…although we had “just” 21 total intakes for the month of June, down from May’s 36. I won’t complain! July & August typically see a slight slowdown in birds, with August seeing babies begin to come in from the second squirrel breeding season. We’ll see, huh?

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The ground dove has been released but is still hanging around the flight pen. She’s made amazing progress from the bleeding little hatchling who came in just a few short weeks ago.

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The possums are too adorable, bless their dim-witted, ungainly little hearts.  They’re branching out as far as food and exploring all the tasty tidbits I place in their cage. Their teeth still aren’t big enough for hard foods, so we’re doing soft stuff in addition to formula. As long as they can sleep all day and eat all night, they’re happy campers.

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Here’s a cute shot of one of the rascals sleeping in a position that makes me wince. He was perfectly content, though, and remained sound asleep for the longest!

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The barn swallow is in the flight pen now, along with a blue jay who came in a couple of weeks ago. Both are good to go; I offered them the chance earlier today, but when they hadn’t flown the coop by noon, I closed the flight pen door for the day. We’ll follow the same routine for the next several days and see what happens.

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I also finally managed to snap a couple of shots of the deer, in pairs. The neurotics tend to hang together, and the psychotic and sorta normal ones have bonded.

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Three mockers came in the same day last week, one by himself and the other two more or less together (from the same nest, but one wasn’t discovered on the ground until the other had already been brought to me).They’ve truly grown like weeds and are already starting to try and perch.

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In case you’re wondering how it is that baby birds, incapable of flight, manage to become unnested, there are a variety of reasons: wind can unnest them; their siblings, in jostling around in the nest, can push them out; sometimes when they back their little butts up to the nest edge to poop, they overbalance and fall out…

And then you have mourning doves, whose nests are a joke to begin with and can collapse at the slightest movement by the supporting branches or the babies…

 

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These little mourning doves, two actual siblings, were also brought in on the same day, for the same reason: their nests had collapsed, in the case of the single dove, killing all her siblings. These are the three little sweethearts on June 19.

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Here they are again on June 21.

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June 24.

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June 27.

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And yesterday, June 30. It never ceases to amaze me how rapidly songbirds mature!

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I also released a young barred owl who spent 24 hours with me while recovering from a concussion, and transferred a baby bat. He came in as a purported brown bat, but he looks black to me!

And I’m running a couple of minutes late on bird feedings—gotta go stuff gaping beaks!

 

 

 


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