Orion’s Luck : Finding a one-winged Kestrel

On July 19th, we were driving home after a week-end at the cottage up in the Laurentians.

Exiting the forested park, we took the road, as usual, that winds its way through cattle fields and a few abandoned barns. We often see American kestrels (Falco sparverius) perched on the telephone wires here, or darting over the grasses. But we weren’t expecting to see one flailing in the middle of the road, just as our car came up one of the hills.

Too often we see irretrievable losses on the roadside: raccoons, foxes, cats, birds of all kinds and sometimes even deer. So when we find something moving, breathing, something that we can potentially help, we jump to the opportunity. A close encounter with a bird as special as a kestrel, now that was going to be a first!

We immediately pulled over and I rushed out, worried another car might come speeding up that hill before I could get the little guy off the road, and I threw my shirt over him. After my experience with the goslings earlier this may, I knew that throwing a sheet or towel over frightened/injured/baby birds is one of the easiest ways to catch them. In the dark, birds get immobilized, so you can pick them up gently and slowly without harming them (and it helps protect you from getting bit or scratched, too).

Note: Being the smallest falcon, a kestrel’s talons aren’t too menacing, and he didn’t have much power in his wings to flail with and free himself, but if you found an injured hawk or eagle this way, you’d want to proceed with a lot more caution then just a shirt.

We quickly realized that the kestrel was flailing this way because he only had one wing. He was also missing a toe. There was no blood, broken feathers, or protruding bone so we considered that these were relatively old wounds. This little guy had been surviving — and by the looks of it, quite well — on the ground, where he was an easy target to a host of predators. How he managed it was, and still is, a mystery to us.

Not wanting to stress the bird too much, we couldn’t yet tell (while wrapped in my shirt and towel) whether his wing feathers had all been sliced or if the actual bone of his wing was gone. What we did know was that he couldn’t fly, and if he had been lucky so far surviving on the ground, that luck would eventually run out.

We like to think that this kestrel’s luck led him to that spot on the road where we’d be travelling. It led him, more specifically, to my mom who was driving the car: bird-lady extraordinaire. She’s a licensed falconer who has a love for red-tailed hawks. In her birding journey, my mom has found and successfully rehabilitated:

• a half-blind, car-struck screech owl

• a broad-winged hawk with a clipped wing

• an orphaned baby raven

In the first seconds of seeing the kestrel, my mom had already identified it as a male by his slate-blue colouring on his wings. We decided to take this bird to safety. In the car ride home, during which he sat unusually calmly in the bottom cup-holder of the passenger door looking up at me, we decided to name him Orion. The great hunter of the sky. Kestrels may be small, but they are remarkable hunters; they’re known to snatch insects and small songbirds right out of the air, in full flight.

At home, we got a syringe and carefully gave him a few drops of water to make sure he was hydrated. A little goes a long way with birds in terms of water, but what’s crucial when finding an injured one is making sure that they do get some water, given that we have no idea how long they’ve gone without it. We were concerned that Orion’s strangely calm nature was in fact exhaustion, starvation, or shock. We didn’t want to lose this little guy, but he took the sips of water and he allowed us to put him in his temporary cage we set up (An old rabbit cage with sticks criss-crossing close enough for him to hop up and down for exercise.)

The real concern for my mom was whether Orion would eat on his own, or whether we’d have to gage the delicate act of force-feeding (which can be deadly for a bird, especially one who hasn’t eaten in a long time). To our surprise and immense relief, Orion snatched an earthworm from my hand and devoured it in seconds. He was clearly looking for more, pecking and tearing at the paper where the worm left a brown and red smudge. He was famished!

We got a frozen chick from the freezer my parents use for their hawks’ food, and watched as Orion ate until his crop was full.

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What’s a crop?

The crop is a muscular pouch that is an extension of a bird’s esophagus used to store excess food prior to digestion.

When a bird has a full crop after a large meal, the throat can look grossly distended as if the bird is choking, has an internal injury, or might have a cancerous growth, but there is no distress. If a bird were choking, it would likely be fluttering its wings, hunching its back and trying to dislodge whatever was in its throat, but birds with a full crop are more likely to sit quietly and calmly as they digest.

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Since then, we’ve moved Orion to one of the free aviaries. I’m really taken by him, by his calmness and his way of really looking at you when you enter the room.

He eats a chick a day and sometimes earthworms or live crickets to change it up a bit. He’s like a little velociraptor when he chases them around the bottom of the aviary. No wonder he was able to hunt for himself on the ground out in the fields.

The most adorable thing is his night routine, when he climbs one of the sicks I’ve lain against the wall, and perches under the sheltering overhang of the feeding station. He hides there, safe, until morning when we find him in his usual window branch, waiting for food and watching the world outside.

One day, after Orion took a bath and when his feathers were wet, I was clearly able to see the bone of his wing, up near the shoulder, severed and neatly healed without any sign of infection. We still don’t know what happened to him, but all we know is he’s doing remarkably well right now.

Stay tuned for updates. We’re hoping he gets more and more accustomed to us and to stepping into our hand as a feeding ritual. Patience, and consistency.

