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la_belle_laideI owe major updates and comments and whatnot. I'm sorry I've fallen off the earth, but it's all been LEIK WHOA.
Well first of all, as I mentioned, last Saturday was Spencer's high school graduation. I thought I'd go in there all chill and mellow and whatnot, but then when he came back down the aisle after the ceremony I got all teary eyed, of course. I took a ton of pics (which I won't post here) and I still sort of can't believe it. It just all is going too quickly. Afterwards we all went to this beautiful restaurant on the water in Easthampton, where they played Bob Marley and you could watch the boats go by, and the food took like an hour to get there. I didn't get home till around 6.
The next day, Mom and I drove out to pick up Jo-chan for her pre-birthday birthday party / shopping thingie. Mom and I listened to my CD's all the way there, me narrating the entire time ("This is 'Lies For The Liars' by The Used, but it should really be called 'I Hate You Gerard Way, Please Take Me Back' because [explain the whole band / brokeback tour-bus soap opera stuff] and in THIS song it says blah blah which is funny because in THAT song it says etc. etc...." Ridiculous but my Mom smiles and nods anyway.) We got in really late and Jo-chan was playing Silent Hill, and then I took over playing it for a while. Monday, I switched some birds around and got Truffles (starling from Laura) and Tim (grackle from work) into the aviary, and got my nice hammock up in the yard. While I was doing this, Jo-chan was just hanging around the yard, playing with the dogs or swimming. Then we went out shopping and Jo-chan picked out a bunch of stuff for her birthday. We also got ice cream and tried to think of a movie to watch later. Also, we stopped at SITF to see some of the animals, and we visited with Tucker for a while.
After ice cream cake and prezzies and stuff like that, I finally decided that the movie should be a kind of rite of passage; after all Jo-chan is 15 now, and I thought, "It's time." So I busted out The Usual Suspect, all the while warning her that the language was atrocious (but funny) and the violence was graphic etc. She loved the movie (how could you not?) especially the ending, and commented that perhaps it'd been a while since I'd seen that movie, because she'd seen a lot worse in terms of violence and language. Which.... yeah, of course. I forget these things. I also had to skip Kung Fu this night, because of party and movie night etc. Jo-chan had to leave the next day (which always sucks) and I had to work.
The next day, Tuesday, brought a whole bunch of crazy animals to me. I went to work with no birds at all and came home with five. One that I did not take home with me was this beautiful baby osprey with deformed legs. (Which, I'm sorry to say, does not bode well. They hunt with their legs.) But I fell directly in love with him and I got to feed him for a while. This is how a baby osprey eats:
You can't tell me that's not the cutest thing you've seen.
Tuesday also brought me three hatchling starlings (one a runt, two fallen about 20 feet from a nest onto pavement--I get that every year, don't I?--and lying on the ground in 93 degree heat for who knows how long. They were heat-stroking out, all limp and panting and not gaping,) and a nestling/fledgling grackle so covered in mites he was (and still is) totally anemic that he's white where he should be pink and/or yellow, unable to swallow his food and just doing badly all around. My poor baby. :(
And it also brought me Lohi'au, whom I have already mentioned. And with Lohi'au, a whole slew of problems that just might be worth it after all.
Okay, first of all, realize that I've been asking the universe for a crow for a while now. I felt like I was ready to keep a non-releasable one, but not a healthy, releasable one. I keep asking myself, what if I had wings and then someone stuck me in a cage just because they wanted to keep me around? But if he was non-releasable in any way, then I would keep him. So when I first saw Lohi'au, skinny but gaping for food and jumping around, I thought, "This little guy will be perfect with some spit and polish. I'll keep him for a few days then give him to Laura so her crows can raise him." I actually called Laura Tuesday night to tell her I had gotten this wonderful baby crow, and what my plans were for him. She asked me how old he was and I told her, a real baby, his tail hadn't even grown out yet. This was the first red flag, because Laura says you never see crows out of the nest that young, not unless they were rejected for some reason. She felt--had the gut feeling--something was wrong with him, that he had some other issue. Oh, the other thing was that I had found two maggots on the newspaper of the cage he was in. These were mystery maggots, as I looked him over top to bottom and could not find a single wound on him. I even smelled him (you know, you can smell rot) but he just smelled like a crow, nothing else. (And crows really do smell like other crows, healthy crows have the same smell. Except Tucker; he smells a little different, a little more like the entire clinic.)
