Bad Blue Bird Architecture

On Saturday, about noon, I was sweeping and raking just outside the gate to the back yard, when I looked down and received a shock: a baby bird was writhing around in the gravel of the driveway, overheating in the sun. I scooped up the featherless, closed-eye baby, took him into the kitchen and washed him off under the water tap in order to cool him down. I even put a little water in his mouth and heard him cough. Then he opened up his mouth and silently implored for more than just water.

What to do? No earthworms anywhere!

I made E. hold the bird as I got the ladder to put the bird back in the nest. "M-A-A-A-A-R-R-R-C! It's a baby blue jay!" she shouted as she got paper towel, in order not to actually come into physical contact with the bird and with whatever diseases it might carry (although I suspect the bird has far more to worry about from us, diseasewise, than us from it). I put the bird back into the nest, which was lodged in the hedge, as the mother bird a few feet away screached her displeasure in my ear.

On Sunday, heading to Pam Kay Lourentzos' ballet class, about 11:30 a.m., I opened the back gate. On the ground next to E.'s car were two baby birds writhing around in the gravel of the driveway. Both were alive, but one bird was significantly cooler than the other. Neither looked well, and they both were very young.

I was getting exasperated. Sunday morning ballet class is the holiest of holies, and I was going to be late. My religious obligation on Sunday is doing plies and pirouettes, not this preservation-of-life stuff. So, once again, I made E. hold the birds as I got the ladder to put the birds back in the nest. "M-A-A-A-A-R-R-R-C! Baby blue jays!" she shouted as she got another paper towel in order not to actually come into physical contact with the birds. I put the birds back into the nest as the worried mother bird watched from a nearby power line.

This time, I took a closer look at the nest, and noticed that even though the nest was well-built, it was nowhere near level - maybe 40 degrees from level. No wonder the baby birds keep falling out! This is a bad place for a nest - this kind of hedge has few horizontal surfaces of any sort. In order to keep this from happening many more times, I would have to help out Mommy and Daddy Blue Jay with some engineering consulting.

I obtained a strip of cloth to attach to the hedge branch on which the nest sat precariously. I also obtained an underinflated wheelbarrow tire to act as a weight. I tried tying the wheelbarrow tire to the hedge, but the weight was too heavy. I dropped the wheelbarrow tire and it bounced off the hood of E.'s car like a basketball (hope those streaks on the black paint aren't scratches in the paint!)

Instead, I used just the strip of cloth to bend the supporting the branch and tied it to the supporting trunk, so the nest isn't much more than 10 degrees, or so, from horizontal. Hopefully that will be stable enough for the moment. Hope the siblings continue to get along, and hope the flying trials go well, and come summertime hope we'll have two healthy flying baby blue jays to show for interrupting the holiest of holies!