In the wee morning hours on May 28th, 2003, we received a huge surprise! Stormy's dad (Ralph) leaves for work at 4:30 each morning. On that particular Wednesday morning, he said that he was going outside to check the oil in my car and then he would leave for his job. He was not outside long before he appeared back inside holding up his right hand. I asked if he had cut himself on something, and he shook his head and told me to hold out my hands. When I did so, he placed into my hands a tiny, forlorn, cold dinosaur-looking creature with an egg-shaped body and a huge soft yellow beak, and he said, "Here's a new baby for you." All I could do was look dumbfounded and say, "Where? How? You found this outside in the dark?"

Ralph said that while he was checking my car, he kept hearing small cricket-like chirps in the darkness. He knew that sound immediately since we had been hearing new nestlings in our starling nest holes for several days. But he felt sure he could not be hearing a baby starling at 4:30 a.m. in pitch darkness since the babies sleep snugly in nests all night long. Each time he made a noise with the car (slammed the door, closed the hood, etc.) he could hear the chirping. He grabbed his flashlight and walked towards the Chinaberry tree where he knew the starlings were nesting. He walked all around the tree, shining the light up into it near the nest holes and on the ground at its base, but he saw nothing. Yet the chirping continued. Finally he shone the light on the ground farther away from the tree where he thought the sound was growing louder, and in a small depression in the grass he spotted a yellow beak. He scooped up the tiny frantic creature, at the same time wondering how on earth he had managed to avoid stepping on it when he had walked all around the tree.

The teeny, mostly bald starling baby (whose age we estimated as five days old) was as cold as ice and and was yelling loudly. We rushed around gathering up a heating pad, a cardboard box, a nest bowl and some crumpled paper towels to line it. Quickly we fixed the same handfeeding mixture we had raised Stormy and Sunny on. The small wildling, whose eyes were not yet open, gaped nonstop while hollering loudly, and to our relief he ate eagerly. We got him warm and fed, and then we stood and marveled at him as he slept snuggled in his warm, homemade "nest."

And so began life here with yet another helpless baby starling. We named him "Shadow" because he was literally found in the darkness. Click this link to view day by day photos of Baby Shadow in his photo journal. Or click this one to see him as a young adult bird in his starry feathers.

Copyright © 2003 Victoria Doll