Well, I didn't press the matter. You can see I spent some time with him because he is such a cool little bird, but I limited that time because I didn't want to tame him.
Incidentally, this is how a baby crow eats:
OBNOXIOUS AND ADORABLE!
Anyway, that was Tuesday. Wednesday, I brought him to SITF with me and had Bosslady look him over. She said she couldn't find anything wrong with him other than that he was really skinny. She asked me if he'd been eating well, because she said she'd always had difficulty getting crows to eat. I told her, Hells yes, he gapes and eats like a pig, I should have him up to good weight in a few days.
Don't you know, as soon as she asked that, he stopped gaping. At first I put this down to the heat. There's no AC in this place, we're on the 2nd floor and it was about 95 degrees outside, and exactly 90 degrees inside. All the birds were wilting. After SITF I had to take the entire crew to Kung Fu. They did all right there and Lohi'au actually sat on my shoulder again between basics and blackbelt club.
Then, when I got home, he started to crash. He was doing this thing I call the death-shuffle, that's what I call it when birds hock-walk. Most birds I've seen, they hock-walk right before they die. He also had the death-puff as I call it, when they fluff all their feathers out and just sit there on the bottom of the cage. So of course I freaked out, I had this bird just over 24 hours and already he was crashing hard. I took him into the bathroom and then I just went crazy and held him for about 40 minutes, because you know, sometimes that little energy thing goes on. (I don't want to get too metaphysical or weird on you all, but the witchy ones of you on my f-list will know exactly what I mean. That energy you get between your palms when they don't touch, you know?) And I also told him I thought he had a purpose and I would not settle for him just up and dying, not after I had asked to raise a crow. When I put him back in his carrier, he just lay on his side all limp. And it wasn't hot then, either, actually it was storming and it had cooled off a lot. (Me thinking, Lohi'au.... lightning.... maybe there's something to this. Oh, because in the Hawaiian legend he's named after, lightning brought Lohi'au back from the dead. Anyway.) I also de-wormed him and started him on Baytril, which is always a tough decision for me because Baytril is so hardcore, but you never know what's going on inside, so I wanted to cover the entire spectrum.
I went to bed fully expecting to find him dead the next morning. I kept trying to visualize positive things, but the first thing you learn in wildlife rehab is that you should never be surprised if you wake up the next morning and everything's dead. When I got up Thursday, that's yesterday, I didn't hear anything from his carrier and I just thought, Well, that's it. But then I went by and he jumped up and screamed at me for food. It was a total turn-around. He had another incident where he was down for a few hours while I was at my first job yesterday, and then he was a little off while we were at SITF, but then he seemed okay at night. Yesterday at work, I called Laura to tell her of this and to also tell her that if at any time she thought she could do better by him, because she specializes in crows, then I wanted her to take him. Because I just want him to live, and success to me would be to release him. I wanted him to be perfect and then to go free.
Laura told me once again that she felt like he had been rejected for a reason, that something was not right. She said the maggots were still suspicious, and the fact that he was down for so long meant that I should still treat him like he was critical. She also said to me that crows are so social and gregarious, that they need to be socialized in order to survive. A lone baby crow will just up and die. If its mother rejects it, it will just die, so she specifically told me to keep on coddling him and petting him and all the stuff that you don't do if you don't want a tame crow. So for a few hours during work yesterday, he just sat on my shoulder under my hair, preening his feathers. No one knew he was even there unless he made a noise or I moved a certain way.
Then today, the same thing. Only now he's obssessed with not being alone. He can't take it. He leaps out of the carrier and onto my shoulder. If I go by, he tries to throw himself at the door to get out. He does not want to be alone. Laura came by work to look at him and she said that he wasn't as skinny as she thought (I've been force-feeding him, so I think he did put on a few ounces,) but he still wasn't right and she said, "Jules, just keep him. Otherwise he's hawk food."
