Monday, August 20, 2018

Weekend at Pedro's

Saturday morning I was out early mowing my front lawn when all of a sudden I saw a grey "thing" moving right in front of the mower. I'm glad I caught a glimpse of it because I was able to stop my mower in time to not run over a little, grey bird dude.

At first I just tried to shoo it away, but soon discovered this little guy couldn't fly, despite his efforts to get away from me. In fact, one of his wings looked in pretty bad shape.

I ran inside and asked Uber Wife to grab a box and come see this bird. At first she brought out a shoe box, and I'm like . . . ok, this will do for now.  We scooped him up into the shoe box and then transferred him over to a bigger box.

We own a parakeet, so I put some seed and water in the box and I snapped this picture and sent it out to my follower buds.


As you can see, the responses I got were fantastic, and I really didn't know what to do with this guy.  He was pretty chill though and I was kind of taking to him at this point, so I sent out a second picture and dubbed him "Pedro."


My followers were on point, as to be expected . . . Pedro was quickly identified as a birb . . . most likely a dove birb . . . and most likely a fledgeling mourning dove birb.

I put Pedro in a safe, warm place underneath the trampoline at our house at this point because Jeff Toney was headed over to play another session of Althea and company's ongoing D&D Game. You might have read a bit about our adventures on my sub-blog about it (which is now sadly out of date). It was a great session on Saturday where our characters finished up a quest chain in the Feywild and took a portal back to the Neverwinter Woods. It involved hunting a pre-cooked pig and partaking in some "intrigue" at a party in honor of Princess Buttercup of the Summer Court . . . but that's a story for another time . . .

We leveled up to 6!

After the game I did some quick research on the Internet and found out that you could feed Fledgeling Mourning Dove's the same stuff you use to hand-feed more domesticated birds, so I ran down to the local Petco and picked up a packet of this stuff for $10 and tweeted it out because Pedro had become the weekend project. I was now fully embroiled in the story plot for A Weekend at Pedro's


Feeding Pedro wasn't easy. I took that yellow mush and sucked it up into a syringe and then would drizzle it down to his beak. At first he wasn't interested at all, and then suddenly I saw a little light go off in his birdy head, "Wait a second . . .  you want to help me?" I'd squirt a drop of food on his beak and then he'd nibble it a bit. After he got a taste of it, he started really working that beak, sliding it back and forth along the edge of the syringe like he was trying to figure out how to really feed from this thing.  So I kept that up, drizzling a bit on his beak and letting him nibble a bit, drizzling a bit on his beak, nibble, etc.  It was a messy operation, but got the job done.

After his first feeding he let loose with a really cute and soft satisfied chirp. OMG PEDRO IS ADORABLE!  You gotta play this two-second clip I tweeted out

By this time it was night time, so I tucked his box away in my stuffy, yet perfectly safe, garage. And muddled over what to do with Pedro. 

When I woke up on Sunday, he was still doing good, so I fed him his mush again, and Uber Wife (being "uber" as she is) committed to taking Pedro down to the Austin Wild Life Rescue, per Leala's excellent suggestion on my Twitter Feed. Uber Wife sent me pictures of the whole drop-off and even staged a great pic for me of his box near the drop-off sign.


No, we didn't actually just drop him off at the foot of the sign . . . Uber Wife took him inside the building, filled out a form, left the baby formula as a donation, and Pedro was finally being cared for by some professionals. As cute as Pedro was, it ultimately was better that he was left with the center. They were going to x-ray his wing, see what could be done, and do a better job at feeding him.

I just want to give a big thanks to my Twitter followers for their excellent suggestions and for joining us for a Weekend at Pedro's. I'm glad I can count on my Internet buddies to help with my wildlife mishaps.Thanks for the hand!

Happy Dueling!

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