Baby Birds: Part 2
REMINDER: IF YOU HAVE THE CAPABILITY, ALWAYS TRANSPORT INJURED BIRDS OR WILDLIFE TO A LICENSED REHABILITATION FACILITY BEFORE ATTEMPTING REHABILITATION ON YOUR OWN.
Louise continued with her baby bird rescue tips:
"The second thing you have to do is keep the baby warm. Use a heating pad to fit the shoe box containing the nest on, and put a weather thermometer in the nest, but not touching the baby. The temperature needs to be, oh, it can vary a little, between 88 and 91 degrees. The box can be in a garage or a storage room, anywhere there is no air conditioning. Adjust the heating pad until you can maintain the correct temperature. Usually it will be on medium. A tissue dropped loosely over the baby helps to hold in the heat, and you want a cover over the shoebox to keep in the humidity. People have also used night light bulbs to keep a baby warm, but the problem with this is it keeps it light all the time, there's no dark period with a light bulb. If you don't have any other way to keep it warm, you could fill a jar with hot water with a tight-fitting lid. Wrap it in a towel. Don't ever put the baby next to the jar. The jar has to be wrapped in a towel and then put the baby near it. But, as the water cools, it will suck the heat out of the baby, so you have to be very careful and watch that. That's just a stop gap to warm the body of the baby. You can't feed the baby until you get the temperature up.
"If you're trying to raise a fledgling and if it is a naked baby bird with an artificial supply of heat, you need to have an open container of water in the shoe box with the bird to keep the humidity up, because they will get dried out.
"OK, first feeding. If the baby is in bad shape, if it's been out of the sun or if it was cold and limp when you picked it up, it's probably dehydrated and it needs energy and electrolytes before solid food, and it always has to be warmed before you give it anything.
"Using a 1 cc syringe, or an eye dropper, or a cut-down straw, or whatever you've got that's like that, give a few drops of Pedialite or Gatorade and make sure you put it down the throat and past the opening to the trachea, which you can see. That's that little hole in the base of the tongue. This is easy to do with a bird as big as a Blue Jay. It's almost impossible to do on a Carolina Wren or a Chickadee. They are so tiny.
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