Welcome to the World Tweedy Bird!

   

 My only New Year’s Resolution for 2015 is to use the Monty Python song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” as my motto.  It seems doable: I live a pretty good life. I have great friends and a decent family. Without becoming too sappy, I’m blessed.

     

     But only three weeks into this shiny New Year, it’s becoming harder every day.  The year started with a literal bang with the shootings at Charlie Hebdo. No matter what your opinions of the cartoons, or the taste -or lack thereof- the magazine showed by printing them, nobody should ever die for a cartoon satire. Ever.

     Then, as if not to be left out of the terrorist discussion, Boko Haram stepped up their assaults on innocents in Nigeria. Not to be overly pessimistic, but I’m sure there will be a school shooting  soon. 

     Boy Howdy! What a way to start the year.

     Which is why some of my friends have noticed my recent infatuation, some would say obsession with my canary chick. Staring at a half-ounce of newly-born fluff somehow gives me hope.

     Some background is necessary.  I’ve had canaries since I was a tyke. Usually one at a time, but sometimes more. Only the males sing, and stores always guarantee that the birds are male. Once the bird in question starts laying eggs, it’s a pretty good bet that it’s female. 

     I always wanted a flight cage where the canaries would actually have room to fly, as opposed to the tiny enclosures that pet stores sell, where the best they can do is hop from perch to perch. When I bought a house, I finally had room and I had someone build a five-foot avian habitat which I quickly populated it with canaries. Some turned out to be females, the rest were, as promised, males. 

     Most of the females spent their spare time turning the food dishes into nests.  Once they rip up enough newspaper to line the feeder, they hop in and start laying eggs.

     For the next two weeks the potential mama canary remains in that nest with her butt plastered to the eggs.  After two weeks, she gives up, hops out and I throw out the eggs . In about a week the process starts all over.

     Only once over decades of canary stewardship did a chick hatch, and it didn’t last a day. Apparently that’s not unusual. Canaries are terrible parents.  They are so bad that it astounds me that the species isn’t extinct.

     So when Rusty started sitting on a nest in late December, I had no expectations. Over the years she’s probably laid two dozen useless eggs. And zero chicks.

     On Christmas Day when she hopped off the nest, I reached in to toss out the eggs. But there was something breathing.  It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. It was an orange bug the size of my thumbnail. But it was definitely alive.

 

   A little late in the day I started reading up on how to keep the pair healthy. Rusty needed special food since she was eating for two.

     This meant that I had to cook. I don’t cook. I never turn on the oven except to bake turkey loaf for the dogs or heat frozen pizza.  I can’t tell you the last time I used the range.

     Suddenly I was buying eggs and hard boiling them daily. For the canaries. Even though it’s cannibalistic, the yolks are good for the chick and grown birds love them. They also got a daily ration of cooked oatmeal, broccoli, apples and soaked canary seed. A balanced diet.

     Every day I braced to find the chick dead. Instead, every morning I was awakened to the bird peeping while Rusty dutifully fed it. Except for when it was eating, the chick was completely silent.

Intellectually I know that nature works, but to watch it happen is magic. 

     The baby, now dubbed Tweedy Bird, changed enormously from day to day.  One moment it was bald, the next it had puffs of down and later it sported actual pin feathers. 

     After two weeks I moved Rusty and Tweedy into their own space. I‘d read that males occasionally attack fledglings, and I was WAY too emotionally invested in Tweedy for that.

The move was traumatic for all of us, but everyone survived. Okay, I needed a slug of Makers Mark . But then I was fine.

     The next day Tweedy started jumping out of the nest. Sometimes he landed on his feet. Mostly he was like a toddler – the feet moved but the brain had no control.

     Yesterday Rusty decided Tweedy  was weaned. No matter how much he flapped his stubby wings and screamed, she was done.  I suppose if he’s big enough to sleep on the perch at night, he’s big enough to eat on his own. Besides, she’s nesting again.

