Holiday Issues

The Friday of Memorial Day Weekend turned into an eventful day around my Upper Meadows home in Greenfield. First, while taking a leisurely morning walk with my wife through the sunken meadow down the road, I lost the Tri-Tronics remote-control for my dog collars. Then, upon returning home after a quick, once-around search mission, I was confronted with a nest of five helpless baby Eastern phoebes on my backyard cook-shed floor. Two problems to disrupt a holiday and keep my wheels spinning.

My remote sends signals to two battery-operated collars I often use for training purposes and to keep my dogs out of harm’s way. When bird hunting, I keep the contraption in a special pocket at the bottom of my Filson nest, lanyard secured around my belt just in case it gets tangled and pulled free. Although that’s never occurred, it doesn’t hurt to be cautious. Tri-Tronics doesn’t give away its collars. On my daily rounds I usually slip the remote’s lanyard around my neck, convenient for leisurely walks but potentially in the way when hunting. For some reason on this day, wearing multi-pocketed Orvis shorts, I dropped the unit into an open pocket on my left quadriceps, lanyard dangling out. I wasn’t concerned. Figured I’d be walking the tangle-free perimeter of an open field in sandals, nothing challenging.

About halfway along our walk, skirting a riverside strip of woods shading us from the morning sun, dogs romping through dense, high orchard grass between rows of Christmas trees, we rounded a gentle bend toward a camper on the riverbank when a red-tailed hawk flew off the ground 80 yards in front of us. Lily saw the big bird and ran toward it, sticking her face into the spot from which it had flushed and returning with a freshly killed cottontail rabbit, still warm and limp, Buddy playfully trying to grab it, Lily objecting. I called Lily. She came and handed me the rabbit, which I carried by the hind legs and temporarily placed in the crotch of an apple tree to keep it away from the dogs. I distracted them by tossing a stick into the Green River. They chased it, took a swim, shook off and started running the field, giving me a chance to put the rabbit back where it came from before continuing along our circuitous route back to the truck. The dogs were off on other adventures, ignoring the rabbit. I was afraid they’d take a wide sweep toward the river and rediscover the bunny, but it didn’t happen, so the final leg of our loop went without incident.

When we got back to the truck, I wasn’t happy to discover my remote missing. I was puzzled. Had I pulled it from my pocket to bring Lily back with the rabbit? Maybe. Couldn’t recall. If so, I must have left it on the picnic table under the apple tree. So off we went, all four of us, to retrace our steps and find the missing remote, which, as it turned out, was nowhere to be found. Hmmmmmm? Should have turned up somewhere with four eyes searching. I thought about taking another trip around the field but figured I’d first return home to rule out the possibility of it dropping in my backyard, or maybe I had left it in the carriage-shed or on the kitchen counter. Predictably, it didn’t turn up on the home front. Then, it really started bugging me. Could Buddy have picked it up, run off with it and dropped it somewhere in the field, maybe between a row of Christmas trees? Possible, but I didn’t think so. Perplexed, my wheels were spinning to the scream of a dentist’s drill, shrill and annoying.

Later that day, still pondering, I took another walk through the meadow with the dogs, again retracing my steps, this time focusing special attention on the area near the apple tree and the spot where I had dropped the rabbit. No trace of the remote. The more I searched, the more it bugged me. What could have happened to it? By then, I was convinced the dog must have picked it up, run off and dropped it, complicating my hunt, making it near hopeless, real needle-in-a-haystack stuff. But where else could it be?

The recurring questions kept me awake that night and woke me early the next morning, pulling me from bed before 7. I went outside into the refreshing morning air, loaded the dogs in the truck and headed back to the sunken meadow, planning on a thorough search up and down the rows of Christmas trees if necessary, secretly fanaticizing that maybe Buddy or Lily would locate the damn thing and pick it up along the way. As it turned out, that wasn’t necessary because, as I walked around the high galvanized gate into the field, something caught my eye in a place I had twice searched the previous day. It must have been the soft morning sunlight that illuminated it, but there it was, my black remote with two buttons, green and red, facing me. It was resting atop vines more than a foot off the ground, black lanyard stretched out straight. I reached down, picked it up, slipped it around my neck and, relieved, walked the dogs joy
fully along my normal route, no intensive search required. A great start to the new day. Took the pressure off on a holiday weekend.

But that remote was just one of my issues. The other was the baby birds. Yes, back to those pathetic phoebes on the cook-shed floor. They hadn’t been there when I left for the fateful walk that had consumed me for a day, but there they were when we returned, a nest and five fledglings, three larger and more mobile than the others, all unable to fly. Buddy drew my attention to the nest by picking up his head alertly, freezing momentarily and following his nose to the base of the chimney ascending from the shed’s cement floor. I could see something there. Buddy picked it up and ran a short distance into the yard with it. He gave it a couple of playful shakes and tossed it into the air, a bird’s nest. It landed and he ran back into the small building. I quickly called him off and secured him and Lily in the kennel before investigating. That’s when I found the five baby birds huddled in what was left of their flimsy nest on the shed floor.
I was aware of the nest nestled into the crotch of a joist and crossbeam below the peak of the shed roof, but couldn’t understand what had brought it down. Perhaps the windstorm two days earlier had loosened it, then nesting activity had dropped it. Knowing I couldn’t reconstruct it, I decided to leave it where it lay to see if the parents would move their young to safety. But by 3 that afternoon, the pathetic little birds were still exposed on the cold floor, waiting for a cat or my dogs to grab them, parents chipping nervously from the nearby bass tree. I knew it was time to put on my thinking cap. Maybe I could find a small board and fasten it like a shelf to the spot from which the nest had fallen. That might work. So off to the barn I went, searching for the right board. In the process of searching through the stable, I discovered a handled, rectangular, wooden fruit basket and knew I had a found a solution. I’d put what was left of the nest and the baby birds in the basket, screw it through the handle to the 45-degree joist-and-crossbeam angle and see what happened. Hopefully, the parents would feed their young in the basket. I was confident they would. Then, once they could fly, I’d remove the basket and let them go their own way.

The plan worked to perfection. On Monday morning I went to the dogs and let them out of the kennel. Buddy ran directly into the cook-shed and out flew an immature phoebe, not a great flier but good enough to get away and land in a tree 50 or 60 feet away. The next afternoon while feeding the dogs, I inspected the nest from the aluminum ladder I had left in place. All that remained was the nest and one dead baby phoebe that must have been injured by the fall. It’s surviving nest-mates were gone. Likely they’ll return next year to build nests nearby or in the same building, a popular site for phoebes.

The new nest will probably stay in place better than that old one. If it ever again comes down, I’ll be prepared. The basket is resting on a box next to a stack of fruit crates just inside the barn door facing the cook-shed. Figured I better keep it handy. So now things on the home front are back to normal: remote recovered, birds rescued. Missions accomplished.

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