I actually keep on arguing this point, because I have to be sure. Not for me, but for him; I want to be fair to him, I don't want to do the wrong thing. But also, for me. This would be another really big committment. I'd have to make room, build a cage, I'd have to keep the dogs away, I'd have to spend a certain amount of time keeping him company, because crows can to crazy from loneliness and boredom. I realize also that this would be another thing for me to worry neurotically over. Like if he truly isn't right, if he's got some metabolic or genetic thing that's going to keep him sick and weak and he'll have a sad, short life that I'll have to watch. (Which, I'll do anyway.) Because you know, I'm naturally drawn to the rejects. Or will I have him for like ten years, so that he'll become part of my routine the way Pendragon was and then, as always, I will have to say goodbye to him after such a long haul. Which is something you have to consider everytime you bring an animal into your life.
So it's not something I'm taking lightly. In fact I'm being kind of neurotic over it while everyone around me, who watched him sit on my shoulder and preen my hair all day was saying, "It's a done deal" and "the bird is already yours" and "how could you think about getting rid of him?" But it's a big deal to me! Already tomorrow I have to put him into a bigger cage because he's getting bored and frustrated in the carrier.
But the bird has awesome energy, I mean just look at him:
FEED ME!!! Isn't that hilarious?
Anyway, so that's where I'm at right now. What's gonna happen is, I'm going away to Florida next month and Laura is going to take all my birds while I'm away. She's going to put Lohi'au with the other crows to see how he does. If he is perfect and he gets wild and he understands crows and he can survive in the wild, she'll know. She's the local authority on crows. And if that's the case, I'll gladly let him go and be a crow. But if not, you know, I'll figure it out.
Well first of all, as I mentioned, last Saturday was Spencer's high school graduation. I thought I'd go in there all chill and mellow and whatnot, but then when he came back down the aisle after the ceremony I got all teary eyed, of course. I took a ton of pics (which I won't post here) and I still sort of can't believe it. It just all is going too quickly. Afterwards we all went to this beautiful restaurant on the water in Easthampton, where they played Bob Marley and you could watch the boats go by, and the food took like an hour to get there. I didn't get home till around 6.
The next day, Mom and I drove out to pick up Jo-chan for her pre-birthday birthday party / shopping thingie. Mom and I listened to my CD's all the way there, me narrating the entire time ("This is 'Lies For The Liars' by The Used, but it should really be called 'I Hate You Gerard Way, Please Take Me Back' because [explain the whole band / brokeback tour-bus soap opera stuff] and in THIS song it says blah blah which is funny because in THAT song it says etc. etc...." Ridiculous but my Mom smiles and nods anyway.) We got in really late and Jo-chan was playing Silent Hill, and then I took over playing it for a while. Monday, I switched some birds around and got Truffles (starling from Laura) and Tim (grackle from work) into the aviary, and got my nice hammock up in the yard. While I was doing this, Jo-chan was just hanging around the yard, playing with the dogs or swimming. Then we went out shopping and Jo-chan picked out a bunch of stuff for her birthday. We also got ice cream and tried to think of a movie to watch later. Also, we stopped at SITF to see some of the animals, and we visited with Tucker for a while.
After ice cream cake and prezzies and stuff like that, I finally decided that the movie should be a kind of rite of passage; after all Jo-chan is 15 now, and I thought, "It's time." So I busted out The Usual Suspect, all the while warning her that the language was atrocious (but funny) and the violence was graphic etc. She loved the movie (how could you not?) especially the ending, and commented that perhaps it'd been a while since I'd seen that movie, because she'd seen a lot worse in terms of violence and language. Which.... yeah, of course. I forget these things. I also had to skip Kung Fu this night, because of party and movie night etc. Jo-chan had to leave the next day (which always sucks) and I had to work.
The next day, Tuesday, brought a whole bunch of crazy animals to me. I went to work with no birds at all and came home with five. One that I did not take home with me was this beautiful baby osprey with deformed legs. (Which, I'm sorry to say, does not bode well. They hunt with their legs.) But I fell directly in love with him and I got to feed him for a while. This is how a baby osprey eats:
You can't tell me that's not the cutest thing you've seen.