     My mare is due to foal in the next month or so, but I sent her away to the home for unwed horses.  I wondered if I was doing the right thing, but after the experience with Tweedy, I know I’m right.  Birthing babies is hard.

The Birds and the Bees; Spring Hits 7 Hills Farm West

Spring has hit Seven Hills Farm West with a wallop. It started with the canaries.

I have four of them in a rather large flight cage that takes up a corner of my bedroom. The birds have a simple job—look pretty and sing. The two girls look pretty and the two boys sing. A lot.

I don’t expect anything more from them. They are after all, birds. But recently one of the girls, Rusty developed baby fever. She spent the last two weeks shredding up the newspaper that lines the bottom of the cage and ripping her pretty red feathers out to make a cute little nest. Which would be fine if she actually used one of the little wooden boxes that I keep in the cage for that purpose. But no…. she decided that the perfect house is one of the food containers.

It works out well for her. Since she rarely leaves the nest, she can eat where she lives. The other birds are a little bummed though. It doesn’t matter that they have four other choices for their dining pleasure. They want to eat out of that one. So they hover around the nest looking vaguely confused and chirping. I mean even more confounded than birds generally look. Rusty doesn’t seem to care. Every few hours she stands up, fluffs her feathers and with a small sigh, sits down on the eggs again.

I’d be more excited if we hadn’t been through this drill before. This is the third time Rusty has taken to a nest. The first time I was intrigued. I don’t’ really care if we have babies—actually I do. Canaries are such terrible parents it’s amazing that the species continues at all. Their parenting skills are non-existent. In the past the infants, which look more like pterodactyls than domestic birds, have survived only days before their moms have knocked them out of the nest and onto the ground.  By the time I find them, there are no more. It’s a little tragedy every time.

So I’d be perfectly content to have no eggs under Rusty’s butt. Sadly though, there are always eggs. She does take care of them—carefully turning them, fluffing over them and only leaving the nest long enough to eat and drink.  Nature is amazing though. Just when I’ve decided that it’s time to remove the eggs and let her move on, she does it herself. One morning she’s just over them, and kicks them out of the nest onto the cage floor. I always feel a little sad. She doesn’t seem to care.

Hopefully Lucy, the other mother-to-be in our farmette, will take parenthood a little more seriously. Lucy is my recently retired show horse.

Our partnership has lasted ten years. We had a good relationship—I gave her lots of snacks, the best possible care, and she saved my ass when it was in the saddle and only bit me occasionally. It seemed like a fair tradeoff.

Lucy is the most talented horse I’ve ever had. Together we have won dozens of championships and muddled through hundreds of horse shows. If she had a more capable, more moneyed partner, she’d probably be famous. Instead she had to put up with me.

Sadly she reinjured her leg at a horse show last year, and even with the best medical treatment (surgery, rest, stem cells and lasers) she didn’t heal well enough to return to work. So I decided to breed her.

Breeding a horse, unless it’s Zenyatta, is not a wise financial decision. By the time you’ve bred the horse, paid for the stallion and raised the baby, it’s cheaper to buy a trained adult. But for me it was about emotion. I wasn’t ready to let Lucy go yet. (It's not like she was going far- even if she doesn't get pregnant, she'll live in the backyard with the other retirees.)

Picking a stallion is a little like using Match.com—but there are no loser coffee dates. And unlike online dating, it’s fun.

I thumbed through the Chronicle of the Horse stallion issue the way some people look at the Tiffany catalog. I picked about six prospects. Finally my trainer stepped in and helped whittle my choices down to the winner. Like many of the nicest guys, he’s Canadian. He was campaigned by an amateur and is an amazing mover—which is Lucy’s biggest fault—and almost as good a jumper as she is. All in all a good choice.

Lucy went to the clinic last week to be bred —sport horse breeding is not romantic.  There are no candles, soft lights, or even another horse in the room. Think turkey baster and you have the picture.

She goes back for her recheck this week. If all goes well she’ll have a baby on the ground in 2015. And people keep telling me horses, unlike canaries, are great and natural mothers.