Rusty, the Red-necked Whatever

"I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.” (Emily Dicikinson)

It was a hot and dusty week here at the end of the road. The three-man construction crew had been working on our siding everyday, always starting before 8AM to beat the heat. I don't know about you, but it's usually past noon before my brain starts firing on all three cylinders. So at first, I thought maybe I had mis-heard the elder construction guy.

"Yep. And we saw an injured loon on the road coming in," he said in passing while setting up the table saw, like that was something that he always sees on his way to work.

"A loon. Really?" I repeated, wondering what he had really said, and why my coffee hadn't kicked in.

"Yep, a loon" he repeated. "We tried to catch him. Mike chased it around the truck, but that sucker could really run." I pictured three large fellows running circles around their pickup, chasing a short loon on a dusty gravel road, half a mile from the nearest water. It was an interesting image.

Wait a minute -- the coffee was starting to work. Loons have trouble even walking on solid ground. Their legs are set so far back on their body that they just sort of push themselves along. I tried shaking the cobwebs out of my ears.

"So," I asked slowly, curiously, "what makes you think it was a loon?"

"Oh, I know loons," he declared, with the conviction of being the eldest person present. End of discussion.

That's how my day started. So we found a big, blue plastic tub with a good lid, and got directions on where to look for a loon ("Just past the mailboxes, before the hill."). Three of us piled into the car to go roadside birding, and the crew fired up their saws and started making more dust.

I parked the car in the middle of the reported loon habitat, and we started walking the roadsides. Sure enough, in short order our friend Bernadette found the bird laying still in the tall grass, just a few feet off the gravel. I slowly approached from behind with my big, thick fleece shirt and, once in position, I asked Bernadette to stand in front of the bird and wave her hands to get its attention. One quick pounce, and the fleece-covered bird was struggling in my arms.

We made a quick examination. The wings were small but uninjured, and both legs were strong while kicking me. The sharp beak was in working order, the eyes were clear and focused, and there were no visible body injuries. Not even a ruffled feather. The bird seemed normal, except perhaps for its decision-making abilities. I set him in the plastic tub, and Bernadette held the lid down while I slid my arms out. We drove back to the end of the road, home to our little lake.

"Red-necked Grebe," I yelled to the crew while carrying the bird in the tub through the construction zone and into a quiet corner of our basement. I named him in honor of our friend who's having surgery to rescue him from years of back pain. "Rusty, the Red-necked Grebe." It sounded better than, "Rusty, the Sort-of-loon-like Whatever Bird."

More than an hour later, the local bird rehabilitator still hadn't returned Tracy's call. Since Rusty didn't have any external injuries, we decided to release him in the lake rather than hold him captive any longer. I slipped my arms back into the tub and, holding his long beak with one hand, carefully pulled him out. I crouched low and set him in the water, and his powerful legs started kicking away. When I let go I expected him to immediately run, swim, or fly away. Instead Rusty spun around to face me, and then lunged. He missed me, but he made his point and restored his injured dignity. Rusty then casually turned back towards open water and slowly swam away. So much for saying, "Thanks."

The night before we met Rusty was dark and moonless. Every now and then on dark nights, flying loons and grebes will mistake roads for rivers or skinny lakes, and land there by mistake. On water, they have to run across the surface in order to take off. But when grounded, because their legs are so far back, they can't really run to get airborne again. We suspect that one wrong judgement turned Rusty into a grounded grebe.

Rusty stayed at our little lake for the next week or so. He spent lots of time preening and swimming, and lots of time diving and fishing. We felt relieved to finally see him catch and eat a good-sized trout. After surfacing with the fish, it took Rusty all of five seconds to swallow it whole. And when we last saw him, Rusty was acting like a healthy loon, er, I mean grebe.

Whatever.

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A Wildlife Emergency

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom..” (Bertrand Russell)

"We have a wildlife emergency!" my friend declared. She was ringing my doorbell with her 11-year-old son, both of them looking worried and anxious. Possibilities flashed through my mind. Did someone hit one of the neighborhood fawns? Was the injured Loon back again?

No, this was a bat emergency. They had discovered a blind and naked baby bat, still alive, but laying helplessly on the neighbor's deck in the middle of a summer's day. I looked down at the two-inch long bat pup, then up to the two hopeful faces watching my every move, and felt my heart sink.

