Saving a Bluebird

There had been five bluebird babies in the front yard bluebird box when I last checked the nest. Three males and two females, I knew that. The bluebird pair made the unusual move of keeping them in and around the yard once they'd fledged; usually bluebirds take their babies deep into the woods for the vulnerable early post-fledging stage, only returning two to three weeks later into the nesting territory. And it bothered me that each time I counted, I found only four babies in the yard. We were missing a male. A couple of weeks went by and he never showed up. Oh, well, c'est la vie, at least we have four. But I wondered if I'd ever know what happened to him.

One afternoon when the fledglings were pretty well grown, I pulled into the driveway, got out of my car and heard a baby bluebird calling insistently, distressed. Neener. Neener. Neener. I followed the sound, my hands still full from my errands, and pinned it down. It was coming from inside a stovepipe baffle. Oh good grief. There it was, a baby bluebird who had fallen down into the open top of the old baffle.

You can see a properly mounted stovepipe baffle on their nest box, top center, and the old topless baffle resting on the ground beneath our martin gourd pole, top right. That's the one he fell into. There was no getting out of it once he was in the 24" tube.

By this time, I'm holding the stranded baby in my hand for the kids to admire. Photos by Bill Thompson III.

He was fine, but he'd been in there a long time, so I gave him a dropper of water and four mealworms.


And it occurred to me where his brother might have gone, right after they fledged. I gave the baby to Phoebe to hold. She loooves to hold baby creatures. Liam, not so much. Too scritchy and scrabbly.


I walked over to the 2' length of stovepipe where our baby had been trapped and lifted it up.

And there was his brother, two weeks gone. The all-blue tail, telling his sex.


His skull, frail as an eggshell, unossified, so young. Rats, rats, rats.


I propped up the baffle with a rock, leaving an escape hole beneath for any future stumblers.

And gave the lucky live bluebird a final kiss on the head before releasing him to the care of his family. We've seen him in the yard many times since.


You can't anticipate all the ways a baby bird can run afoul of the careless trappings of man, but sometimes you're lucky enough to be there to help when they do.

Mighty Mites

It's been a tough year for bluebirds in Ohio. First, there was the mid-April cold spell--a ten day marathon in which many early nests were lost. It's tough to incubate eggs and feed babies, when it gets down to 20 degrees at night and barely gets above the 40's during the day. The weather settled down for awhile, and then we had the driest May and June since 1988. That hurts insect populations. Clutch sizes fell accordingly--three-egg second clutches were the norm. But mites, which are more closely related to spiders and ticks, flourish in dry weather. Man, do they flourish. This is the first year I've lost bluebirds to mite infestations, and I've been monitoring at least 20 nest boxes each year since 1982. That's a whole lot of nests peeked into, a whole lot of notes taken. Never have I seen mites like I'm seeing in 2007. Five of my boxes were heavily infested, and I've lost three young in two boxes to mites. It drives me nuts when I'm traveling a lot and can't be there to change nests. But I got to the one in the far orchard just in the nick of time. The day after we came back from Maine, I was out in the morning, checking boxes. They hadn't been checked in two weeks--an unavoidable, but unacceptably long interval. Sure enough, this nest, which had only a couple of eggs when I left, was overrun with mites. One baby had just died, and a second was dying. The third looked all right, but both remaining young had mites seething over their tender skin, and worse, stuffed into their ears. Bleccch!
I closed the box and ran back to the house, picking mites off my arms and out of my eyebrows the whole way. Eek!

I grabbed my bag of dry grass, a toothbrush, a Tupperware container, and a thermal mug full of boiling water. Reaching the box, I took the babies out of their infested nest and put them in a paper towel lined Tupperware. For some reason, when you put mite-infested babies on white paper towels, the mites swarm off them and onto the towels. I don't know why, but I'm glad they do. I removed the seething nest, carried it a good distance away and pitched it into the woods. Next, I scrubbed the box with the toothbrush, loosening the mites packed into its seams. Then, I dashed boiling water into the box, three times for good measure. Dead mites ran out with the water. Why use poisonous insecticide when hot water is so much safer and faster?
When the box had cooled, I made a new nest and stuffed it in.

While the box cooled, I used fine blades of grass to flick mites out of the nestling's ear openings. Poor little things. The weaker baby was badly dehydrated, not even able to right itself, and a sickly yellow in color. Any more, I can tell immediately when a box has mites, even before they swarm up my arms, by the anaemic yellow skin of the nestlings.
I gave this baby a 50/50 chance of survival, improved by the fact that the parents had only two to tend, and vastly improved by their now mite-free box. I closed the box and came back two days later, to find the once-dying baby all pink and plump, cuddling with its sibling in their crude hand-made nest, comfortable, hydrated, in possession of all its red blood cells, and well-fed for the first time. The chance to make a difference, even in one bird's life, is part of what keeps me going. That, and the things I see as I make the rounds...butterflyweed in full glory.
A bumblebee, navigating fields of nectar.

And an indigo bunting nest, eggs an unexpected white (why in the Sam hill would an open-cup nester have WHITE eggs? They stick out like a sore thumb! Somebody explain this to the Science Chimp, pleeeeeze. I'm staying away from this nest, though the thing I'd most like to do is stick my camera in it every day. What would be the point of photographing it if I just wound up leading a 'coon to it? Ahhh, it's torture, but I have to do what's best for the birds. The little hen bathes in my bird spa every afternoon at about the same time, and her handsome mate uses the backyard bird bath. They're my neighbors. I have to keep my big nose out of their bidness.