Rescue and Release

With his permission I am sharing the following event that Gordon Bell recorded recently. In the late 90s I had a contract in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. I drove there every Sunday evening and back to the Arkansas farm on Thursday evenings.Leaving my client late one Thursday, I stopped at a convenience store to nourish my starving red Jeep Grand Cherokee. As it hungrily gulped down liquid gold, I gathered the styrofoam and paper drink cups from the seats and floorboards, coupled with plastic lids impaled with straws with chewed up ends.As I approached the nearly full trash can to dump the refuse, I heard anemic chirps in the pastel blue 55-gallon drum.Scrunching the double handful of stuff with my left hand, I sorted through the top layer of trash with my right and found three baby birds in a displaced nest, still pink and featherless, their yellow-lined pink gapes frantically signaling for chow.“My God!” I blurted out.At home we had horses, cows, chickens, brush goats, multitudes of dogs and had just lost a few newborn abandoned baby squirrels.We didn’t need something else .But I couldn’t leave ‘em. Someone had discarded these babies. Totally heartless. And the Creator had once again burdened me with something I knew NOTHING about.I replaced the nest with my trash, placed it in the passenger seat and pulled the gas nozzle from the Jeep.I ran into the convenience store and grabbed a warm, dried out stale hot dog off one of those warming racks. Thinking that birds were omnivores (based on my chickies), I figgered I could chew this crunchy bun and aging pink dyed weiner, then swig a bit of water, orally swish into a putrid liquid and blow some of it into a straw. Then using a finger over the upper straw end, I release little droplets into their beaks. This worked very well. They gulped faster than I could suck down a Guinness Stout. It wasn’t long until they passed out.I headed home which was a four hour drive. I made it down to Tulsa, about 45 minutes later sparrows encored their “feed-me Seymour” song.After pulling into a Mexican restaurant’s parking lot, Seymour repeated the prep, feeding and returning to the road. My four to five hour drive turned into a six hour feeding frenzied drive.After numerous pigging outs, darkness hit and they shut up and went down, winglets reaching for the arms of Morpheus.Finally arriving at our farm, I brought’em in and placed‘em in our master bathroom linen closet. After explaining our new parenthood status, my wife and I returned to sleep.For the three-day weekend my very understanding spouse and I prepared and delivered a sparrow smorgasbord for about 12 hours a day. Sunday evening I left my wife with our new-found family to support.After nearly two weeks, the birds were fully feathered. We came up with a cage to prevent them from learning the flying business in the house.The day came that we realized they had to be set free from us. Taking the cage to the back deck, we placed their wired home on our glass picnic table. I opened their cage door and they bounded out. Two flew immediately (total shock at their lack of gratitude and poor manners). Those two never looked back. But one stuck around a bit. It flew off to a nearby tree. It returned to the table. Not for long though. It took off and didn’t ’t come back. Sunday before leaving for Bartlesville, I returned to the picnic table. I waited a few minutes.A small brown sparrow flew to the table, just off to my right. He stayed only a moment and flitted away.