When a child learns empathy and wants to help an injured animal, how do you explain to him that many baby animals don't survive to adulthood? I put on my "serious biologist face" and tried my best. In a good year, I started, maybe three-quarters or more of the pups in a bat nursery will survive to become full-grown bats. In a bad year, less than half of them survive. "The animal world is really, really tough -- and that's perfectly natural," as long as we don't do things to make it even harder on them. Inside, I doubted that my rationalization was helping, but maybe I was planting seeds for the future.

There was no good solution. An abandoned bat pup is unlikely to survive for more than a day. But I had a young version of myself by my side, and we had to do something. I couldn't find any sign of bats in the house where the pup lay. So with gloved hands, I collected the purplish pup and carried her next door, where I knew that bats lived. We placed her near the roof ridge and hoped for the best.

In the summer, pregnant bats move into warmer (thermally stable) locations, like metal roofs and attic spaces, to give birth and raise their young in nursery colonies. Like us, bat mothers usually only have one baby per year. They nurse them with milk for about six weeks. The pups grow quickly and can fly at about three weeks, but they normally stay in the nursery until weened. Sometimes, a pup crawls or falls out of the nursery. Sometimes, when disturbed, the pup clings to mom and she tries to move it to a new location. Either way the pup is pretty much doomed. (This is why bat exclusion measures should never occur in the summer.)

In the fall, most bats will move out of human structures and migrate to thermally-stable caves ("hibernacula") for hibernation. If disturbed during hibernation, they burn up the equivalent of 20-30 day's worth of stored energy. So undisturbed nursery and hibernacula locations are perilously critical to bat survival.

It's revealing that, in locations where the native bats are large and easily seen, bats are cherished and sometimes even revered. But in places where bats are small and hard to see -- like North America -- bats are feared and persecuted. And that can lead to strange behavior in unexpected places.

Back when I worked in Glacier National Park, I attended a yearly meeting with most of the park's Rangers. These are guys and gals that I hold in the highest regard. But when a bat appeared at one such meeting, the Rescue Rangers left me shaking my head. One after another, the room quickly filled with highly-trained men and women swatting and throwing things at the frightened bat. One very intelligent Ranger friend opened the door and repeatedly threw a towel outside. "The bat will chase it out the door!" he yelled. Well, I've watched thousands of bats in the wild, and not once have I seen one chasing a towel.

The Rangers stopped for a moment, and the bat landed on a wall. I quietly placed an empty coffee can over the exhausted bat, slipped a piece of paper between the can and the wall, and safely trapped the bat in the can. Another ranger friend cheered, "How many Rangers does it take to catch a bat? Ha! They can't do it. All it takes is one biologist!"

In another bout with the Park, I tried to get the Chief Naturalist interested in Glacier's native bats. During the popular summer-time campfire talks, the seasonal Naturalists often get upstaged by bats feeding on the mosquitoes that are in turn feeding on the audience. With my own money, I bought a set of slides showing our native bat species. I then donated the slides to the park collection so the Naturalists could incorporate bats into their educational slide shows. I also wrote a detailed memo about potential funding sources for buying a "bat detector" (detectors amplify bat echolocations so humans can hear them). I figured that the campfire kids would be fascinated to hear the bats feeding around them. My efforts went absolutely nowhere. Apparently, native bats were not cute and cuddly enough to mention to park visitors.

The Park Service is required by law to preserve each park's natural resources -- even bats -- for future generations. But just try explaining this to the dusty bureaucrats running some of the park units. Glacier has lots of old buildings within the park boundary. And this means that lots of excellent bat habitat is infested -- with park employees and visitors. So I volunteered to take the rabies vaccination shots, at a cost to the park of about $100. Then the park would have a trained and protected person to respond to bats in buildings. You can guess how well this went over. The native bats living in Glacier Park were lumped into "pest management" instead. It takes some people a long time to learn how to change directions.

You can learn all about bats in short order at the links listed below. I won't go into the many ways in which bats benefit all of us -- even the people who still fear them. Suffice it to say that we really need bats if we want our children to live in a healthy environment. Right now, our native bats are suffering a "wildlife emergency" of their own, and they really, really need our help.