A Name for Everything in the World

The desire to know the world by name is something I often feel when I’m out in the yard, hunched over a a cluster of star-shaped flowers, a nest of fledglings, a small colony of mushrooms. What do I call you? I stand there and wonder. Where do you belong in the great library of life?

This interest has been in me since I was a kid. I had all the Audubon society’s field guides in my bedroom library; birds were a particular fascination. But at that age, you just call living what adults call passions, interests or hobbies. You don’t really know, when you’re a kid, what you’re doing or whether you’re any good at it. You stand in the muck and the rain and the mosquitoes not for any extrinsic goal, but for the act itself. To be a witness of the world for the sake of being a witness. Observance.

I still have wildlife sighting notebook I had kept when I was eight or so, in which I wrote multiple, identical entries of having seen a red squirrel, a Canada goose, or a great blue heron over multiple days. For who, or why, were not questions that occupied my soul then.

Since my childhood, I’ve moved around quite a bit. I’ve lived in different cities and countries. I’m in my third university and pursuing a degree in law, which satisfies a part of my brain that goes dormant when I stand in the fields or the woods. Every time I come back to the forest, to this bedrock, I feel the desire come up in me again: to learn the world by name. So I’m back to observing, to watching the marsh change colours from Spring into Summer.

We are in July, month of pinks and purples and bursts of rain. The backyard marsh is alive with Loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria ‘Robert’) and their faithful bumblebees, Swamp Milkweed (Asclepias incarnata), and Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus Carota). There is, of course, an unfathomable amount of life that could be noticed, named, recorded: ferns in the undergrowth, the variety of birch trees, the army of yellow flowers hiding in the ground cover. There are the birdcalls in the trees that could be identified, animal tracks in the mud, and the nocturnal life that springs awake in the garden when everything else goes to sleep. I have recently learned that my coneflowers are haboring a beautiful Crab spider (Misumena Vatia), a remarkable predator that uses the flowers as its hunting grounds. I have yet to see it change colour, which they are known to do.

I’ll be updating these pages regularly as I learn more and more about the multiplicities of life here on the Bedrock. Stay tuned!

The Orphaned Goslings

Trumpets in the sky.

That’s how spring is proclaimed, long awaited then all at once.

Every year, honking paragliders descend from the clouds of March and drift into the backyard pond. Sometimes there are several pairs, and for the next week or two we’ll watch them charge each other, throats-to-sky, making broad displays of wingspans.

If we’re lucky, they bring the warm weather folded with them underwing. But often they’re a little too early, and they paddle the black strings of water between ice, enduring thick snowfalls.

Eventually, though, the bruise of the earth always surfaces under snow. The pond swells and all melts. After troops of other geese have landed and departed again, after the thawing field has bore witness to their scuffles, one pair usually remains, graceful and victorious.

Our geese, we think. The mates who return year after year to nest on the upper pond with a small tuft of an island, only wide enough for a lonely tree and their nest.

This Spring, I visited mother goose on her nest often. I sat by the clear water and told her this year is your year. I am amazed at Nature’s persistence; to return year after year to the same nest, despite the previous two springs bearing heavy losses of life. Here she was, making herself small on the island moss, trying again. This year is your year, I said.

The goslings in our backyard often hatch on Mother’s day week-end. This May was the same, and like clock-work I woke one morning to find five yellow downy hatchlings wandering the green fields behind mother. Father took up the defensive rear.

But something special happened this year ; our geese tolerated the presence of other non-breeding geese. They kept to one end of the pond and the others to the opposite. Except, as soon as the goslings were born, one of these other geese started following the family around. We called him, or her, the bodyguard. It gave us another reason to say, this is your year, Mother Goose. “You’ve got a body guard now. Your babies will make it.”

Last year, all five of her chicks had disappeared overnight. We blamed the fox but who knows; there are a thousand eyes in the dark and young mouths to feed underground. So for one month, we checked on the family daily. The other lingering geese eventually departed, but the bodyguard stayed. The chicks grew plump and adventurous. They shed their yellow coats for brown fluff. We were hopeful, but we knew that this was usually when the fox strikes. My gut feeling was that this year would be different. This year was going to be their year.

On May 29th, I woke early and filled a pale to water the young apple trees we had just planted. I had grown so used to seeing the goose family every morning for the past month, that it was only when I reached the end of the backyard field and crossed the pond that I realized they were all gone. All but one lonely gosling sitting by himself by the water.

I didn’t understand. They were still too young to fly, so the family couldn’t have taken off anywhere. Yet no predator in our yard would have been able to kill two parents and four chicks in one go. There’d be signs, wouldn’t there? Torn feathers at least. But there was nothing…Only the little guy, clearly a little weary and concerned, sitting in morning sun.

Without the protection of his parents, and the comfort of his brood, I felt so much for this little creature all by itself. My human instincts overpowered rational sense, maybe, and I decided I had to try and catch it before a hawk did, or a fox, or the neighbour’s prowling bengal cat, a feline so big my parents once mistook it for a coyote!

