Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Swimming in the flood (Doves, Finals, and Love)

The past few days have been bizarre, hectic, stressful, tiresome, and surprising. Of course, like I said last weekend, I did spend Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday studying for my finals. But, on Sunday, a distraction came when our gardener trimmed our palm trees. Apparently there had been a nest of mourning doves in our palm tree, and so my dad came to show me the poor baby birds on the ground. There were two of them, both had some feathers and I'm guessing they were a couple of weeks old.
Finding these baby birds sent my stress levels sky-high. What was I going to do with 2 helpless baby birds right before I took my finals?! While the gardener continued working in the yard, I lined a shoebox with papertowels and covered a tupperware full of hot water to keep them warm, and let them rest. One of them (the larger one) seemed perfectly fine, but the smaller one had a pretty badly swollen chest and what looked like bruising. Understandable, considering the poor thing just took a tumble from a palm tree. I thought for sure the little one wouldn't survive. I tried to call an animal hospital to see if they'd take them, but they said they didn't take birds.
I hummed and hawed over it for awhile, and finally decided that they needed to be fed, so I went out and bought some veggie baby food, cause I wasn't really sure what they ate. they ate some, and I left them alone. One of my friends suggested leaving them in the backyard to see if the parents will come for them, which I thought was a silly idea at first. I mean, their nest had been obliterated. But when I left them out in the backyard and came back to check, sure enough, there was a mourning dove adult on our roof, eyeing the babies. I was amazed, I really just didn't expect the parents to come back after their rude eviction.
It took a little while for me to realize I had to take the babies out of the shoebox or else the parents wouldn't come close, but once the babies were out of the soft, warm box and onto the prickly grass, one of the parents came down and fed them. Well, I was worried for a little bit because it seemed as if the little one wasn't getting fed, but then I caught a glimpse of the little one getting fed a little.
The next morning when I went out to check on them, I only found the little one in the grass, covered in ants. I picked the poor thing up and searched for the other one, and finally found it hiding under our fig tree! I thought this was an excellent spot since the big broad leaves are excellent cover, and so I reunited them. 
The babies are still alive, amazingly, and seem to have become more mobile in the backyard, wandering around our vegetable garden and fruit trees, and momma dove and papa dove are usually close by, ready to show off their nifty pretend-to-have-an-injured-wing dance when I check on their babies. I'm excited to watch them grow up. :)





2 comments:

  1. glad the parents were watching and waiting for them! hope they make it!

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  2. Eek ants are so hard on baby animals. You should make a circle of baking soda around them! Hope they survive! Glad they're old enough that they'll start flying soon.

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