In the aftermath of her father’s death, Zebra finches helped Tamika Elgin navigate her journey of grief.
Elgin’s Patrick Springs home is filled with birds – 17 to be precise, distributed amongst several cages in a room, aptly enough called The Bird Room.
She agreed to give two pairs of breeders a home after her father, Wallace “Wally” Brown, died.
“Dad has always loved birds, and after leaving the nursing home and moving in with my sister, Saprena Cook, he asked her about buying some birds. She took him to a pet store, I believe in Danville, and he purchased the two pairs. I’m thinking that was in September,” Elgin said.
Elgin recalled that while Brown had the birds, one pair “laid a couple of eggs, but they never did hatch.”
Brown had many health issues. He died November 27. “It was his birthday. He was 82,” Elgin said.
As the family grieved in the coming days, “my sister would talk about how dad would sit in his room with the birds. He watched them and talked to them. The males are more vocal than the females, and he loved listening to them. Daddy really enjoyed his birds,” Elgin said.
One day, “my sister called and asked me if I would like to take the birds. She felt like I knew more about taking care of them than she did, and she thought it was something that dad … that he would have liked for me to have them,” she said, her voice rife with emotion.
“I went and picked them up. I started out with a single large cage, until they started laying eggs in the nest that my daddy had actually built. Then, I got another cage and separated the pairs,” Elgin said, adding that she also named the birds.
Charlotte and Wilbur hatched four eggs, she said. Soon, the other pair – Fred and Thelma – also became happy feathered parents to four, Elgin said. “One of those babies died. We don’t know why.”
In a short time, “Charlotte and Wilbur hatched six more eggs, and we had six more babies. They were prolific,” she said, chuckling.
Then, the unexpected happened, Elgin said.
“I never figured out why, but Charlotte and Wilbur stopped feeding the last six babies. That was in March. I watched for a full day to make sure, but they just weren’t feeding them. I took all six babies with me the next day, loaded them into a shoebox, and went to a pet store in Danville. I got baby bird formula that I had to mix and then, I fed them with a syringe,” Elgin said.
The frequent feedings made the first few weeks challenging, she said.
“At first, they had to eat every three hours, all day and night. I set an alarm to wake myself up,” Elgin said. “I did that for about a month. They had to go with me everywhere I went.”
It also was difficult to prevent overfeeding, she said.
“You have to be careful when feeding them, because if you feed them too much, they could die from it. With a chicken, its craw is in the front of its neck. With these babies, it was on either side of their necks. I’d have to look to see if the sides were full or not. That’s how I knew to stop feeding them,” she said.
As they got older, the breaks between feedings became longer.
“Most of the time, I would go to bed really late, and make their last feeding around 1 a.m. Then, I’d get back up around 4:30 or 5 a.m. to start over again,” she said. “But that was not until two weeks or so after I first took them away from their parents.”
At one point, because the fledglings decided to try out their wings, “I went to Walmart and bought a small children’s tent, with zippers so it would close. I’d take their cage inside, have everything ready to feed them, zip the tent and open up their cage door,” Elgin said. “They’d all fly out at once, like WHOOSH, with their little beaks open, wanting to be fed. That was challenging. It was fun, but crazy.”
As the birds got older, “I tried them with a bowl of warm water, setting it inside the tent to see if they were ready to drink on their own,” Egin said, and laughingly recalled, “it was then that they took their first bath.”
After that, each tent feeding was bath time for the birds, Elgin said, laughing. “I got soaked in that process, but it was fun. They enjoyed it, and I did too.”
The six hand-fed birds are older now, eating and drinking on their own, she said.
“Now, they’re like all the others. They won’t come to me anymore. They fly away like all the others. That hurt a little at first, that they no longer need me. They are full-fledged fledged birds now. It was hard work taking care of them, but I loved it,” Elgin said.
It also was a process she likely will remember.
“It was amazing—it was just knowing that these little six birds depended on me and my ability to take care of them, and I didn’t know what I was doing. Dad had raised birds and I’d watch him, but I didn’t have a clue what I was doing,” Elgin said. “Honestly, it was like he was there with me, leading me in what I was doing. The fact that they all survived blows my mind.”
She would like to thin them out a bit and isn’t interested in breeding any more in the foreseeable future.
“I would like to sell some, and let other people enjoy them too,” Elgin said. “The breeding days are on hold, with having that many right now, it’s a lot of work to
properly take care of them. I would have to buy more cages if they had more. Now, when I see that they’ve laid an egg, I immediately remove it from their nest or the cage.”
For now, “I listen to them sing and talk back to each other. It’s worth it. It’s really nice,” Elgin said, adding “these were dad’s birds, and it feels like a part of him is still here with me.”
