Fall Is My Favorite Season

A foggy Fall morning:


Beautiful Fall colors:

'Clair the Loon'

On Saturday morning October 13, 2007, at about 10am, my brother Mark and Mom noticed a weird looking bird lying down in my backyard. We didn't know what it was. Mom thought it was a goose. But it looked more like a duck with a pointed bill. We thought it was injured, and I called the human society to ask if they took care of injured birds, they said no and gave me person to contact who could help me. Well around noon I looked in the back and the bird wasn't there. I was a bit relieved as I thought that it may have flown away. I looked around the house and found that the bird managed to move itself to my concrete driveway. We were all very concerned about this bird, but I was not able to get in touch with anyone to help me. I didn't know what to do because anytime my Mom or I approached it, it would make a loud bird call and I thought it was scared and I didn't want make it more uncomfortable. Mom gave the bird bread and sunflower seeds to eat, I'm surprised she didn't try to feed it spaghetti and meatballs!

We were really worried and I hadn't heard back from anyone. Finally, I was able to get in contact with a woman named Judy who knew a lot about birds. I explained what our little visitor looked like; grey head, white neck and belly, grey feathers with white spots, and webbed feet. Judy told me that she wasn't in the business of rescuing wild birds, but she could help instruct me on what to do when she knew what kind of bird it was. After I described the bird, Judy was already getting pretty good idea of the species of bird and how it may have come to land in my yard.
Once Judy saw the pictures she knew exactly what we needed to do. She said that our little visitor was a healthy juvenile Loon. They are migrating to their winter homes right now and sometimes when they land they don't get it right. They are supposed to land in water and this Loon thought my back yard was water. Loons are not equipped with legs that are directly underneath them to walk with. Their legs and webbed feet are closer to the tail of their bodies and stick out like paddles, and they need a long water runway to take off and fly. Also, loons feed primarily on fish and other aquatic creatures, so trying to feed it bread was useless. So my little buddy was stuck and it couldn't fly away from a stationary position nor could it walk. All it could do was just scoot along by pushing itself with its webbed feet. Furthermore, when it scooted along the concrete one of its toenails were injured and bled a little.


Judy explain that I would need to throw a blanket over the Loon, tuck the blanket under it's belly, pick it up, put it in a box and take it to the nearest big body of water. I called my brother Mark to come and help. He was visiting his in-laws. I got a box, blanket and gloves ready and then Mark, my sister-in-law Carla and two other people arrived to help. Carla threw the blanket over the Loon and she and her brother-in-law pick up the bird and put it in the Dell box. We drove to a nearby lake and released our friend from the boat launch. We decided to call him/her Clair after Debussy's classical love song ClairDeLune.
Our little Clair came out of the box, spread her wings and swam out to the deeper water and immediately dove under, I assume to fish for whatever aquatic food that was available. She probably was very hungery. She seemed very happy just swimming along and diving. She didn't take off and fly. I called Judy to tell her she was right on the money and I mentioned that Clair didn't take off and fly away. Judy said that Clair would probably spend the night and take up with the next migrating group of Loons that fly by.
So our little Clair was happily swimming along getting further and further away heading out to the open lake. And she lived happily ever after! hehe.

Collage

This is a collage I put together today.