I walked by our Avian Nursery this afternoon and was surprised to hear all sorts of chirping. In the  past 24 hours, we went from only a few birds placed in our Orphan Outreach Program, to a nursery with nearly a dozen birds in it. Nesting season is upon us.

This group of young House Finches came in this morning (I love the wispies on their heads!):

This fledgling-stage robin also was admitted this morning and to be honest, we were a bit surprised at how old it is already:

Young robins, like many other bird species, leave the nest before they can fly. That’s why you always see the spotted robins hopping around the yard, hiding under your shrubs, etc. They leave the nest simply because there’s not enough room in it for their flight feathers to develop. Think about how small a nest is, add four growing robins and you can envision the space problem!

They’ll spend 5-9 days on the ground learning to search for food, taking practice flights and picking up tips from their parents on how to evade predators.

A reminder that fledglings should be left alone. This is an important stage of development necessary for them to lead successful lives in the wild. We realize it is stressful if there are feral cats in the neighborhood, or if your neighbor leaves their own cat(s) out, but the robins need to learn to survive. Hopefully, if you point out the cute young robins to your cat-owning neighbors, they’ll agree to keep their cat indoors for the next couple of weeks.

Of course, mistakes are part of the learning curve and accidents will happen to young birds. If you notice a fledgling dragging a wing, not able to stand or worse yet actually pry it out of a dog or cat mouth, you can certainly bring it in. That’s why we’re here!

First, I love my job. I get to combine my passion for wildlife with my professional skills. Then, there are the people I work with. I’ve learned so much from them. Every day I go to the office I learn amazing facts. Take yesterday for example.

We admitted a Pied-billed Grebe that had crash landed on a road instead of in a nearby lake.

After a physical exam and x-rays to check for internal damage, she was given a clean bill of health. The amazing part of this story? She had an egg in her. Yep, we could see it on the x-ray, and you can too:

Yes, this is cool because you can actually see the egg, and see that it’s still soft – the thin white circle around the dark circle is the actual shell. You can see the vertebrae behind the egg in fact. But the really neat part of this? It’s by far earlier than normal for grebes to be nesting. There are no records outside of the month of May here in Minnesota.

We quickly returned the uninjured grebe to the nearby lake, hoping she’ll continue her nesting cycle.

The other neat thing that happened yesterday is we learned that the oldest wild pelican on record was a 20-year old bird in Montana. Why would we learn that? Because we received a report back from the federal Bird Banding Laboratory on a band that we removed from an injured pelican last winter. Turns out that pelican, which sadly had to be euthanized, was 17 years old and was banded as a young fledgling in 1994. A pelican that was 17 years old! I had no idea they lived that long.

All learned in an exciting day at WRC. Wonder what today holds in store…