Today was fully planned on the calendar. We were going to head up to the Jelly Belly Factory for a tour, then head back down for a couple of free games of bowling, and then across the parking lot to the Farmer's Market we love so much.
But as I headed out the front door to put a load of stuff in my car for the day's adventures, I would remember later that I heard a soft 'thud' to my right. As I walked back up to the house I caught sight of a tiny baby bird on the ground with just a few short bright-blue primaries (flight feathers) and a whole bunch of fluffy grey down. I yelled inside for Mike to come outside so I could ask him if he would kill me if I brought the thing inside and tried to take care of it until it could fly. So as the parents screamed and yelled at us overhead, we managed to chase the little guy down and pick him up. He was really fast and quite wiggly, and could even "fly" up about a foot in the air. He was fluffy and round and alert and feisty, but we were scared for his life because there are prowling cats all over the neighborhood here.
I retrieved a bucket from the garage and we placed him inside. I took Mike back to where I had found him to see if we could find the nest in the stubby tree next to our house. We've been hearing these babies yell for a long time now, and although we've looked and looked, we just could never find their nest. Today was no different. We searched high and low but there was no sign of the nest anywhere.
And that's when we saw the other one...
His tiny brother was considerably smaller than he was, scrawny and dull grey with a very thin layer of down. I didn't notice him the first time, but now I saw him, lying on his side with his feet kicking halfheartedly in the air. He wasn't able to right himself and he clearly wasn't trying very hard. This was not good.
We scooped him up easily and placed him on a cushiony nest of toilet paper that provided just enough support for him to sit upright.
Luckily, thanks to all the years A has spent obsessing about birds, I knew what the species was - a scrub jay. I started doing online searches to see what these guys eat and how in the world to take care of them. But the more sites I visited, the more I noticed that for every 5 people telling me to feed them watery dog food or mashed up mealworms and pedialyte, there was 1 person reminding all of us panic-stricken do-gooders that the best thing we can do is leave their care to the experts: either their parents or a licensed wildlife center. In fact, they said repeatedly that it is illegal to care for wild animals without a government issued permit. Did you know that? The law says that "keeping a native wild animal in the State of California is against the law if you do not have the proper permits and licenses, even if you plan to release the animal."
After searching a little bit more online, I found this flowchart that might come in handy for you someday:
Flowchart if you find a baby bird
From this, I decided that the bigger guy was ok, but the little guy was probably not. At first, I put them both back on the ground where I found them and we watched for a while to make sure they'd be ok. The bigger guy tried to jump and fly all over the place and eventually settled himself behind the planter by our front porch. He was active and lively and very alert, and the parents were clearly watching over him since they finally stopped yelling at us for the first time.
He looks kinda mad at us. Sorry, baby bird, we were just trying to help!
But the other one just sat there. He didn't move. He didn't look around. He was clearly not going to survive out here.
I decided to go ahead and call the Wildlife Center at the number I found on the flowchart. I described the bird and she told me I needed to bring him in right away. The only problem was that I had called the wrong wildlife center. I was a little relieved because first of all, I read online that baby birds need to be fed every 30 or 60 minutes around the clock (oy!), and secondly, I was kind of afraid that they were going to tell me that scrub jays weren't worth saving. They're considered pests in many areas around here, and they're certainly far from being an endangered species, but I was relieved to hear that they were going to try to help the little guy because otherwise the girls would have been crushed.
Once I got the address of our local Wildlife Center, we packed him up in a cute little box with a cozy blanket and drove him right out there.
They took him straight back for an evaluation while I filled out some paperwork upfront. I think the girls thought that maybe they'd be invited back into a back room for a full tour of the place. They certainly thought they'd be able to come back and visit him each day. So they were a little surprised when the worker told them they couldn't see him anymore and that they needed to limit his contact with humans if he had any hope to survive. I was surprised, though, when she handed me an informational pamphlet with an ID# on the back and told me that we could call back in anytime to check on how he was doing. The girls were thrilled that at least we could hear how he was doing and promised we'd call first thing tomorrow. We did all we could do, but I just hope it's good news when we call.
Before we left home, we'd left a peace offering for the scrub jays. A bowlful of pine nuts, peanuts, and sliced grapes, a gourmet meal straight out of A's bird book.
I couldn't take the obsessing anymore, and I wanted the poor traumatized baby bird back at the house to have some time to relax, so we decided to go ahead and go to the Jelly Belly Factory anyway. We had a tiny bit of a head start from the Wildlife Center, and we figured we might as well just go ahead and go do it.
By the time we got there we were all hungry for lunch. It's hard to pass up jellybean shaped hamburgers and pizzas.
After lunch, the tour line was crowded, so we (meaning I) decided to go look for a geocache that was supposed to be hidden in the parking lot. I know I'm a little late to this geocaching thing (and we really stink at it, believe me), but how hard could it be, right?
Well, we were foiled from the beginning when K somehow managed to step on the lid of an underground control panel of some sort, making the lid slide off diagonally and planting her foot and leg in the knee-deep water, mud, sludge and yuck. She was pretty bruised up on her shin and was bleeding a little, and when she pulled her leg out of the water, it came out without the shoe. Ugh.
