Monday, May 11, 2009

Harvesting





Well, this is what I'm raising the worms for, but I had my first experience of having to collect and drown my OWN worms to feed them to baby birds.  It was REALLY hard!  I put some apple slices in with the worms I'm posting a picture of how happy the worms are when drinking off the apples.  You can tell they like apple better than sweet potato!  Then, I shook the apple over a bowl to knock off the worms.  Since I have a variety of sizes of worms, I picked out the tiny ones to put back to grow some more.  I need to figure out a better way to harvest them.

Worms that are fed to baby birds have to be killed, since they can eat through the tissue in a tiny bird's esophagus.  I put them in hot water and they wiggle for a few seconds and die.  I've done this lots of times to worms that we bought, but not to ones that I raised from eggs.  It took a while for me to gather the courage to do this.  I'm feeding five baby Carolina wrens.

My sons told me that they don't want me to turn into a worm rehabber!


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