I walked toward the gosling and it let me get close enough, until it stood up and made for the water. I watched it drift and considered my options. That’s when my partner called to me. “There’s another one! Look, there’s another baby!” And surely enough, a second little gosling had emerged from the undergrowth and waddled over to the pond where her sibling swam. She did so confidently, as if it was the decided meeting point for post-emergencies in the goose family.

We decided to wait. We felt the parents were around somewhere. Maybe an attack in the night had spooked them, maybe they’d all gone in different directions. At least one of the pair had to come back. Other goslings were probably still hiding. So we made breakfast and ate outside, keeping an eye on the babies. A pair of broad-winged hawks started circling and swooping threateningly low, perching in nearby branches. But then they were off again.

We blinked when we saw, against all odds, a third little gosling paddling toward the pond from the back reeds. And a fourth was with him! Four babies. Our human hearts falter so easily when we see the fragile prevail in the animal kingdom. But then, they stopped coming. No fifth baby emerged, and still no parents. We spent the entire day by the water, waiting and protecting. But now the sun was setting, and we had a choice to make: either leave them alone in the dark and hope whatever took the others doesn’t come back for them, or try, somehow, to catch them all.

We were deliberating when we saw a female mallard make a noisy descent in the pond. The goslings all started peeping and the one we took to be the leader of the brood stood up expectantly, as if he wondered if they could latch on to this duck. But the mallard flew off again. Then came a wild turkey, out of the woods to drink and take a sand bath in the loose earth by the apple trees. The goslings peeped at her too, but the turkey left.

If it sounds like I am writing a children’s book, believe me I felt it while I watched this all unfold. “Are You My Mother?” came to mind, a book that broke my little kid’s heart back in the day. The dark was coming and the goslings were starting to huddle. I phoned the local wild bird rehabilitation centre. They told me it was unusual for both parents to disappear like that, and the chances of them returning were now, after an entire day, extremely low.

“So what are we going to do,” my partner asked.
“We’re going to get big bed sheets. And we’re going to catch them,” I said.

And that’s what we did. If anyone saw the pair of us they would have thought we were bewitched, running through the backyard fields with bedsheets flapping about us. In the first rescue mission, we each caught a gosling, but the other two ran off into the marshy reeds and we lost them.

We took the two captured ones to the rabbit hutch, which we had just finished setting up for Torts and Hilda. But the rabbits, in times like these, would have to wait.

By the time we looked back toward the pond, the other two were already returning. They waddled right to the place where we had captured their siblings and they sat. Like their mother, they are persistent, trying again despite the risk. Coming back again to the place they were raised, the only place they knew. Where else could they go?

This time, when we approached with our bedsheets at the ready, they didn’t run right away. They flattened themeslves in the short grass as if somehow, they could hide themsleves there. I felt like they were ready to give up, but they shot up at the last moment and darted for the reeds again. We each chased one, threw our sheets, and carefully scooped them up.

We had all four now. I filled a tub of water and placed it in the hutch for them. As soon as I step out of their eyesight, they would swim in there.

My mom and I took to the woods and the garden and pulled as much dandelion as we could. We piled a mound of it in their hutch, thinking it would last a few hours. But they ate it in minutes. And soon the hutch was full of their droppings, and the new turf I had laid, completley unsalvegable. As much as I wanted to keep them until they were strong enough to fend for themselves on the pond, I knew we didn’t have the proper set up to raise 4 wild goslings. We let them rest in the hutch all night, hoping that a small miracle would return the parents to the pond.

Taking them to the wildlife rehabilitation centre was plan B, but before that we had to give plan A a shot. We had read that geese are remarkable parents and will often adopt orphaned goslings. In fact, this is often what rehabilitation centres do when someone brings them a baby goose, they start looking for parents.

So the next day my mom and I drove along Lake of Two Mountains, searching until we found, out in the field in front of an impressionable house, a flock of geese and a group of chicks (we learned that this is what is called a goose creche). We asked the owner of the house if we could attempt an goose rescue and adoption mission on their front lawn. They seemed sceptical, but generous.  So we carried the crate of goslings from the back of our car and made our way to the creche.

The adult geese started honking and warning in their usual way, and their own babies retreated to the water with their parents. But this flock could hear, coming from inside our crate, the little peeps of our goslings. You can tell when a goose is listening to something: it stands very still, neck perfectly straight and slightly forward, with only the beady eye searching for the source of the sound. I knew at that moment that these adults would welcome these babies.

I opened the crate door and immediately the four goslings darted out one after the other, peeping for help while the nearby adults honked as if to say “this way!” My mom and I laughed as the goslings, within minutes, were part of the pack, eating grass and foraging in the centre of the flock. We did what we could, and gave them the best second shot they could get. They had multiple bodyguards now.

When we got back home, the pond felt surprisingly empty without them. The backyard rang hollow for a few days after that. I kept thinking of mother goose, whatever had happened to her,  and how often I’d told her “This is your year.” I suppose that’s why we fought so hard for her little ones… I felt responsible for them, in a completely self-imposed way.

If it couldn’t be her year, we would try our best to make it theirs.