Baby Ditch Bird

Adorable? Nope.

A while ago I wrote a brief post about the Yellow Crowned Night Herons that have built a nesting colony in our yard. They moved in and built their nests and pooped on my truck. Charming. Recently egg shells started dropping from their nests, indicating that something must be hatching. We thought we might be seeing movement in the nests, which we pointed out to the kids and all thought was pretty neat. Then, on Friday, we received confirmation that there were indeed chicks that had hatched, and that ditch birds are terrible terrible parents.
The little guy you see in the picture had either fallen, or been pitched out of the nest. Either way, he was laying on the ground thirty feet below his parents and they didn't care. There were other chicks in the nest and they seemed quite content with that. I, however, was not. I just don't have it in me to let a baby anything lay there and die. I just can't. No matter how idiotic it was to pick up the ailing chick and bring it inside, there really wasn't anything else I could do. Just to be clear, the world doesn't need another ditch bird. They're not endangered or threatened or uncommon in any way. Other than being terrible parents, they're doing quite well as a species. In fact, if the baby was pitched out of the nest for being small, I might even be going against natural selection here and be raising a chick that will be a detriment to the species. I still can't just let it die. I am not a smart man.
I may not be smart, but I do know how to raise baby birds. A quick search showed that Yellow Crested Night Herons eat crayfish, frogs, bugs, fish and just about anything aquatic or semi aquatic that they can catch. Ok, meat. They eat it, lug it back to the nest in their bellies and then puke it into the waiting mouths of their chicks. Ok, meat vomit. What very common product looks, and pretty much is, meat vomit? Canned dog food. Think about it for just a second, you know I'm right.
The baby bird is a little older than is ideal for trying to hand raise. It's already imprinted on it's parents, so initially it really just wanted to poke my eyes out. It certainly didn't want me to feed it. I had to hold it's beak and poke little bits of food to the back of it's throat for the first few days. Sounds horrible, my wife says it looks horrible, but it's really not so bad. My older daughter could even do it. By yesterday, which was day four, he was starting to pick up and eat the food by himself. This morning he ate his own breakfast without any help at all. It was pretty awesome. Then he vomited it up, looked at it, and ate it again. I guess I should be twice as happy?
Even though I set out with the intention of saving this bird and raising him until he can go out into the wild by himself, there's no guarantee that it will work. I was quite shocked that he even lived through the first two days. He seems to be doing quite well and is clearly growing, but there is still a lot that can go wrong between now and when he's big enough to be able to fly and hunt for himself. He's the current project around here so I'll be giving updates as things progress. Follow along as I either hand raise a bird that should never be hand raised, or experience a minor family tragedy as the ugliest, orneriest, and newest member of the family fails to make it. Could go either way.