Ellen Westbrook texted me two photos from over at the Key West Wildlife Center, where she volunteers on the regular. The first was a tiny egg – about the size of one of the bigger peanut M&MS – sitting in one of those small dishes you use to mix spices when cooking. The second was of a trio of chicks in a nest. Ellen had spent the afternoon feeding them mealworms every 15 minutes.
There are two types of bird chicks – precocial and altricial. Precocial chicks can generally walk and/or swim within a day or so of being born. They hatch with big eyes and a layer of down. I generally don’t regard birds as cute, but precocial chicks tend to be pretty cute. Think ducklings.
Altricial chicks tend to be born featherless, blind and loud — little pink blobs that can’t do much but scream for food. And for the first several days of their lives that’s all they do — screech and eat. They are essentially giant mouths with small bodies attached. They are also generally what scientists would call ugly, creatures only a parent or a rehabber could love.
The chicks in Ellen’s photo were altricial, with a lot of pink skin but also a good number of dark spiny-looking feather shafts that had just grown in. If you looked for where you thought their eyes should be you would instead find the yellow corners of their mouths.
She sent it with a note saying, “Carolina wren & egg.”
“That’s not here, is it?” I texted back.
“At the Wildlife Center,” she replied.
“Wow. Crazy,” I typed. Then, “And you guys are sure on ID?”
“Peggy is,” Ellen said. “The chicks are so tiny, eyes closed, almost naked.”
Hmmm, I thought, probably out loud. I don’t like to doubt people. Especially someone like Peggy Coontz, who works incredibly hard to save wildlife every day and who knows so much. But something didn’t add up.
Carolina wrens are common all over the eastern seaboard, all the way up to Massachusetts, then west to eastern Kansas and Texas. There is also something of a population in the Yucatan.
But they have never been recorded south of the Seven Mile Bridge in the Keys, and only rarely north of the bridge. They’ve been recorded breeding on the mainland of Florida, and on the north end of Key Largo, but nowhere south.
There is an old, heavily shopworn axiom in journalism: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. And since this column occasionally approaches journalism, I figured I’d follow that guidance.
I texted the photo of the chicks to my friend Julie Zickefoose, a writer, painter and wildlife rehabilitator in Ohio, who’s pretty famous in bird world. She has written and illustrated an entire book about baby birds called – wait for it – “Baby Birds,” which I’m pretty sure is the only book out there about them.
I didn’t give her any info. Just a photo and a note asking if she had any opinions on the ID.
She texted me back in minutes. “Eight-day-old Carolina wrens,” she wrote, with two accompanying illustrations from her book – one of what Carolina wrens look like at eight days old, and one of what they look like at nine days old. (Turns out Carolina wrens are the first species she writes about in her book.)
“I’m envious. [Carolina wrens] are sooo cute and cuddly and total fun to raise. Look what’s on my desk right now!” she added.
She sent me a photo of two Acadian flycatcher chicks that she was feeding mealworms to, sitting in a nest she’d built herself, because their old nest had been destroyed and the parents abandoned them. The chicks had enough down to begin looking borderline adorable, like undersized Muppets.
If you look up the migratory habits of Carolina wrens on Cornell University’s “Birds of the World” site, the entire entry reads, “Not migratory, but wanders (see Distribution). Movements primarily diurnal.”
It was great to know that Peggy was right. But also, what the hell? Carolina wrens are not shy, receding birds. They call a lot, they jump around, they are gregarious. I could maybe believe that one of them wandered into town and no one noticed. It was so much harder to believe that two of them – a male and a female, who were both inclined to mate with each other – wandered into town.
So I went over to the Key West Wildlife Center to talk to Peggy and get some answers.
It turns out a couple had been camping in their RV up around Kissimmee. The RV was a fifth wheel, a type of trailer. The thing that connects a fifth wheel to the pickup truck that tows it is called a pin box. And in that pin box, while they were camped in Kissimmee, a pair of Carolina wrens built a nest and brooded their chicks, three of which hatched.
The couple were unaware of them, though, and drove from Kissimmee to the Blue Water Key RV Resort in the Saddlebunch Keys – about an eight-hour drive, if they didn’t stop too much.
While the couple was leveling the trailer, and extending the slideout and the awning, they heard a lot of weird, high-pitched noises coming from somewhere in the trailer. After they traced it to the pin box, and realized it was a trio of hatchlings, they called the folks at Key West Wildlife Center at Indigenous Park on White Street.
“Our staff member Brittany went and scooped them all up and brought these little tiny pink things down. We had no idea what species they were, but clearly from the design of the beak, they’re gonna be insect eaters. So we started them on the basic insect diet right away,” Peggy said. Later, she had puzzled out their species using a guide she had.
The nest in the pin box had fallen apart on the couple’s drive. And when Peggy opened the cage that held the chicks and showed them to me, they were on a green blanket in a plastic tub, all three sleeping. Their skin had grown darker already, and more feathers had sprouted.
Peggy offered them some mealworms, which they gulped down before falling asleep again.
The folks at the Wildlife Center are still working out the details, but the birds won’t be released here. They’ll be taken to the mainland. Peggy said they hope to get them to a rehabber in the Kissimmee area before they fully fledge, so they have some time to adapt before being released.
