THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, June 3, 1995 TAG: 9506020037
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A13 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
A wobbly baby bird on the ground, cheeping for help.
This may well be one of the announcements - more painful than we'd like - that family-raising time in the feathered world is very much with us again.
Most human observers of nature's spring rites would, of course, prefer happier symbols.
Like the pair of Canadian geese my wife and I saw again this week on the river shore near us, marching along with their contented brood of five still-fuzzy goslings.
Or like the chirps coming from a well-protected opening under a neighbor's roof, an aperture to which two adult starlings, for some days, dutifully ferried foodstuffs, including bits of suet from our yard feeder.
Or the two yellow-crowned night herons, in their immature garb of dusty brown, that we saw a few days ago, on bare limbs over a patch of marshland - perched within a few feet of each other and obviously doing well since their recent departure from the nest.
But less-fortunate youngsters, nestlings that tumble to the ground by accident and remain virtually immobilized there, or that crash-land after a failed wing-flapping test, are far more powerful attention-getters. This spring, so far, we at our house have been caught up in two such predicaments.
One involved a young starling that had hobbled, stubby wings atremble, partway out into a street we were following on our bicycles. The baby was getting fluttering, panicky attention from one of its parents, which was making no progress at coaxing its chick out of harm's way. We didn't think it would be a good idea to handle the stranded creature, so we shooed - and that worked. When we biked on, the young one was up on a lawn and at least safe from a running-over for a while.
Our other juvenile-in-trouble was a partly feathered blue jay, staggering around an open plot of hard-pruned shrubbery at our house. Mother and father had found their ground-bound offspring and were employing protective aerobatics between deliveries of food. After a day and a half of anxious monitoring, during which the fledgling moved only a few feet, we decided to try the shooing tactic again, with a dense, protective bush as the goal. Again success. That is, as far as we know. Feeding flights continued into the new location, and recently we've seen a young jay making short flights to low limbs in the vicinity.
Maybe these two strugglers survived; maybe not. But certainly such plights as theirs occur in enormous numbers every year, with risks of fatal outcomes so high as to boggle the mind. What's really incredible is the task faced so early in a bird's life - the transition from flightlessness to flight, often from some hatching spot way up in the air.
In light of the hazards and the need for perfect coordination of genetics and parental coaching, we might well wonder how bird species have kept themselves going over the evolutionary eons - and keep going now. But despite everything, birds have and birds still do. The reality may be more to the point than the puzzling. MEMO: Mr. Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star.
by CNB