Pati Mattrick of Elizabethtown feeds a morsel of doughnut to Stormygirl, the house finch she rescued four years ago.
Stormygirl
Pati Mattrick's German shepherd just wouldn't go near the ivy-covered blue spruce tree just off her porch in Elizabethtown.
Curious, she investigated and found two dead baby birds that must have fallen from a nest somewhere in the massive tree's loft. She disposed of them.
But, still, the dog slinked around in circles. She went back outside in the wind and rain. Pulling aside the ivy and feeling around the roots, she spotted another form.
This bird was alive, but barely. Probably only several days out of its mother's egg, it had tiny fuzz on its head but mostly wet, naked skin.
She cradled it and took it inside.
The first thing she did was e-mail three wildlife rehabilitators and asked for advice on how to care for the orphan. Each told her gently but firmly that the bird might survive three days, no more.
Undeterred, Mattrick says her motherly instinct kicked in. She fashioned a makeshift incubator with a heating pad, Tupperware bowl with a nest of linen napkins, all placed inside a fish bowl.
Now, what do I feed it? she wondered.
She didn't know, but went back out in the rain and dug up some worms and insects. She took a razor blade and chopped them into tiny morsels, then fed them into the bird's beak with tweezers.
One night after feeding, when she'd had the bird about a week, it barely moved. She resigned herself that the bird would die overnight.
The next day, it was fine. "I think I overfed her," Mattrick says sheepishly.
The bird did not die. It grew feathers and started to sing whenever it heard its rescuer's voice.
"She really believed I was her mother," says Mattrick, 56.
She named it Stormygirl for the tempestuous day the bird was found. She kept dicing bugs and bought live meal worms from a local feed store.
Still the bird grew. It sprouted streaks of yellow and Mattrick determined that it was actually a she. A female house finch, to be exact.
Until 1940, house finches were only found in the western United States. But some were illegally sold as cagebirds back East.
Threatened with prosecution, residents of New York released some of the finches. Today, they may be found throughout the East and Midwest. Around Lancaster County, they are one of the most common birds at backyard feeders.
Mattrick taught Stormygirl to feed herself. It was also about this time that Mattrick was mortified to learn that house finches don't eat bugs and worms at all. They're vegetarians.
Now, Stormygirl eats top-of-the-line birdseed and loves strawberries and blueberries. Her favorite food, though, is apple turnover.
Teaching her to fly was trying. Mattrick placed her on the arm of a Queen Anne's chair in the living room. When the bird began to flap her wings furiously, Mattrick nudged her off.
The bird promptly crashed to the floor. But on the third try she took wing and flew across the room.
Now that she could fly freely about the house, Mattrick built her her own aviary in one of her children's former bedrooms. She made a teepee of branches from floor to ceiling and put a tarp under it to catch droppings.
"I don't know what the neighbors thought when I was dragging in all those trees. But they know I'm an artist," she laughs.
Like many young children, Stormygirl got a little freaked out sleeping in the dark. Nothing a little night light couldn't cure.
She likes to get going in the morning at 8. She makes four or five silent flutters into her mom's room to let her know time to get going. If Mattrick isn't up by then, she lands on her head and starts pulling hair.
Similarly, if it's after 8 at night and Mattrick is still in the living room watching TV, the bird will fly in to remind her she's ready for roost and to turn the night light on.
Stormygirl follows her mom around the house. Often, she perches on Mattrick's glasses as she does chores.
The bird can be mischievous. Once, a silver chain necklace Mattrick had laid on the bureau to wear suddenly disappeared. She found it a week later behind Stormygirl's cage.
And sing — Stormygirl sings her heart out all day.
Since Mattrick got a second dog and three cockatiels, Stormygirl now sleeps in a roomy cage at night.
On Saturday, Stormygirl celebrated her fourth birthday with a cherry turnover. Mattrick sang happy birthday to her while Stormygirl sat on her shoulder. She was rewarded with a little peck on the cheek.
It's not likely to be the bird's last birthday. House finches are known to live 9 to 15 years in captivity.
To say that the bird she saved against all odds has brought joy into Pati Mattrick's life would just be scratching the surface.
In short order, Mattrick had gotten divorced, become disabled with a mysterious disease, had to use a wheelchair and lost her preschool teaching job. She had to go on disability. The last of her four daughters had moved away from home.
"I had lost my identity and my children," she says. She was, in fact, stuck in depression.
Finding the bird changed all of that. "To me, it was uplifting to know I was needed again," she says. "I needed her singing and her joy and she needed me. Even now, when she sings, it reminds me every day of the miracle that she is.
"I don't think I have ever had a sad day since I brought her in."
Mattrick, who remarried a year ago, is in good health and has started painting again, thinks the bedraggled bird she found one day in a storm wasn't just happenstance. She thinks it was a gift. A gift from God.
You be the judge.
