365 Day Project - Day 61

I'm going to take this oppurtunity to honor my Dad with this post (as some of you may know, he just died in March).  As a child we had at least one annual late spring / early summer project: saving baby birds.  We tried all sorts of things to try to save them, most didn't work.  But not long after I went to college my Dad came up with an genius idea.  What he would do was get an old bird cage and tie all the doors open with trash bag ties.  He'd put the baby bird in the cage (with all the doors open) and hang it high in one of the pecan trees in the back yard.  Eventually, the mom (or dad) bird would come, perch just on the rim of one of the open doors and feed the baby.  Soon the baby bird would be strong enough to leave on his own. Genius.  And it took all those years of us trying to feed them and killing most of them to figure out the best person to feed them was their parents.  No matter how hard we tried or how often we fed them or how much research we did, there was just no replacing the gentle, effective and consistent feeding by the parent.  Hats off to all you moms and dads out there! Keep feeding (emmotionally, spiritually, physically) your kids; no one does it like you! 

And just a note on the cage.  I rigged this up with a crab trap. I hung it from a clothes line so that it would sit on top of a bush in my yard (that way it wouldn't swing too much in the wind and dump the poor bugger out). The poor chap didn't make it through the overnight rain storm.  Anyway, my sister truly believes that I missed my calling as an engineer (I'm always trying to rig things up).  I owe it in part to Dianne Murphree (College Theater professor) that taught me that there's nothing you can't fix with a hot glue gun.