White-nose Syndrome (WNS), is named for a white fungus that appears on the faces of infected bats. Since its discovery in a single New York cave in 2006, WNS has killed more than a million hibernating bats. Little brown bats appear to be hit the hardest. WNS is rapidly spreading south and west, and it's about 95% fatal. A number of bat species risk extinction within a matter of years -- unless we find a cause and a solution. To learn more about WNS and how you might help, read more at the Bat Conservation International website.

Bats and humans can peacefully coexist -- we did so for generations. As you read this, a handful of bat biologists are struggling to find a solution to this new wildlife emergency. Our children will be watching our every move.

Bat Links:

What to do if you've found a bat
Bat Conservation International
Bats of Montana

A Bird in the Hand

"I realized that If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.”
(Charles Lindbergh, interviewed shortly before his death)

I have a cold. I have a cold and some serious brain fog. Just like my little chickadee. Another one hit the window today, dang it. We live in Eden and so we have windows all over the house. We also feed the birds. Bad combination. We've tried placing white, vinyl stickers in the middle of the windows -- in the middle of our view -- so the birds don’t fly headfirst into the glass. It doesn’t always work.

I heard the familiar “thump” while working on the computer, and I looked outside to see a little Black-capped Chickadee lying on the windowsill, two little feet pointed skyward. What can you do? Here’s what I’ve learned -- don’t give up on the fellow. I gently collected him in my palm and brought him inside. Setting him in an old towel, I lowered the towel into a big, clear tub with a lid (very important), and moved him to the warmest, darkest part of our house. And then I waited. When I left him, he looked dead to the world. He didn’t look much better thirty minutes later. But an hour later, he was standing up on the towel and looking for an exit. I carried him back outside before removing the lid (very important), and gently lifted him up in my hand. He blinked twice, and then flew off to the nearest tree. His brain fog had lifted!

Birds sometimes break little bones when they collide with a window, and then there’s not much you can do. My ornithology professor taught me how to squeeze a seriously-injured songbird (broken wing or leg) in your hand until it had passed. He believed that was the most humane thing to do. Still, that’s a really hard task for a bird lover. I’ll admit, sometimes I’ve carried seriously injured birds off to a quiet location in the forest – that way at least, the last thing they see is familiar. I don’t know if it helps them, but it helps me. A little bit.

But in my experience, most birds that fly into windows just get knocked foggy. You can’t rescue them all, but you can help many. What’s most important is to keep them warm, quiet and contained – and hope they recover. If left outside, their little inferno bodies are likely to burn up too many calories to recover before the fog clears.

Our previous bird/window collision was about a month ago, a Mountain Chickadee. I didn’t have high hopes that she was still alive, so I set her on a towel in a bucket without a lid. Big mistake. I spent a good part of the afternoon watching her fly around the house -- ridding herself of excess weight along the way.

Several years ago, a Northern Flicker (a medium-sized woodpecker) flew into an upstairs window. When I collected him, both eyes rolled back, then closed, and his head flopped onto his back. I figured he’d broken his neck, but I couldn’t bring myself to squeeze him. So I placed him in a towel inside a cardboard box, and left him alone in the studio. I checked on him every hour, all morning and into the afternoon. His eyes remained closed, his head still flopped back. Six hours into the ordeal, I was trying to think of a quiet spot to bury him as I opened the cardboard lid to reach inside. Suddenly, a big blur came flying out! Looking for an exit, he flew straight into the nearest window, hitting it head-on from the inside. Fortunately, he wasn’t flying very fast this time. The collision slowed him down just enough, and I grabbed him. His eyes looked clear and focused, and he turned his head from side to side. I carried him outside and lifted him skyward. He flew off, lifting my spirits along the way.

And finally, 27 years ago I got to meet an honest-to-goodness blackbird. I was working for a central Florida newspaper and had driven into town on a Sunday to print some photographs. No one else was around, but I heard noises coming from the newsroom. Somehow, a Grackle had gotten into the press area and dipped its long tail into the thick, black, newspaper ink. It then proceeded to explore the rest of the building, smearing ink everywhere it landed. I eventually corralled it in the city editor’s office, then carried it to the back door to set it free. As I watched it fly away, the door quietly closed behind me and I realized that my keys were back inside the darkroom. There I was, smeared with ink and locked out of the building on a Sunday afternoon. I called one of the writers, and he kindly drove into town to rescue me.

The most embarrassing part? I had to be rescued earlier that same day after locking my keys inside the car. Now that’s some serious brain fog.