look at. They had bigger syringes for their feeding and I’d wave it in a circle around their beaks to coax them to open up, but they would only open half-heartedly, not enough for the nozzle to actually go in, then swiftly snap their beaks shut. Alyssa and I would often have to, once again, pry open their beaks for the feeding which, after they realized they were being fed, they were alright.

The baby wrens, and baby robins were absolutely adorable. They were both in an incubator, alongside two hatchlings (which we weren’t allowed to fee

d as it’s extremely easy to kill them) so in order to feed them we had to take them out and hold them in our hands. The robin was my favorite. The moment I held him, he immediately closed his eyes, and even got too lazy to open his beak! We had to open it for him and feed him that way, then waited cautiously to make sure the sleepy bird had swallowed. It was the cutest thing I had ever seen.

(Can you imagine, it was even cuter than this?)

Finally we had to feed the 4 crows outside. Two of them wouldn’t stop eating the dog food, which he hand fed them with tweezers like the woodpecker, while the other two would run away upon sight. I think they were just amusing themselves making two girls literally dash around the cage trying the grab hold of them. When we finally did, and we able to get dog food past their beaks, they didn’t even swallow. By the end of the day we had to tell t

he woman we were working for that the birds wouldn’t eat a thing from us, and she had to go feed those two.

Birds were the only things we dealt with that day, due to the fact that they had an intense overload of them at the time, but they weren’t the only animals there. There were 4 baby raccoons in another room, and a fawn in another (the fawn from what I’d heard had some neurological problem preventing it from using its back legs.) In another room was the cat socialization room, and Louie was amongst them. That cat had a urinary problem which prevented him from urinating on his own, but he was still persistent on trying to run outside to pee! There were ducks in an outdoor cage next to the crows, and pigeons on the other side. There was an isolation shed in the back for animals that were

being rehabilitated so they could go into the wild and not rely on humans. Back in that area were a few squirrels as well.

It’s an amazing place, but absolutely tiring. That night, I couldn’t get to sleep. There were no birds outside my room, but in my head there was an incessant chirping; the aftermath of 5 hours of nonstop birds. I finally can sympathize with those cartoon characters who’d just been hit in the head.

I’ve much more to say, seeing as I also started my third summer at the zoo this last weekend, but I shall save that for another post!

Until next time,

Love
Sam