The Neon Nurse's Charting

It's a lovely morning here on the high plains. Sun is shining and birds are chirping. In my walls.

Yes, in the walls. Few people know it, but we are an involuntary amateur bird sanctuary.

It started a few years back after we switched the big old non-functional swamp cooler for a smaller but far superior air conditioning unit. It left a small gap in the wall, but because there is quite a good overhang of the eaves, we didn't think it would cause much of a problem. So we put trim around the a/c on the inside wall and called it good.

Next spring, we realized our error. Birds had clearly found it, and found it good. We heard evidence of several broods of hatchings as spring and summer passed. But hey, it wasn't like we were USING the space ourselves, so we didn't disturb the status quo.

But there came a fateful day when...the a/c stopped working! And of course by then we were addicted to it (as you can imagine, since we generally top 100 degrees daily by mid-June and it doesn't slack off until September.) I WAS guiltily aware that there were babes in the nest, back in there under the casing. But the shop guys insisted they had to take the machine IN to fix it, so that seemed to be that.

Except when we pulled it out, we were suddenly in violation of Federal Endangered Species statutes!



Naturally, we were very upset. They didn't look old enough to live on their own yet, but I suspected they were lively (and spooky) enough to jump around and get out of the hole in the wall and into the dog pen--OR into the house, which was not really a good substitute habitat either.

Then I had the brilliant idea of calling the Nature Center in Pueblo, which I knew had a Raptor Rehabilitation department. The lady I talked to was a whiz. She ID'd the little rascals just on my lame description, and could even imitate the call of the adults well enough for me to verify I had indeed been hearing it all summer. But then she flummoxed me by asking, "Can you get them down to the PO within the hour?"

She wanted me to mail them? I explained it was a Saturday and our PO wasn't open for business right then. But no, she again knew what she was doing. Seems the driver of the PO truck regularly served as a volunteer carrier for them, and was actually already bringing them an owl with a broken wing someone had turned into the local wildlife office. So the little kestrels were saved!

They all lived, too, and we even got to go see them later in the year before they released them into the wild. The parents did come back the next spring, but they didn't want the wall next anymore. (Smart birds!) But their attempt to improve their digs didn't work out all that well. See, these birds are crevice nesters. This time the crevice they tried out was our unused chimney. Which I THOUGHT I had successfully blocked off after we got the pigeon out that time.... But no.
SO I had to partially disassemble the chimney stack, which let the mom (?) kestrel out into the attic. Luckily it was easy for her to escape because of the hole the woodpecker made that one time. (See what I mean about the bird sanctuary thing?)

That seems to have put us on the kestrel blacklist. Ever since, our nestees have been plain brownish-black birds. Starlings, maybe. Does anyone know if the adults are known for a highly varied and melodious set of calls? They really do sound pretty. And there's something kind of friendly and homey about hearing the click-click of their toenails on the metal case in the very early spring, then the chee-chee-chee-chee of babies a few weeks later. I'd kind of miss them if we ever got around to patching the wall....