It all started from about the age of 5!  LOL Yeah, I have been an animal fanatic since way back when, actually as soon as I could walk & talk.  When I was small, my family lived in the city, I was always dreaming of living in the country so that I could raise all kinds of animals & be around nature, which I enjoy so much. 

When I was little I would find every injured animal or fallen baby bird from a tree and try to nurse it back to health.  In the case of baby birds that were the victims of a rain storm & had fallen out of the nest & in most cases the eggs were broke and only a lone survivor baby bird would be laying on the grass, cold, wet, hungry & chirping so loudly that I would scoop 'em up & take 'em home, find any box & put leaves, or grass clipping or newspaper in it, and then my "motherhood" instincts would kick in & I would go to the shed & get my dad's shovel & go digging for ripe, juicy worms that would in turn become nasty, slimy, "worm paste" that I would mash up to attempt to feed them.  For hours, and hopefully days I would remain vigilant caring for the baby until it was old enough to fly, I had success in many cases & many a good intention gone astray & mother nature took it's course and the baby did not survive. 

I remember one of my earliest experiences in wanting to save as many baby birds as I could from an impending thunderstorm, I climbed a rocked wall where hundreds of sparrows had built their nests in the crevices.  And with a little shoulder bag attached to my side, began to collect as many eggs as I could (believing that the storm would come & the eggs would be washed or bl owed out of their nests.  I took the eggs home & in as many shoe boxes I could find, I placed them all in warm cozy beds & put light bulbs in each box to keep them warm, and to "incubate" them, like a mother bird would- or so I thought. (with me being only 6 yrs old at the time & no Internet highway for tons of information (this was in the Black & White TV & LP era)LOL  or even yet a  library card to obtain access to information,  this was how I set out to "save the birds" one day.  Well, over a week had passed & no chicks yet!  I began to get worried, and started to put a few of them in the bed with me at night, under the covers to keep them warmer & to see if they would hatch, still no chicks.  Well, I confided in a little child-hood friend of mine who later told her mother, who just happened to be on the board of the humane society & boy was she mad!!!!  She came to my house, talked really nasty to my mom & told me how "bad" I was for doing such a thing!!  I really intended no harm, in fact in my little mind I was saving the world, by saving a small little fraction of the bird population.  Well, that negative encounter left an imprint on me for life (as you can see, I'm feeling the need to write this story) LOL...... but from then on, after my mom gave me my first book on "raising baby birds", and I got myself a small "incubator" later & raised chicken eggs, and then taking me to the library when I learned to "read", and trips to the St Louis Zoo were amoung my favorite passtimes, I even made it a regular stop with my own children & now they too with theirs............I never gave up the pursuit of knowledge on birds & tried to learn as much as I possibly could at that young age, reading not only about SPARROWS, but EAGLES, and HAWKS, and OWLS & CRANES & then FINCHES to MACAWS to COCKATOOS, to this day I am still reading & still learning so much about such wonderful creatures that God put on this earth for us to marvel & cherish!  I feel very blessed to have the ability to share my home & live side by side with them now!