Our Pet Mockingbirds

In the mid 1950s, my sister and I found two baby mockingbirds in our back yard. We were distressed that they had “fallen out of their nest,” and we immediately set about taking good care of them. We carried them everywhere, let them sit on our shoulders, put them in a warm box all lined with rags, and caught insects for them.We loved them and hugged them, and they got quite tame. We had them for three or four days, and then they learned to fly and left. We cried, but whenever I saw a mockingbird in the back yard, I was sure my old pet remembered me and was visiting. I am very fond of mockingbirds to this day.

I’m sure this experience contributed to my love of nature and my current hobby of birdwatching. Now that I have studied birds, I know that the young mockingbirds had NOT fallen out of their nest, but had fledged. Many newly fledged birds spend a day or two on the ground fluttering around, before they get the hang of flying. Their parents are there to protect and feed them. I did not notice, but most likely the parents of our pet mockingbirds were quite frantic when my sister and I began playing with their fledglings. They probably fed them and took care of them when we were not around. At any rate, they survived and flew off.

A more recent experience with a fledgling was with a crow. About a year ago, I was at my daughter’s house when she noticed that a crow was trapped in the bamboo plants around her patio. I went out and caught it and slowly untangled it. Its parents were in the tree over our heads, squawking furiously and wiping their beaks on the tree branches, a sign of aggression in some birds. I released the fledgling, and it immediately fluttered off to get trapped in the bamboo again. So I caught and untangled it again, but I decided to try to hold it a while to get it and its parents to calm down. It suddenly went stiff in my hands! It looked like a dead crow in full rigor mortis. I very much doubted that I could have hurt it at all, although my daughter was vigorously accusing me of killing it. I set it down, all stiff, on the patio bench, far from the bamboo, and went in the house to keep an eye out for any neighborhood cats coming into the patio. 

After about 10 minutes, the young crow “came to,” hopped down off the bench,  followed its parents across the street (far away from US) and hid in some bushes there. It sure looked like they were giving the youngster a real scolding for consorting with humans.