Baby Ditch Bird #6

Well, our baby Yellow Crested Night Heron isn't a baby any more. It spends it's days and nights outside. It hunts and it flies, though neither of them well. It's been chatting with the other herons in the yard. Most importantly, it finally convinced my wife to like it.

Hunting in a small pond. Very small.

I've been doing pretty much all of the feeding up until the last week or so. Because it's summer and because I get to sleep in a bit, my wife has been feeding the bird in the morning. She takes the food out and calls to it and it flies down from wherever it is in the yard. The swingset, the roof, on top of my truck, it comes gliding in for breakfast. Finally my wife can enjoy a caring relationship with the bird without having to worry about touching it. That makes her happy.
We'll keep feeding the bird twice a day as long as it wants to eat. I acknowledge that by raising the bird and taking it out of it's natural environment I may have altered it's ability to hunt a bit. I have watched it eat bugs out of puddles and off of the lawn, so I know it's learning by itself, but there's not a whole lot of motivation to go hunt frogs when you can just wait for dinner.
We've pretty much done it. We rescue a helpless chick, fed it, raised it, and released it. It's functioning as a wild bird in the same way that a song bird that eats birdseed from a feeder is wild. It gets supplements from humans, but other than that it has to make it's own way in the world. The other day I counted six adolescent herons on my lawn and another four adults in the trees. Keeping Baby Burr alive isn't going to matter much to the bird population in my area, but to the bird, it's the difference between life and death. If there's any lesson to take from the effort that we put into raising this bird it's probably related to that. I don't think that being a stay at home dad is going to have any real impact on the world. Wars will still happen. Taxes will still be paid. College will still be expensive. All of those things would happen if I stayed at home or if I put my kids in daycare. To my kids however, I think the decision to hold them every day for naps when they were babies is significant. I think that making a healthy dinner for them every night is significant. I think being there at 3:00 to pick them up from school and help them understand their homework is significant. I'm not affecting the world, but I am affecting four lives. That's good enough for me.