Doing wildlife rehab you end up with some critters that demand every bit of skill--and luck--you can muster. Dovey was like that. She was only a very few days old. No bigger than my wife's thumb. Weighed just over 12 grams. We despaired over keeping something so small and fragile alive.
Dovey was a mourning dove, and when it comes to baby birds they are one of the more difficult and demanding ones you'll encounter. They don't gape, yelling for food. A special food blend called, not surprisingly, dove milk has to be made. The end is cut off a syringe, and that end covered with a piece of plastic wrap or washed latex glove. A slit is made in that membrane. Then the baby's beak is guided into that opening so it can suck/slurp down the food, which is the consistency of heavy cream. They fuss, fidget, spill--it can be a messy job. And they have to be trained to eat this way; they want to stick their beak into their mamma's beak and eat the way instincts dictate.
Hours and days of patiently giving small feedings, at least once an hour, starting in the morning and going until just before we went to bed. Trying to keep her warm enough, trying to keep her clean. Trying to keep her alive.
Dovey grew up, starting on a kitchen counter, in a tub on a heating pad, through a heated cage in our rehab shed, then finally to an outdoor flight cage before being released. She joined the flock of other mourning doves that haunt our yard, but maintained special privileges. She sleeps on the roofed-over woodpile near our front door. Shows up on the back deck demanding special feeding in her favorite spots--and pecks at our fingers if we don't lay out the chow fast enough. Lands on our heads or arms. Starts at breakfast, then lunch, a late afternoon nosh, then some seed at her sleeping place.
This morning I was making coffee and my wife was just entering the kitchen when we heard a thump outside. We ran to look--that thump usually means someone has flown into a window, or at least grazed the house.
We get outside, and all we see are soft gray feathers floating down. Soft gray mourning dove feathers. A hawk has hunted our feeders, right next to the house, and has struck at a mourning dove. No sign of hawk or dove. The horror begins to sink in . . .
There are a lot of other doves, nearly two dozen, but we're afraid it must be her because she sticks so close to the house. We're hoping not, but we know she made a big juicy target. It cast a real pall over our morning. Happy Solstice. Bah.
After a while the other doves come back to our feeders--along with the jays, juncos, chickadees, sparrows, goldfinches, woodpeckers, nuthatches and male cardinal.
No Dovey. Not all morning, and into early afternoon. No avoiding it. Dovey is gone.
Then mid-afternoon I'd gone downstairs and look out back, and there's a dove on the railing where Dovey always perched. I grab food and go outside. She pecks at my fingers, and when I tell her how glad I am to see her she look at me like, Whatever. Teenager bird that she is, she's been off somewhere, doing who knows what, leaving us to be worried sick.
The goal of wildlife rehab is to get wildlife returned to the wild. Which is, like it or not, returning that robin or green heron or squirrel or woodchuck to become a part of the food chain. You know this, but fast and brutal object lessons in the natural order can be really hard to take.
So maybe the hawk got some other dove, or maybe it only got a few feathers from Dovey, and not a meal. We'll probably never know.
But this Solstice night we'll raise a glass to Dovey, out sleeping on our woodpile, and take deep and abiding pleasure in the small miracle of her continued survival.