Babies without families

I don't get many injured bird pick-up calls for RAPTOR. I'm on the list as a "last resort".
So when dispatch calls, I know they went through numerous calls before dialing my number.

The phone rang this morning, and when I saw it was dispatch (a local bird store, Wild About Birds), I got excited...the girls and I had no plans today.
"Susan? Want to go get a peregrine downtown?"
"Do I WANT to go get a peregrine? Does a bear .........?"
I took all the info, called the person who had the bird (a printing company downtown) and stuffed the girls in the car.

The company had boxed the bird already ("That is one AGGRESSIVE bird! And I've never seen anything like it!"), so I put my gloves on and slowly lifted the lid of the box.

Ummmm.
This was not a peregrine.
This was not even a BIRD OF PREY.

It was this:


A young Common Nighthawk. (Chordeiles minor)
(Gloves get thrown down with a sigh)

Non-birders: Though this bird has the word "hawk" in its name, this is not a hawk. This is a bird in the nightjar family. Nightjars, though, to confuse the issue, are in the same ORDER as owls.
To refresh memories out there: The biological classification of species goes like this:
Domain
Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species
*A good mnemonic for this is "Keep Ponds Clean Or Frogs Get Sick".
Another one is "King Penguins Congregate On Frozen Ground Sometimes". *
I like the frog one myself.

So a Common Nightjar's taxonomy is like this, starting with Class:
Class: Aves (Birds)
Order: Strigiformes (goatsuckers, owls)
Family: Caprimulgidae (Nighthawks and Nightjars)
Subfamily: Chordeilinae
Genus: Chordeiles

Okay. Who's confused?
Anyway...


Though their beaks appear tiny and insignificant, follow the gape of the mouth from the beak tip to the eye....they can open that maw like a frog.
All the better to snap flying insects out of the air.

Since this is decidedly NOT a raptor, and I am not qualified to say if it was truly injured, I called Marilyn. Marilyn is a rehabber at RAPTOR, Inc., but she also does songbirds, water birds, etc.
She sounded so tired when I talked to her on the phone. We rarely even SEE Marilyn during songbird nesting season because she is always up to her Toches in baby birds until Summer is over.
But as luck would have it, she was on her way to Eden Park to try and foster a baby Mallard into an existing flock, so I met her there to hand off the nighthawk.

She said that nighthawks are extremely difficult to rehab because of their high stress levels. But she also said she would try to return it to the building it flew off of (nighthawks will nest on flat-topped gravel roofs.)

And here's her baby Mallard, in all its ducky fuzziliciousness:
(This whole business reminded me of Beth's post about Ethel and Lucy's babies)



It didn't go well. If you have to introduce a single baby duck into an existing brood, the duck you have HAS to be the same age as the babies you are trying to blend it with. Otherwise, the foster duckling gets pecked to death or shunned.

Unfortunately for Baby Duckling, the other ducklings were just a bit older, and larger.
Love this picture...
looks like the duckling is saying, "Are YOU my mother?" to the house sparrow:


One of the mother ducks was aggressive to the duckling:



"HELP! MARILYNNNNNN!!!!"


The duckling kept running back to Marilyn...so Marilyn decided this wasn't going to work, and will keep the duckling until she can either find a compatible flock, or wait until it's grown (10 more weeks!) and release it as an adult.
Poor Marilyn....

Of course, I had to use this opportunity to photograph MY ducklings with the fuzzy little thing:


So. Two baby birds without families. But hopefully I will be able to update everyone about the outcomes of these two stories.

Sigh. Wish it had been a peregrine.