Confession of a Carolina Wren Lover

I love Carolina Wrens. In fact, it was discovering them around our home in the country when we first moved here that got me hooked on backyard birding. They are so elegantly shaped. They look like they would fit nicely in a teacup. They have that beautiful streak above their eyes and the reddish brown coloring on their backs. I hear their calls all the time when I am working in my yard, "Teakettle! Teakettle! Teakettle!" We have had many stories over the years involving them ---- mostly getting into our house when we open the front door and they are nestled into a decorative wreath on the door! One Christmas, we got one in the house twice. One time, we had two in the house at the same time. You know what they say, a bird in the wreath is worth two in the house! Hmmmm....maybe I have that saying wrong.

Well, this spring they have been hanging out a lot in the big Hemlock just outside our garage. There have been multiple times I have seen them in the garage this spring. They seem quite adept at finding their way back out, so I don't worry too much about it. Tonight, as my husband was heading out for his bike ride, he came back into the house, poked his head through the kitchen door and said, "we have a situation." My first thought was that there was an unwelcome critter in our garage . . . not a totally unusual event out here. It was a Carolina Wren. Unfortunately, even though we have switched to a humane mouse trap, we still had some of the terrible glue traps sitting on the bins I keep the birdseed in. One of my sweet little wrens was stuck on it!!!! It was horrific. We grabbed a clean shop towel to put over his head to keep him calm. I held him while my husband gently, carefully pried him off the trap. He settled down as long as we had the towel over his eyes. We ended up having to use a little vegetable oil to free the one wing that was pretty stuck.

I checked him out to make sure his feet and bill weren't too sticky. He was anxious to get away. I hated to let him go back out into the world, but he seemed in pretty good shape. I put him under the Hemlock where there's a bunch of dead leaves from the fall still. He flapped about, then scurried to a bush by our front door. I tried to keep an eye on him but he eventually disappeared. I really hope he's ok because I feel horrible that we try to keep our property as a haven for the birds and it almost became a death trap! We promptly threw away our remaining glue traps in the garage to prevent another tragedy.

A word to the wise, even traps that are poison free can have dangerous consequences for unintended critters.