Our August 20, 2017 Pup of the Week is for the Birds

  

There has to be a first time for everything.  Today, for the first time, I am honoring two birds with the honor Pup of the Week (although I did once give honorable mention to Leo’s family’s bird Tiki, and I believe, another family bird from the Gustavson pack.)

This week’s honorees do not have names.  They were found by the father of Angels Rusty, Scooby, and Odie and their mortal brothers Max and Baron.  He was on a construction site.  He was taking down a soffit when he disturbed a nest holding three tiny newborn birds.  The boy’s dad knew that their terrific mom would take these birds in and help them grow.  She had performed this miracle several years before and she was confident she could do it again.

An important lesson:  If you are going to take a baby from the wild and raise it until it is ready to be free don’t name it.  When you give it a name it becomes part of the family and you don’t want to send part of your family away.  While the Boys' Mom loved the birds she had to keep herself from getting too attached.  Her job was to get them ready for the wild, no matter what her heart said.

If I was to name one of them I would have called it Hope.  Because, like those little birds, hope is the things with feathers.  When they fell out of the nest they were without Hope, which is being without feathers.  The Boys' Mom would give them both hope and feathers.

The Boys' Mom has lots of small animals and she knows everything there is about raising all creatures.  But raising birdies is harder than other animals.  They want to eat all the time, and every ten minutes they are crying for food.  The Boys' Mom fed them with a syringe to make sure they got all the food they needed.  Being a Birdie Mama is hard.

As the days passed the birdies kept eating, their feathers kept growing, and hope that they birdies would be strong enough to fly away sprouted.

One of the most important lessons a bird has to learn before it can go out to the wild is how to feed itself.  The Boys' Mom put seed in their cage.  Slowly one of the birds began to peck at the food but the other was reluctant.  These birds were siblings so the Boys’ Mom did not want to separate them.  They could not be released until they were both eating.

The second thing they needed to learn was how to fly.   To speed up the process Rusty, Odie, Scooby and I popped into their dreams and took them on flying lessons.  Scooby was a great inspiration.  When a bird sees a Great Dane fly he knows he can soon.

This week the Boys’ Mom knew the birds were ready to be released but she wanted to wait for a period of sunny days so they did not get hampered by the rain.

Yesterday their moment to return to the wild arrived.  Here is the exclusive video.

birds go free

Birds are the only beings allowed to fly back and forth to the Bridge.  They flew straight to Rusty, Odie and Scooby and told them that they loved their parents, the one who saved them, and the one who raised them, and they are very thankful.  We named them Hope and Feathers.

They want their mommy to know to keep an eye open for them in the trees.  If she looks up in the sky she will certainly see hope and feathers flying above her.