Hubert

We have been busy at school for the past 2 ½ weeks. I am teaching 4 grades this year so our days are very full, trying to fit everything in. We wake up early and sometimes school lasts until time to get supper ready. It is a lot of work but so rewarding and fun!

Well, Tuesdays are my busy day. The big kids all get their schoolwork given to them in the morning and Joshua and Jonathan have most of the day off. I leave for bible study around 9:30 and don’t get home until almost noon. Then our afternoons are spent at soccer class. Yesterday when I got home at lunchtime I found the whole house in an uproar! Ernest (our gardener) had found a wounded baby bird and kindly (argh) gave it to the children to care for. By the time I got home the kids had a nest all made up for the bird in an old plastic ice cream container and were giving it mushed up fruit and water out of a little eye dropper that they found in one of our science experiment kits.

Now, we do have some experience with injured baby birds. Unfortunately, we have never had one that has actually lasted the first night. I didn’t have very high hopes for “Hubert”. Hubert, by the way, is the name Andrew had picked out for Jamie to name Michael but she told him that she would feel awful taking away his favorite name, so she let him keep it for his own future children. (Wasn’t that nice of her?) So, now we have an injured baby bird with a special name. The kids were starting to feel invested in this bird. He was scared of them at first but by the time I got home from bible study he would sit on their hands and eat fruit off their fingers.

There was much discussion about how to keep Hubert warm last night. The ideas that the children came up with might have burned down the entire house, so we decided to just risk having him in his box in the girls’ closet with the door closed. I guess that the night was filled with children getting up and checking Hubert to make sure he was ok. Anna and Alissa were awake by 5:00am with him, feeding him and giving him water.

Well, for the past two days school has been a little bit halfhearted on the side of the kids. They are so busy feeding Hubert, taking him for walks near the other birds (so he can hear them chirping) and letting him walk around in the sun. It was funny to see him when they took him over to one certain part of the yard near a tree. He would start to chirp like crazy and we would hear chirping just like his; almost like he was talking to another bird! This afternoon the kids put him down by that tree and left him alone. They started noticing that bigger birds would fly over to him and feed him! They realized that there were two birds who would do this. They would fly over to Jasper’s food bowl, get some bits of food or water, and then fly back over and feed Hubert! We (ok, I’ll admit that by this time I was as invested as the kids!) all stood at the window watching for about 30 minutes. Then Hubert’s mom started leading him to the gate and before we knew it she had led him right under our gate and out into the road! We couldn’t control the dogs in the street so Kaleb ran and rescued Hubert and placed him closer to Jasper’s food area. After about 10 minutes or so his mom and dad found him again and led him over to a bush next to our yard wall. He hopped over there and has been there ever since. We aren’t exactly sure what to do now. I think their nest is outside our gate, but he can’t fly. We were torn whether we should bring Hubert inside for the night to keep him safe from Jasper (who keeps his distance when we are around but we aren’t sure what he will do tonight) or if we should just leave him with his folks. I think we will end up leaving him with his parents to take care of him. As attached as we are to Hubert, it seems like his best chances of having a life as a wild bird is to be with other birds and not getting used to having people care for him.

I have to say, I am very happy that we saw that his mom found him and fed him so we could hand his care back to her. The children were talking about building him a cage and keeping him as a pet forever!