It all started in 1964 when I was stationed at a U.S. Naval Air Facility near Kenitra Morocco as a medical officer in the U.S. Navy. I was driving on the base one day when I saw something moving in the street where I was driving . I stopped to see what it was. It was a small bird that apparently had fallen out of its nest and into the middle of the road. Being the birder that I was I picked it up. It barely had wing feathers but looked unharmed, so I took it to my home on the base and made a nest for it in a shoe box and shreds of newspapers. I had raised a few baby birds before but none this young. I fed it mashed boiled eggs mixed with oatmeal with the use of a toothpick and used a eye dropper to drop water in its mouth. It would open it mouth wide and I would poke the mixture of egg and oatmeal into its open mouth and it would swallow it. I thought to myself that it would probably die shortly, however with me and my wife feeding it every 3-4-hours day and night, it thrived and began to grow.

The word spread on the base about the bird and what I was doing and very soon someone knocked on my door with another small bird that looked identical to the first. So I repeated the same food pattern and it too thrived. Soon the feathers began to grow fast and they were mostly yellow in color. They both gained strength and were soon able to sit on a branch. My wife and I went to the local marked in the city of Kenitra and bought a cage for them. They both continued to thrive and we had to change to seed for their food. A small container of water was placed in the cage from which they could drink Soon they were flying around the cage making chirping sounds.

We named the first one Mary Margaret and the second one Trixie Jane. They were very tame especially MM. I would let her out of the cage and she would fly around the room and perch on various places in the room. Then one day she landed on rims of my glasses I wore and would pull at my eye brows. When I was ready to put her back in the cage, she would jump on my finger and I would take her to her cage and she would promptly jump into the cage. One day I noticed both birds were taking a bath in their drinking water, then I had to obtain from the local pet store a water container that would fit thru the bars and be on the outside of the cage. That was when I decided to put a cereal bowl on the dining room table and after I let each out they would fly to the bowl and take a bath.

After they were about 10 months old and fully feathered out, and the were beautiful. After some research I found that they were European Gold Finches. Their face is red with a white patch behind the ear and a black path that went from the crown of the head to below the neck, with the rest of the back grey as was the breast. The wings had a black patch on the shoulder and a large yellow area and the rest of the wing was black. The tail was black with white on the very tip end. A very beautiful bird.

They grew to be adult birds. When time came to return to the states in 1964 I asked the travel personnel about what was the policy on pets on the plane and he said “No cats or dogs”. So my wife and boarded the plane with the birds in a small cage we had found in the market, and my wife made a flowery cover for it. My wife was 8 months pregnant at the time so everyone gave us extra consideration while flying. We carried the cage on to the plane as if it were just extra carry on material.

On the flight across the Atlantic from Spain where our flight left there were little seed hulls all over the floor next to where we had the bird cage. So far everything had gone well. Then the trouble stated. While we were waiting to go through customs, I put birds on the floor in front of me. They began to chirp and the man in front of me leaned over to his wife and said “ I may be crazy but I think I hear birds chirping” I immediately moved them under my chair. His wife said “I don’t hear anything”. I gave a huge sign of relief. But when we got to the desk where the customs officer was and he was checking through every thing he looked at my wife’s purse and then the cage and said what is that? She said “Oh nothing”. But he insisted and picked the cage up and said “birds?”. You can’t bring those into the country! We will have to destroy them! At that time my wife burst into tears and started to cry hysterically and holding to her very pregnant stomach and said “ no you can’t do that we have had them since they were babies”. The customs officer got so embarrassed and frustrated that he said “go ahead lady and get out of here with your G–D– birds. By the way I had a certificate from the base veterinarian stating that they had no contagious diseases. Well, we passed that event.

The next was when my wife was to fly to Houston where her parents were to pick her up and take her hone with them until I could get discharged from the U.S. Navy. She got on the Delta flight OK but during the flight, one the flight attendants heard the chirping and saw the seed hulls flying out of the small cage and when found out they were birds, she stated “no pets are allowed in the main cabin”. She went and reported to the captain on the plane and he said “since we are at 38,000 ft, just bring them up here and put them in the cockpit.” That is where the birds flew until they landed in Houston. On the way out the captain said to my wife “lady get these G-D- birds out of here, they have chirped for the past 3 hours and our cockpit is fill of seed hulls.” So she gladly grasped her precious cargo which had traveled from Kenitra, Morocco,to Spain, then to Philadelphia and finally to Houston and then to her parents home in Aransas Pass, Texas and eventually to Austin, Texas where they would live the rest of their life. They lived for several years, Trixie Jane died before Mary Margaret. But we came home one night after a movie and Mary Margaret had died. That is the end of the saga of two European Goldfinches. By Jack Kidd
For more information see: birdwatchingforyou.com