Tuesday also brought me three hatchling starlings (one a runt, two fallen about 20 feet from a nest onto pavement--I get that every year, don't I?--and lying on the ground in 93 degree heat for who knows how long. They were heat-stroking out, all limp and panting and not gaping,) and a nestling/fledgling grackle so covered in mites he was (and still is) totally anemic that he's white where he should be pink and/or yellow, unable to swallow his food and just doing badly all around. My poor baby. :(
And it also brought me Lohi'au, whom I have already mentioned. And with Lohi'au, a whole slew of problems that just might be worth it after all.
Okay, first of all, realize that I've been asking the universe for a crow for a while now. I felt like I was ready to keep a non-releasable one, but not a healthy, releasable one. I keep asking myself, what if I had wings and then someone stuck me in a cage just because they wanted to keep me around? But if he was non-releasable in any way, then I would keep him. So when I first saw Lohi'au, skinny but gaping for food and jumping around, I thought, "This little guy will be perfect with some spit and polish. I'll keep him for a few days then give him to Laura so her crows can raise him." I actually called Laura Tuesday night to tell her I had gotten this wonderful baby crow, and what my plans were for him. She asked me how old he was and I told her, a real baby, his tail hadn't even grown out yet. This was the first red flag, because Laura says you never see crows out of the nest that young, not unless they were rejected for some reason. She felt--had the gut feeling--something was wrong with him, that he had some other issue. Oh, the other thing was that I had found two maggots on the newspaper of the cage he was in. These were mystery maggots, as I looked him over top to bottom and could not find a single wound on him. I even smelled him (you know, you can smell rot) but he just smelled like a crow, nothing else. (And crows really do smell like other crows, healthy crows have the same smell. Except Tucker; he smells a little different, a little more like the entire clinic.)
Well, I didn't press the matter. You can see I spent some time with him because he is such a cool little bird, but I limited that time because I didn't want to tame him.
Incidentally, this is how a baby crow eats:
OBNOXIOUS AND ADORABLE!
Anyway, that was Tuesday. Wednesday, I brought him to SITF with me and had Bosslady look him over. She said she couldn't find anything wrong with him other than that he was really skinny. She asked me if he'd been eating well, because she said she'd always had difficulty getting crows to eat. I told her, Hells yes, he gapes and eats like a pig, I should have him up to good weight in a few days.
Don't you know, as soon as she asked that, he stopped gaping. At first I put this down to the heat. There's no AC in this place, we're on the 2nd floor and it was about 95 degrees outside, and exactly 90 degrees inside. All the birds were wilting. After SITF I had to take the entire crew to Kung Fu. They did all right there and Lohi'au actually sat on my shoulder again between basics and blackbelt club.
Then, when I got home, he started to crash. He was doing this thing I call the death-shuffle, that's what I call it when birds hock-walk. Most birds I've seen, they hock-walk right before they die. He also had the death-puff as I call it, when they fluff all their feathers out and just sit there on the bottom of the cage. So of course I freaked out, I had this bird just over 24 hours and already he was crashing hard. I took him into the bathroom and then I just went crazy and held him for about 40 minutes, because you know, sometimes that little energy thing goes on. (I don't want to get too metaphysical or weird on you all, but the witchy ones of you on my f-list will know exactly what I mean. That energy you get between your palms when they don't touch, you know?) And I also told him I thought he had a purpose and I would not settle for him just up and dying, not after I had asked to raise a crow. When I put him back in his carrier, he just lay on his side all limp. And it wasn't hot then, either, actually it was storming and it had cooled off a lot. (Me thinking, Lohi'au.... lightning.... maybe there's something to this. Oh, because in the Hawaiian legend he's named after, lightning brought Lohi'au back from the dead. Anyway.) I also de-wormed him and started him on Baytril, which is always a tough decision for me because Baytril is so hardcore, but you never know what's going on inside, so I wanted to cover the entire spectrum.
