Hope we did the right thing...!

We have a titmouse nest in our basketball hoop. It is black and the nest was about 4 feet down in the ten-foot pole. I can usually hear the babies and watch mom all day long making trips back and forth to the nest. For the last two days I hadn't seen her there at all, and I work from home so I keep an eye out all day. We checked the nest when DH came home and found two dead babies inside, and one live baby.

We took down the pole and got the one dead baby out of the nest, along with all the nasty critters all over him. The other one had apparently died some time ago - the pole is very narrow and apparently the others either were standing on him or something, I don't know. Anyway, it was decomposed in the nest materials pretty deeply. It was in the high 80's today and yesterday and it stunk to high heaven. All in all it was gross.

Momma did come to see the baby while we had it out, but it can't fly yet, or even hop really. It did scurry around on the ground near her, but then she just flew off for the night. I waited about an hour for her to come back before we picked up the baby off of the ground, and I made another nest (since the original one was infested with critters and decomposed bird funk) and put the living baby in it, and mounted it up on top of a ladder in the same space where the pole had been, inside of a black nursery pot with holes (for rain drainage). I'm praying she'll come back to it tomorrow now that she knows it is alive and it at least looks similar to the black pole where the nest was.

That's the best we could do, so I hope we did the right thing. I know I couldn't begin to feed a baby wild bird even though I'm here all day. I did find a wildlife rehabber a couple of towns over, so I'll give her a call tomorrow if I don't see momma caring for the last little one.
I really try not to interfere too much with the natural processes - but the two dead carcasses was just a little much in combination with the depth of the nest and the heat inside of the pole; I didn't want to see three dead babies :(

I did get a picture before we put him back into the nest.

Aww, the poor little thing! You did a great job. Please be sure to let us know if you see the Mama come back to the baby and also what the rehabber has to say.



This message was edited May 2, 2007 11:16 PM

I am thrilled to report that Momma found our alternate nest and has been busily feeding the one remaining baby!! I can't tell you how relieved I am. I'm hoping by the looks and size of the baby, that it is near fledging and will soon be out and about. We're due for rain the next few days so I made sure the nest container had drains. As long as no predator investigates, I think he'll be okay. He is awfully noisy though...lol! Much louder than the wren babies were when Mom wasn't around.

I'm so relieved too Hineni!! This time of year is so exciting and nervewracking with all the baby birds around. I had chickadee babies that flew the coop the day before yesterday. I sympathized with the parent birds as they spent the whole day loudly dee dee deeing warnings to the chicks as they started learning how to cope with the big wide world. I was a nervous wreck lol! I'm so glad you recued that baby and the parents are taking care of it.