Last week when I left all of you in suspense at the end of Dummy Bird - Part 1, I had four naked baby crows living in my bedroom. I learned a lot of respect for crow parents in those first days. Baby crows are hungry all the time. At 17 I didn't realize that really all babies are hungry all the time so this new responsibility took me by surprise. You can't go to the store and buy baby crow food, so we improvised. Under the direct supervision of a veternarian (my parents) we decided that wet cat food would probably contain all of the nutrition that a growing baby crow would need and would be easy for them to swallow. Think about it, adult crows regurgitate food for their chicks, and wet cat food already looks like it's been thrown up by something, why not an adult crow? I'd mix the food with a bit of water to soften it and form it into little balls. With the whole batch of crows pointing their open mouths to the sky I'd place ball after ball in and watch them disappear. After a while they'd start to get bigger and bigger and when they were so full they looked sure to pop they'd settle down and do what all well fed babies do, fall asleep. In a wild crow nest food can be at a premium so the most aggressive chick gets the most food. In my nest, everyone ate all they wanted, and they grew. Oh how they grew.
The baby crows needed to eat every four hours or so during the day. My parents worked, and school was close to home, and they were my crows, so I was voted the man for the job. The only hitch was that back when I was in school, we had a closed campus, which meant I couldn't leave. A quick call from my mom led me to one of the greatest rule breaking triumphs of my high school career. The principal at the time was a guy who took the word 'pal' out of principal. Couple that with my propensity to be at the site, though never the cause, of every major violation during the school year and I was not on friendly terms with him. It brought me no end of joy to drive past him as he guarded the parking lot to bust people trying to sneak out at lunch, and just smile and wave as I drove past. He hated that my mom had given me permission to break his rules for something so incredibly weird as feeding baby crows. How do you even argue against something like that? It's not like you're all of a sudden going to have a bunch of other students leaving to feed their baby crows, and even he didn't want to be the guy responsible for the death of a bunch of baby birds. It was awesome.
Click past the jump to read more about the crows.
This is a great part of the story to talk a little bit about bird nests. Normally birds like crows nest high up in trees, and they don't care at all about the forest floor beneath them. This is good because baby crows have a pretty interesting, and completely instinctual, way to keep the nest clean. When they have to 'go', they back up to the edge of the nest, and just before they lose their balance, they let loose. Once they're done, they flop back into the middle of the nest. This is absolutely brilliant in an evolutionary sense. The nest stays clean, the birds stay clean, and nobody has to do any real work to keep it that way. However, if their nest is on a dresser in a bedroom instead of high in a tree, it causes problems. Big stinky problems. In very short time I had everything moved as far from my dresser as it could go. It's a good thing I had vinyl flooring in my bedroom, and even then I put down newspapers and had to change them at least once a day. It was both fascinating and horrifying to lay there in bed and watch these little featherless things waddle back to the edge of the cage and just let go, every single time, never making a mistake or having an accident. The only good part of all this was that I never had to clean their cage, it was spotless. The really horrible part was that my dresser only had open floor on three sides. The other side was against the wall, and I don't think the wall ever fully recovered from the onslaught it received. Sorry wall.
The birds were growing rapidly and their eyes opened. They immediately imprinted on me, and for the rest of existence they were doomed to think that they belonged with people. People were food, they were companionship, they were everything to those ugly little baby crows. They didn't stay ugly for too long and eventually their feathers grew in. They were starting to look, and act, more like real crows. This was a problem. I had enough patience and room to raise one crow, maybe two if I was stretching it, but not four. Four was loud and rambunctious and they were getting way too big for their cage and way too hard to catch when I let them out to play. Now, you might think that it would be hard to find a home for a crow, but you'd be wrong. My dad put out feelers and within days I had more offers to take the crows than I had birds. We had a little bit of an interview process trying to make sure the crows were going to go to a good home where they would be taken care of until they wished to head off into the wild. We settled on giving two of them to one old man who had had crows when he was a kid, which I think was during the great depression, he was old, and a third crow off to another gentleman. One bird I kept, that was Dummy Bird.
Dummy Bird sounds like a horrible name, but he was really a horrible bird. Not to suggest that there were any crows anywhere that were any better, it's just the nature of crows, they're all horrible. They're incredibly smart, social, and loud. They can figure out the world and how to manipulate the objects, and people, in it. I called him Dummy Bird because every morning started with me saying "stupid bird" the very first thing. He still spent his nights in the cage in my bedroom and slept soundly. He used the very first hint of light in the sky (and he was right by an east facing window) to determine that it was morning and he should be fed. Once he was sure that it was time to eat he made sure to let me know with phenomenal volume. If I was sleeping, he would crow every five to ten seconds to try and get my attention. Once he saw my eyes, he'd crow constantly, over and over, to encourage me to get up and feed him. Every morning was like this. He'd start crowing at some ungodly hour, I'd pretend to be asleep and not open my eyes, not even a sliver, to try and stay in bed as long as I could. Eventually I'd crack and pop them open and he'd go nuts. I'd get up and get food for him, and after feeding I'd try to get back to sleep as it was always still earlier than any sane human would be awake. Dummy Bird didn't want to sleep any more though, he wanted to play, to interact, to go do stuff. It was miserable.
The story has become long again, so next week I'll wrap things up and tell you what fate befell Dummy Bird.
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