I went to bed fully expecting to find him dead the next morning. I kept trying to visualize positive things, but the first thing you learn in wildlife rehab is that you should never be surprised if you wake up the next morning and everything's dead. When I got up Thursday, that's yesterday, I didn't hear anything from his carrier and I just thought, Well, that's it. But then I went by and he jumped up and screamed at me for food. It was a total turn-around. He had another incident where he was down for a few hours while I was at my first job yesterday, and then he was a little off while we were at SITF, but then he seemed okay at night. Yesterday at work, I called Laura to tell her of this and to also tell her that if at any time she thought she could do better by him, because she specializes in crows, then I wanted her to take him. Because I just want him to live, and success to me would be to release him. I wanted him to be perfect and then to go free.
Laura told me once again that she felt like he had been rejected for a reason, that something was not right. She said the maggots were still suspicious, and the fact that he was down for so long meant that I should still treat him like he was critical. She also said to me that crows are so social and gregarious, that they need to be socialized in order to survive. A lone baby crow will just up and die. If its mother rejects it, it will just die, so she specifically told me to keep on coddling him and petting him and all the stuff that you don't do if you don't want a tame crow. So for a few hours during work yesterday, he just sat on my shoulder under my hair, preening his feathers. No one knew he was even there unless he made a noise or I moved a certain way.
Then today, the same thing. Only now he's obssessed with not being alone. He can't take it. He leaps out of the carrier and onto my shoulder. If I go by, he tries to throw himself at the door to get out. He does not want to be alone. Laura came by work to look at him and she said that he wasn't as skinny as she thought (I've been force-feeding him, so I think he did put on a few ounces,) but he still wasn't right and she said, "Jules, just keep him. Otherwise he's hawk food."
I actually keep on arguing this point, because I have to be sure. Not for me, but for him; I want to be fair to him, I don't want to do the wrong thing. But also, for me. This would be another really big committment. I'd have to make room, build a cage, I'd have to keep the dogs away, I'd have to spend a certain amount of time keeping him company, because crows can to crazy from loneliness and boredom. I realize also that this would be another thing for me to worry neurotically over. Like if he truly isn't right, if he's got some metabolic or genetic thing that's going to keep him sick and weak and he'll have a sad, short life that I'll have to watch. (Which, I'll do anyway.) Because you know, I'm naturally drawn to the rejects. Or will I have him for like ten years, so that he'll become part of my routine the way Pendragon was and then, as always, I will have to say goodbye to him after such a long haul. Which is something you have to consider everytime you bring an animal into your life.
So it's not something I'm taking lightly. In fact I'm being kind of neurotic over it while everyone around me, who watched him sit on my shoulder and preen my hair all day was saying, "It's a done deal" and "the bird is already yours" and "how could you think about getting rid of him?" But it's a big deal to me! Already tomorrow I have to put him into a bigger cage because he's getting bored and frustrated in the carrier.
But the bird has awesome energy, I mean just look at him:
FEED ME!!! Isn't that hilarious?
Anyway, so that's where I'm at right now. What's gonna happen is, I'm going away to Florida next month and Laura is going to take all my birds while I'm away. She's going to put Lohi'au with the other crows to see how he does. If he is perfect and he gets wild and he understands crows and he can survive in the wild, she'll know. She's the local authority on crows. And if that's the case, I'll gladly let him go and be a crow. But if not, you know, I'll figure it out.
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no subject
Date: 2007-06-30 03:53 am (UTC)And man, that mouth is pink. ;) Cute photo.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-30 04:44 am (UTC)Yep, all baby crows have blue eyes and big, pink mouths. The eyes turn black in the first year and so do the insides of their mouths. Oddly though, if they remain tame and they bond to a human, their mouths remain pink all their lives. That goes for bluejays, too. My bluejay Cassidy (the one I lost suddenly last January) was about 4 and he still had a big, pink mouth. Weird, huh?
no subject
Date: 2007-07-01 04:16 am (UTC)I'm gonna' see if I can find that article.... Don't hold your breath. ;)
no subject
Date: 2007-07-01 04:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-01 04:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-01 05:14 am (UTC)!!!!
Date: 2007-06-30 06:34 pm (UTC)Re: !!!!
Date: 2007-06-30 07:12 pm (UTC)I'm prolly gonna post more pics later, you'll see the kind of great energy this bird has. ^_^
no subject
Date: 2007-07-05 05:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-06 12:14 am (UTC)