After I woke up the other morning I was making my way out of my room into my bathroom when this blob of something caught my eye right by the baseboard of the door...there lay a little juvenile hummingbird. Looking at it I thought it was dead...
Eyes closed
Bundled up
Not moving... couldn't see that it was breathing
No reaction to me coming out and walking right next to it.
So I got something and gently touched it because I didn't want to scare it too bad if it was alive.
Poor little guy slowly opened his eyes and started to breathe a little hard. He had been in that room all night and just exhausted from trying to find his way out. So I gently wrap him up in a towel and took him upstairs, but because he was so weak I knew he needed to eat first before he was released. So my mother and I got nectar or sugar water and fed him from a syringe. First he was hesitant at eating but got better and better. We went outside to let him free and. . . . poor thing... tried to fly away but had missing feathers and still was weak that he flew a few feet and fell to the ground... This happened a few more times and decided that we'd just have to help him. We tried putting him on the hummingbird feeder and the poor guy just sat there.... until a mean big one came and knocked him off tumbling him to the ground.
So we took him inside and kept him in a little container. We first kept feeding him every few minutes, and then every 30 minutes throughout the day... He started to become more alert and getting strength back but because he had missing feathers he wouldn't be able to fly until they grew back in. So we called up the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center of Northern Utah in Ogden. We took him in where he was going to have a new family of 5 other hummingbirds that were there to be taken care of until their release back into the wild.
They are a wonderful non-profit organization to help sick or injured wildlife get ready back on their feet to be released back into the wild. They "through wildlife rehabilitation and education will empower the community to engage in conservation and responsible stewardship of wildlife and habitat." Like them on Facebook and check out their website at www.wrenu.org and check on our little hummingbird. His animal case # 1105 and you can follow his rehab process.
Here are a few pictures of the little guy:
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| Sitting on the hummingbird feeder |
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| As he sat there some other hummingbirds came by to eat |
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| And some came to chase others away |
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| Feeding |
~Buz Marthaler~
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