Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 21:44:20 -0400 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Les Eastman Subject: Hummingbird rescue Comments: To: Harford Birds , BB for Hummingbirds and Gardening for them in the Southeast MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This evening about 6 PM I went to do some maintenance on my swimming pool. When I took the lid off the skimmer, I noticed a black object between the flap and the wall of the skimmer. I quickly realized it was a hummingbird. Assuming it had drowned, I reached for it and was very surprised to find that it was alive! I don't know how it did it, but this bird had somehow managed to keep its head above water enough to keep from drowning in the strong current of the skimmer. I don't know how long it was in there. The bird was totally soaked, of course, and its feathers were quite disarrayed. The wet feathers all looked black except for some white on the end of some tail feathers, so I couldn't tell what age or sex it was but I assumed it was an immature because the beak looked really short - less than 1 inch long. Also there were bare areas under the wings where there were apparently no feathers. The bird tried to fly, unsuccessfully of course, but it was encouraging that it still had enough energy to try. I tried to get it to drink some sugar water, first from a feeder and then a drop on the end of a metal rod. It wasn't interested. I can't say that I blame it but I wanted to try before I did anything else. After cupping my hands around it for a while to warm it up, I put it on a paper towel in a plastic bowl and went on with the pool maintenance. When I finished that, the bird was mostly dry. I could tell now that it was an immature male (Ruby-throated, of course). I again tried to get him to feed from a Perky Pet 4 fountain feeder. He sort of lunged off my finger and got wedged between the bottom of a flower and the perch support. I gently coached it out of there and tried a Little Beginner feeder. I had some success with this and he drank some. It was sitting on my finger and still trying to fly periodically. While trying to get him to drink some more, a mature male Ruby-throat came up to the feeder and tried to chase the immature bird away. I shewed the mature bird away but he came back and this time the immature bird took off and flew to a tree about 50 feet away. By this time, it was almost 7 PM and there was only about 1 hour of feeding time left before dark, so I hope the bird could eat enough to get it through the night. He had a rough day, to say the least. Les =========== Les Eastman mailto:les@birdtreks.com Havre de Grace, MD Visit the Harford Bird Club Web Page at http://www.harfordbirdclub.org ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================