Baby Birds: Part 3
© Terrie Murray
The last stage of Louise's lessons on raising a wild baby bird:
"Fledgling to release. When they're feathered out, jumping in and out of the nest, if you find a fledgling or if you've raised a baby to this stage, if they are in a room where they can fly free, that's the best of all, like a store-room or a grain house or a sun porch or something like that where it's enclosed but where they can actually be free to fly, that's good. Now, of course, birds don't understand glass, so you need to cover the windows, which is another reason why garages are pretty good, except they're kind of big for a little bird, it's easy for the birds to get lost. Sometimes they'll get in a spider web and they'll get all wadded up in the spider web and you'll have to clean the spider web off of them. They can find all kinds of ways to get in terrible trouble. If you don't have a room where they can fly free, they need an enclosure at least 4 feet by 4 feet by 6 feet tall, and it needs to have fine screening and you really need to be able to bring it in at night if you don't have it covered in anything but fine screening because a cat could shred that and so could any other predator and a Horned Owl laughs at window screening. So will a hawk, of course. They need plants for cover, they need sand to scratch around in, a shallow container to drink from and bathe in and different types of food, like live meal worms and crickets and fruit flies. Fruit flies are real easy, all you've got to do is put a banana or a cut apple - I think bananas work best of all - but put some fruit in the cage and in just a little while fruit flies will be there and the little birds will be catching them. You're still going to be hand feeding. If they're seed eaters you supply a good mix of whatever bird seed they like. If they are insect eaters, it's not all that hard either, most insect feeders are omnivorous to a certain extent in that they will eat things like dog food and they'll eat fruit like raisins. You can have some of that in the cage but it's really important for insect feeders to have a chance to learn to catch insects. This is where sometimes you just have to use commercial crickets, because it's the only thing you can find to have to throw in the cage. It can hop around and move around and they can chase and it is interesting to watch how they do it when they catch it.
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