A few mornings ago my son went outside to check the bird
feeder. “Hey Mom, be careful if you go out in the yard,” he warned, “there’s a
baby robin on the ground.” Nathan was very concerned about the fledgling,
knowing we have several cats in the neighborhood who are very good hunters.
Before leaving for school, Nathan checked again on the bird who was making
tentative hops around in the grass. I assured him that the little fella
probably had been pushed out of the nest to learn how to fly today and I’d keep
an eye on him. I then waved at my very own fledgling as he got in his car to
drive to school.
As I went about the business of cleaning up the kitchen,
having gone to bed the night before too tired to finish the dinner dishes, I kept
looking through the large window in front of the sink through to the backyard.
The mother and father robins swooped to the ground to feed their baby, then
swooped back up to the trees, or into the grass to forage for more worms that
they would then masticate for their youngster. As I continued to watch, I was
reminded of the part I had played in the disastrous demise of another baby
robin—one that had the ill-fated luck to be “saved” by two nine-year-old girls.
One spring afternoon during the fourth grade, one of the
other Lauras (there were four of us) invited me home for lunch. On our walk to
her house, we discovered a baby robin hiding underneath a bush and assumed it
had fallen from its nest. Concerned for its survival, and apparently assuming
that its parents were unaware of their baby’s whereabouts, Laura and I scooped
it up and brought it to her house.
Laura rummaged around in her basement and found an old
canary cage the family had stored there, and we tenderly placed the chirping
little bird in it. We proudly brought him back to our classroom to show our
adoptee to our fellow classmates.
Laura and I thought he was a delight, but we did have one
dilemma: how to feed the wee tyke. At recess we went out near the lilac bushes
and dug around for some worms. We chopped them up, but little baby wouldn’t eat
them. We couldn’t seem to force feed him either as his beak remained firmly
shut, except when he cheeped. We tried some milk having no clue that birds
would not be interested in dairy products. We tried water. Nothing worked.
At the end of the school day, Laura took our baby home with
her. The plan was to switch off days until he was grown, and then we would let
him out in the world. We were under the false assumption that he would just fly
off when he was ready.
The next morning Laura came to school without the bird cage.
The poor little thing had died in the night—probably starved and scared to
death. I was grief-stricken. I couldn’t help thinking back to the moment we
scooped the little robin up from under the bush, and desperately wished that we
had left well enough alone. What if his mommy was looking for him, I wondered,
too late.
As I watched the mother and father robins in our backyard
care for their offspring, the mistake that Laura and I had made, gave me pause.
And the parallels to raising one’s own children interrupted my thoughts as I
observed the birds.
Over the next three days, the robins fastidiously cared for
their young. They took turns dashing off to gather food while the other parent
acted as sentinel. I went out in the yard periodically to find Baby when I’d
lost sight of him in the grass. If I got too close, Mother or Father Robin made
a terrible fuss and Baby would cease chirping as he waited for the danger his
parent sensed to pass. Finally, on the third morning I saw Baby making practice
take-offs and landings from a low embankment on the back of our property. By
the end of the third day, he could easily fly to the branch of a tree and dig
his own worms. Although I could still tell the baby from his parents, his
growth over the three-day period had been remarkable. His downy feathers were
all but completely gone and his coloring was very close to that of the adults.
Another day or two and I’d be hard-pressed to know which was which.
Each day upon Nathan’s arrival home from school, I reported
out on the activities I had observed, and he went out in the yard to make his
own observations of the baby bird. My hope was that I was coming at least close
to emulating the robins when it came to teaching my own baby how to fly.
Copyright DJ Anderson, 2008
