Drifton family comes to aid of robins

A plump, young robin perched on the rim of an Easter basket hanging from a tree limb in the front yard of Peggy Brennan's house in Drifton.

The story of how the bird, which seemed to be mustering the courage to jump, and its two, smaller siblings came to live in a basket began last week.

Brennan found the baby bird, which she calls Cheepers, on the ground.

"It was bald like a plucked chicken," she said.

Young robins frequently fall or get shouldered over the side as they grow and space becomes tight in their tiny nests.

Brennan's instinct was to leave the bird alone and hope the parents continued feeding it on the ground, but as night fell she relented and took the bird inside.

After putting it in a shoebox, reading information online and checking with the wildlife rehabilitators at the Carbon County Environmental Education Center, she learned what to feed the baby robin: cat food or dog food soaked in water for one hour.

The bird needed food every 20 minutes, a schedule that Brennan kept for three days while watching the mother and father robins do the same to feed the babies remaining in the nest.

"Parents go from dawn to dusk. I have a healthy respect," Brennan said.

Meanwhile, she sought help returning the baby to the nest.

With a step ladder, she couldn't reach the nest, which was on a limb too flimsy to support a larger ladder.

She called utility companies, the fire company and eventually the Hazle Township supervisors, who sent a workman with a bucket truck.

The truck was too big to park where the bucket could reach the nest, but the workman held a ladder against himself while Brennan's boyfriend climbed to the nest and put back the baby.

She asked her friend how many birds were in the nest.

Three, he told her, but the bird that she fed was the biggest.

"My heart swelled," said Brennan, who felt liberated from the feeding schedule. "I was able to shop, do things, have a life ... We thought that was the end."

The next morning, however, after a fierce storm, Brennan was about to let one of her cats roam the yard when she saw the soggy remains of the nest that the wind had dumped out of the tree, along with the baby birds.

This time, she took all three babies inside and planned to deliver them to the wildlife rehabilitators at the Carbon County center before recalling something that she had read: A basket could double as a nest for baby birds.

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P.S.: Just think what a ridiculous thing you are asking for......"for USCIS to tell what is the approximate future for EB3"!! That's a joke! I don't know what my future will be GC or no GC. Why will I listen to USCIS who has been most trustworthy historically. And why would they want to make themselves liable to tell you what actions to take. As I wrote earlier, just because it's a free country, it doesn't mean, you can ask someone for anything irrationally! Needless to say that the distincation between EB2 and EB3 has become so meaniningless now. How many positions really satisfy the EB2 requirements? From what I heard that most people just try to get around the system to get an EB2. One of the persons who filed EB2 told me that a high school graduate would probably be able to work in that position too. This is EB immigration and it is hierarchial. That is quite simply a fact not an opinion. The sooner people understand that, the better, and then everyone can channel their frustrations into broader fixes. Unless that can be done we will see these less than well planned, less than well coordinated, fitful efforts, and an internecine warfare that will make us a laughing stock and undermine the heroic efforts of IV core.[/QUOTE] I am just stating the fact. The position was not my position. So I can't speak too much about it. But that was the person who worked there told me. The most important point is that a lot of EB2s do not deserve it at all. This is especially true for smaller companies including those body shops, where a lot of wiggle room exist on how you describe the job requirements. In large companies, they tend to have more strigent requirments on what category to file. A lot of people filed under EB3 before the retrogression starting in late 2004 and 2005 because they did not pay too much attention on this issue (that's their bad - lessons learned). Did you hear that home sales are up! All these media and those streaky economists and so called "housing experts" claiming in the news channels for past couple of weeks?.. that is media messing around with people's head.. I was looking at the public records for home sales and found that a huge portion of current homes sales are nothing but LOW END old homes between (75K to 150K).. Only a neglegable percentage are the ones between (200K and above). This is exactly what media doesn't speak about.. they conveniently skip this part when they report on home sales lately...

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