The Lost Prairie Chronicles were written for my Children and Grandchildren to remind them of their birthplace and early years growing up in Lost Prairie. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Lost Prairie Chronicles #25 Ma and the Birds Being just old enough at the time, I'm sure you'll remember this. Your Mother was a bird lover and a bird keeper. At one time the outbuildings here in Lost Prairie housed some two hundred pairs of breeding birds. Macaws, Dwarf Macaws, Kakarikis, Cockatoos, Giant Indian Parakeets, varieties of Pionus Parrots, different kinds Amazon parrots and a raft of various parrotlets. Over time she became expert in breeding, avian nutrition and diagnosing avian health problems. She incubated her own babies, spoon fed them and raise the friendliest parrots to be found anywhere. It wasn't an easy thing for her to do. Those baby parrots had to be fed every two hours day and night. Yep, your Ma was a dedicated Lady, but then again so were you kids. You were up at 5am every morning of the week, cutting up vegetables and fruits, preparing seed dishes and assembling the feed trays for some 24 flights. Most all of them had varying diet requirements, so each bucket and tray was numbered by the flight. Seeds of alll kinds were bought by the 100 pound bags, all stacked on a pallet shipped out of Spokane and delivered to town. You and your Ma made the rounds of the grocery stores where the produce managers had set aside still eible fruits and vegetables for the birds. Your Ma had a good reputation in town and after that TV outfit came out and did a special on her aviaries she became a local celebrity. Remember that darned Mynah bird in the kitchen. He'd say "Are you leaving soon? Are you taking your damned kids with you?" heh...... great bird, that one. Nobody else liked him, but I did. There are probably pages of stories that I could write about your Ma and the parrots, and maybe I will one day, but this is about the Bluebirds. We have two kinds of bluebirds here in Lost Prairie. The larger Western Bluebird and the smaller and brighter Montana Bluebird. I remember a long time back that your Mother had read an article concerning the raising of Bluebirds. I asked her exactly how the heck she was going to raise wild Bluebirds. Well, she did just that. We had a number of nest boxes around the place, most of them out on fenceposts where Bluebirds usually nest. She brought those in, had me clean them out and she painted a blue flower on a number of them. Others had a blue ribbon attatched to them. I was wondering what the heck she was doing when she explained that Bluebirds actually are more inclined to use a nestbox that has blue ont it. Well, that was a new one for me, but it turned out that she was right. She mounted four of them in the yard. Bluebirds prefer a choice of nestboxes and only one pair will nest within one hundred yards or more of another pair. They're territorial and aggressive. So back to the question. How is Ma going to help breed Bluebirds. She brought in 10,000 mealworms! She found out that in an average clutch of five babys, only three or four at most survived. By feeding the parents mealworms before they went to nest they became more active, amorous and went to nest sooner.Continuing the feeding of mealworms ended up wtih all five babies surviving, and they went back to nest another two times! Fifteen babies a year, but the really amazing part is how the parents responded. To this day, Ma has a feeding station attatched to the deck rail in the yard. These Bluebirds return each year, recognize her and sit on the rail waiting for her to feed them. They're no more than a foot away from her the whole time she's filling the cup with worms. They impatiently flutter all around her head. When she's at the sink, I've seen them fluttering at the kitchen window to let her know they need more worms. I've actually seen a (*)(*)(*)(*) land on her knee more than once as she's sitting in one of the deck chairs watching them feed. Once the babies are hatched it gets very busy with both parents flying back and forth from the feed cup to the nest box. 200 meal worms a day to feed the babies and both parents. Once out of the nest box, the babies take their cue from the parents and sit on the rail right next to Ma while being fed. The yard is filled with flashes of blue the whole summer long. Its a real treat to approach the house from the county road and see all of that blue flashing in the sky around the house. After all these years Lost Prairie is still filled with Bluebirds every spring. A different pair shows up every so often, but I'm convinced its a pair from one of her clutches. They're waiting right at the feeding station as soon as they arrive in the valley and just as friendly as can be. Yep. Ma raises Bluebirds. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- These are some of her birds and babies. Papa Bluebird Mother Bluebird Babies. You'll have to look close in this one. A mealworm in Papa's beak.
