Hi!
My name is Joy. The last couple of years,my hubby & I have been bird watching. We have our bird book on the deck with us and when we see a new bird, we make note of it in our book.

Last year, in the Spring, before I really got too enthusiastic about it, my hubby picked up two fallen baby scissortail,hardly feathered, from under a lone Mimosa tree in our front yard.

Ok, I am a very busy lady, doing nothing in particular, and I was a little over whelmed at the thought of trying to raise 2 baby birds that I figured would die anyway,but decided to try! What is a lady to do when her old softy hubby looks at her with those near teared-up eyes? (chuckle).

I have to be honest, the phrase "Here kitty-kitty" started running through my frazzled brain, real quick! I knew I had bit off more than I could chew and there was no way out at this point. Instead, I found a birdcage and went to our local pet shop and picked up a syringe and some baby bird food,sort of like pabulum for babies, and went at it.

They did wonderful and grew old enough to eat the pale crickets from the pet shop, hubby brought in & as many flies as we could catch for them. It was an awesome experience, I have to admit! We made them a perch on the deck, after they proved they could fly, and they would come down out of the tree just above it, to take anything we had to offer.About then,pet store food was getting a little expensive so we decided to try lightly cooked ground beef with a little moisture added. They ate it but liked the flies and crickets much better.

By the time early Fall arrived,one of the babies had joined the other young scissortail, that hadn't fallen out of the nest and were being fed by the adults. The one left, "Baby", stayed with us near the deck until almost time to start their migration.Neither of us were ready to bid her farewell by then and she didn't look like she was in any hurry to leave us, until one morning early, as I was coaxing her down out of the tree, I heard this adult scissortail, out on the back fence, throwing a whale of a fit! I couldn't imagine what was upsetting it! It didn't take long to figure it out when she flew over and perched on our cable wire just above my head & threw even a bigger fit! I was trying to feed Baby and could see she was torn between me and the adult bird. Instinct won out though and she finally went with the older bird. We were pretty sad to see her go but she would hover around the deck when she got the chance. We could tell the adults didn't like it much, they would chatter at her until she came back to them.

It is Spring again and guess who comes and perches on the cable wire and has built a nest in that same tree she fell out of? Yep! Baby is BACK!

PS! And she had better keep her babies in the nest! (chuckling).

We just wanted to share our joyful experience with a kindred bird lover.
Thanks for listening and happy bird watching to you and yours.

Joy & hubby

Ada,Oklahoma

Is that cool or what? Thanks so much Joy, for sharing your story with me, and allowing me to share it with the other birders here.

Joy adds that she wishes the spammers would find something else to do so I could put up the message board again. I'm kinda working on it. But I also decided today that five years of knocking myself out writing, drawing, building webpages, to reach an all time high of $2 a day is just not worth it. So I'm going to start job hunting Monday. After that, well, all depends.

We still don't know at this time if we are moving far far away or what. Sigh. I sure hate limbo.

Good birding