Page 484 - Hand rearing birds second

480 Hand-Rearing Birds

Self‐feeding roadrunners coming in to rehabilitation may have a difficult time learning to eat
nonmoving food. It is often important to give them foods that they do not have to kill, so that they
receive sufficient calories and variety during the healing period. Encouraging them to self‐feed is
important because force‐feeding these birds, even only twice a day, is very stressful to them.
Sometimes presenting the food with a puppet will help, sometimes dressing a piece of meat up
with spare feathers or fur will be enough to let the roadrunner know that this is food. Once they
learn that this unlikely looking stuff is food, they will often begin to self‐feed easily.
As with raptors, roadrunners imprint when their eyes have opened and cleared. As this process
is occurring, it is important to provide chicks with a conspecific imprint model. This may be a fos-
ter parent, a slightly older sibling that responds to begging, or a puppet made from a roadrunner
skin (Elliston 1998) (Figure 30.1). Puppets may be used with feeding implements such as long
hemostats or a syringe with a long rubber tube attachment for feeding liquid diets. Also see
Chapter 15 for more ideas to avoid imprinting and habituation in susceptible species.

Hatchlings

Hatchlings, between 13 and 18 g, should be weighed every morning, hydrated, and fed 5 times/12–
14‐hour day or whenever they gape. Allow the birds to get plenty of sleep between feeds and at
night. The internal temperature of hatchling roadrunners is about 105 °F (40.6 °C) (author, unpubl.
data). They should feel hot to the touch and look like little black balloons with sparse white down
on their feather tracts (Figure 30.2). If a bird refuses food, re‐evaluate the temperature, hydration
status, and physical condition.

Nestlings­and Fledglings
Fully and partially feathered birds should be fed two to three times a day when they call or beg
(Figure 30.3). Roadrunners stop begging when they are full. In nature, their parents probably
start to feed them when the day becomes warm and cease when they go to roost about 1 hour
before dark. They can be fed by a surrogate parent (foster sibling or adult) or blunt forceps and a
puppet surrogate.

Figure 30.1 A puppet surrogate parent with very young chicks expectantly focusing on it for the next meal.