Wonders All Around by Bruce McCandless III

Author:Bruce McCandless III [McCandless, Bruce III]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626348660
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Published: 2021-11-15T06:00:00+00:00

MY FATHER’S OBSESSION WITH protecting birdlife was admirable, of course. But it probably didn’t do much for his prospects at NASA. Occasionally his concerns could seem grating, even when couched in humor. In 1979, for example, he gave one of his fellow astronauts an “award” to commemorate the astronaut’s having killed a rare Attwater’s Greater Prairie Chicken while flying in one of the agency’s T-38s. In doing so, my father wrote, his colleague had “reduced the local population of the species from 4 to 3 and consequently helped the [prairie chicken] a finite distance further along the path towards extinction.” Funny? Sort of. Appreciated? Not likely.

Dad eventually made himself into a wildlife-rehabilitation expert. In the mid-seventies, he tended, treated, and returned to the wild a succession of injured or orphaned birds, including three baby screech owls, wide-eyed and ponderous; a red-shouldered hawk that was too powerful for us kids to handle; a pied-billed grebe; and the common loon. He kept notes and photographs related to these projects in a bound red volume. Some of the notes read like a true-crime procedural:

Wed. 5/28/75—1530 – Bernice telephoned with info that [name unclear] in Clear Lake Forest had an adult and three young screech owls . . .

1630—Clear Lake Forest . . . Adult was in bad shape; did very little except lie there and shudder occasionally . . . Other adult (parent) was dead on front lawn . . . apparently a day or so. Suspected acute pesticide poisoning, both adults . . .

1800—[Veterinarian] Hoover suspected organo-phosphate poisoning of adult—pointed out oscillating behavior of pupils of eyes.

The adult owl died the next day. My dad collected the fledglings, though, and he and my mother cared for them for the next three months. Dad fed them mealworms and shreds of raw beef when they were young and switched to using whole mice as they matured. He bought a toy locomotive, set up a track, and placed frozen mice in the coal car. At night he would set the mouse train running around the enclosure, simulating the movement of prey in the wild. He used nail polish to paint the birds’ tiny talons—designating each bird with a different color, red, blue, or green— so he could track their weight gain as they grew. He finally released them on August 22, on a night Dad described in the book as full moon, no wind, very quiet, sort of misty—had been raining heavily in the afternoon.

The owl project lasted longest, but some of my dad’s other rehabilitation efforts were equally vigorous—and ingenious. For an injured nighthawk, he fashioned a spring-loaded traction system, using a snap swivel, a tubular tangle guard, pulleys, and a handmade bridle designed to keep the injured bird from falling over. The Red Book contains Dad’s schematic of the device, with the bird (“Bird”) helpfully labeled. He created a mini-estuary in our garage for the loon, Gavia immer, complete with wading pool, heat lamp, sandy beach area, and water circulating system, and fed the creature tiny fish that we hauled out of Taylor Lake in a seine net each evening.

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