Missoula Notebook

How and Why to Hold a Baby Bird

By Sutton Stokes, 6-08-08

Certain things about life and the universe snap into sharper focus when you are holding a baby bird in the palm of your hand, the first of these things being that just because something is homely, pathetic, and helpless now doesn’t mean it can’t soar like an eagle or at least a house wren later.

Of course, it helps to be born with wings.

I spent last week in northern Arizona visiting my wife, who passes her summers managing a field-research project studying songbirds in the Coconino National Forest. For the first part of the week we were in Flagstaff, where Amy and her crew take a break every 12 days for motel showers, soft beds, and beer in glasses. But — as any good captain knows — ports rot men and ships, so the breaks are short, and soon it was time to bounce the rented Taurus up the rough dirt roads through the woods to the remote collection of tents known among the researchers as Bird Camp.

So it was that, on a sunny June afternoon, I found myself near a stand of young maples, their leaves fluttering in a stiff breeze, holding this baby bird in the palm of my hand while Amy readied her digital scale and other equipment. As the bird burrowed into the warmest part of my hand, where the blood beats at the base of my thumb, the millenia seemed to recede and it was possible to believe that this squirming hairless creature, the color of a healthy lung, had a future not as a Steller’s Jay but as a pterodactyl.

Not that the baby jay appeared the slightest bit tough or menacing. Its organs glowed blue through its skin, and its enormous mouth gaped relexively every time I moved above it. With its eyes still sealed behind translucent skin, its legs too weak to support its body, its wings “wings” in name only, this was all it knew how to do: wait to be fed, mouth wide, with no idea whether the presence looming over it was bringing or looking for a meal.

Some people might see a lesson in trust here, but that would be imprecise. More instructive is to reflect on the animal urges we all have in common, and to try to imagine what it is like to feel that hungry.

I have belatedly come to understand that, for some people, field songbird researcher is an even more glamorous job title than freelance writer, if such a thing is possible. I base this conclusion on the way that these people positively seem to salivate when I explain what Amy does for a living, as opposed to the way their eyes glaze over when I describe my technical reports and business case studies and solipsistic blog. These people, it seems, actually prefer the idea of being paid to live in the woods all summer, even if it does require sleeping in tents, cooking with propane, and drinking hose water from a big tank on wheels.

And, okay, doing bird research. The research project studies birds’ reproductive and nesting behaviors. In practical terms, this means locating and observing nests; counting and weighing eggs; counting, weighing and banding nestlings; and a host of supplementary tasks too numerous to mention here.

In even more practical terms, it also means rising at 3:30 each morning. This is a cold time of day to be getting dressed in a tent at 8,000 feet (the Coconino got a foot of snow two weeks ago), but consider the popular wisdom on early birds/worms, etc. You brush your teeth in your tent and walk off into the trees to spit. Breakfast is in a big white dust-streaked canvas tent, two dozen people rummaging in their coolers and heating water for coffee or instant oatmeal on five communal stoves.

The vehicles pull out at 4:30 a.m., dropping each researcher off in a different piece of forest for another eight-hour shift of following birds around.

As appealing as some people find this work, they are perplexed that I “let” Amy go so far away each summer, or that Amy wants to do it in the first place. “Don’t you miss each other?” they ask, as if missing each other would be a good enough justification for Amy to give up on her dream job, the whole reason we moved out here in the first place. I shrug, never sure how to answer, although inwardly I’m thinking how could we look each other in the eye over breakfast if she did that?

When the baby birds are old enough, they get a little metal band clipped around one of their ankles. The band has an identifying number so that the birds’ survival and range can be measured in subsequent seasons. The problem is that when the birds are old enough for a band, they are also old enough to jump out of your hand. Be careful: you must hold the bird firmly enough to keep it from getting away, but — if you hold it too tightly — you will crush it.

That’s the other thing about life and the universe that snaps into sharper focus when you are holding a baby bird in the palm of your hand.

For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.

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