C and I spent about 10 minutes on our knees digging around in the sludge with sticks trying to find it. The weight of her stepping on it had driven the sandal deep into the sludge and it took us a long time to uncover and release it from the muck. The water smelled nasty and was full of rotting snails and all other kinds of unpleasantries. The shoe looked like this when we finally wrenched it free. For the smell, you'll just have to use your imagination.
We abandoned her shoe behind the building on the grass and she wore one of mine while I proceeded to sear the bottom of my right foot on the hot, black asphalt on our way to the corner of the parking lot. While we (meaning I) were looking around, three business people in suits came walking by (on an lunchtime stroll around the parking lot). I kinda pretended that I was doing nothing as I stood there with my tablet and cell phone in my hands in the bushes in the corner of the parking lot. Needless to say, they weren't really fooled. They actually yelled out "Good luck!" and told me they'd looked for that one many times and hadn't been able to find it. Way to crush my spirit, guys.
"We" looked for a little while longer and then "we" called it quits empty-handed. Back across the parking lot, running a little faster this time on my burning foot, we retrieved K's shoe and headed inside to wash it, and her leg, off in the sink.
Finally ready to head into the tour, we got in line and donned our little white paper hats and headed upstairs. No cameras are allowed inside the factory, and honestly there wasn't much to photograph today since production was shut down for routine maintenance they do on the equipment every June - who knew? The tour's not nearly as fun without the workers busily moving around down below, but they make the best of it with video monitors and by programming the robots on the floor to dance to silly songs (like Sugar, Sugar) for our entertainment.
The only thing I took a picture of inside (besides them) was a couple of the cool mosaics someone had made out of Jelly Bellies.
The free bag of Jelly Bellies is probably the biggest reason my girls want to come back here every now and then. Well, that and the sample bar. I tried Apple Pie a la Mode and Birthday Cake Remix (both of them were not really all that good), and I got a couple of the new Tabasco flavored Jelly Bellies to bring home to Michael. A and K both got candy corns (of all things!) and C got some chocolatey ones, I'm sure.
I let the girls each spend $2 in the gift shop where A and K got a bag of candy corns (sigh) and C got some chocolate-covered gummy bears. I guess the gift bag at the end of the tour was enough jellybeans for them.
After the tour was over, I was still a little irritated about that geocache so I decided to go for another one. There was one just around the corner, but without an actual GPS device, it was proving to be a bit difficult to get a good read on how close we were. All I knew was that we were in the front parking lot of some office building in the middle of the day, and I was feeling more than a little self-conscious. A lady yelled out from her car parked two spaces over from mine, asking if I needed some help. I tried to play it cool that I was just looking for something on my tablet and assured her we were fine. I waited for her to drive out of the parking lot and down the street before A and I resumed looking for the cache.
We had barely taken 5 steps when another yell came from the street side of the parking lot and two ladies speed-walked over to where we were and asked if we needed help with something. I finally fessed up that we were looking for a geocache, and she very excitedly told me that we were standing less than 2 feet away from it. This calmed my nerves a little bit as I was expecting her to tell me to get off the business property or she would call someone big and mean and scary to come and make us. Ok, so I'm not so good at the trespassing thing just yet.
Turns out she was actually telling the girl that was with her all about geocaching and how it works, and the workers in the office had actually placed this geocache there themselves in an attempt to bring people to the Jelly Belly factory to take tours. Apparently, this unmarked building was yet another Jelly Belly office building. I told her that we still didn't see the cache, although we had thought maybe it was on the light pole we were standing next to. She asked if we looked all around the lightpole and touched and moved everything. Honestly, there wasn't much to the thing. A square metal box on the concrete base with a round pole coming out, and two electrical boxes on the back with screwed on plates and wires coming out the bottom. "Um, where?" I said.
It actually looked a lot like this one, only it was a lighter color, almost white.
The girl she was with and I stood in horror as she literally pried up the front of the box to show that it had been bent and loosened over time, and hidden underneath was a small tupperware-type box.
"Um, isn't that defacing property?" the girl with her asked. Ya, I guess, but it's no big deal, was kinda how her reply went.
Ok, so I have a lot of learning to do with this geocaching thing. This is only the fourth one we've found, and I would never in a million years have thought of trying to basically destroy the light pole to find the cache. Hrmmm... Hopefully my next post isn't from a prison somewhere. If so, you'll know why.
After this cache, we were more or less done for the day, so we headed back towards home. We checked on the baby bird we left in the yard (Cole) and found that he was still in his hiding place behind the planter. The entire food bowl we left was empty.
We struggled to resist the temptation to bring him inside for the night, trusting that his mom and dad would protect him out there in the cold, dark night with the prowling cats all around. Every time I heard them yelling, I would run to the front door and see what was out there. At one point I saw a black cat slinking across our yard, being divebombed by the two adult jays. They managed to chase it into the neighbor's yard, but we panicked a bit when we realized that we couldn't find Cole anywhere. He had moved to the row of tree trunks below his nest, and that's where he's still sitting right now, asleep.
I hope he makes it through the night safe and sound. Not only because I want him to live, but also because I know the girls will say it's all my fault because I insisted we leave him outside and trust his mom and dad to take care of him. And somewhere in the Wildlife Center, his brother Jesse is hopefully doing well, too. Although at least I won't take the blame for that one!
