About three weeks ago, Lindsay Shaver was handed four baby birds who had been abandoned by their mother.

A neighbour of the 12-year-old Long Sault girl heard the young starlings squawking in the Shaver’s garage and retrieved the animals.

The neighbour handed the birds to Lindsay, who has cared for them ever since.

Since that time, all but one of the Starlings have flown away on their own, but one continues to return, and squawks as it waits for Lindsay to feed it wet cat food.

The nest was built just under the eavestrough of the family’s garage. The birds, her father, Brian Shaver, said, appeared to have fallen through the insulation and into the garage.

They watched as the mother bird, he explained, attempted to get to her young, but she then had to abandon the four baby birds.
“When they fell through they were squawking, you could hear them,” Brian said.

They thought the birds were blackbirds, but were unsure. The Standard-Freeholder contacted the St. Lawrence River Institute and after showing biologist and educational co-ordinator Jordan Ann Kevan photos, she quickly confirmed the bird is a young starling.

The babies hardly had any feathers, Lindsay said, as she kept them in a cardboard box and fed them water through a straw and cat food on a plastic knife, sometimes waking up at 6 a.m. to feed them.

While she was at school, however, her mother, Monica Shaver, would also care for the young birds.

They knew to feed the birds cat food because many years earlier – before Lindsay was born, Monica recalled – a similar incident occurred and they found themselves with a nest of baby birds without a mother.

They contacted a woman who has cared for animals at a rehabilitation centre, who told them to feed the birds wet cat food. And it seemed to work, Monica said, since all the birds at that time flew away.

“If I had food, they’d just walk up to me and open their mouth,” Lindsay said. “The other day, I was at the end of the driveway and one just started following up the driveway.”

On Friday evening, three flew away.

It would appear the birds associated Lindsay, who was feeding them, with a mother bird, said biologist Brian Hickey, who also works at the St. Lawrence River Institute.

However, he explained, that starlings are quite adaptable and do not often become as dependent or easily imprinted, as say, geese.

“I always recommend people intervene as little as possible,” Hickey said. “They should minimize their contact so imprinting doesn’t happen.”

In some species, he explained, imprinting is so ingrained that the animal won’t understand that it is a bird, for example, and not a human. Imprinting is shown in the 1996 movie Fly Away Home, a gaggle of geese believe a young girl is their mother, and she must teach them – by flying a tiny two-seater plane shaped like a goose – to migrate.

If an individual finds a nest of birds, however, Hickey’s recommendation is to either “let nature take its course” or to call a wildlife or bird rehabilitation sanctuary, where a trained technician can care for the animal.