Friends & Neighbors: Sheree Patton

By Lara Hayes
Dalton Daily Citizen

May 14, 2008 11:02 pm

— She’s not a doctor, her last name isn’t Doolittle and she can’t talk to animals. But try telling “Pete” that — a European starling Sheree Patton rescued recently after he fell out of his nest soon after birth. To Pete, Sheree is just “Mom.”
Sheree and her husband, Steve, routinely take in strays and animals they find that have been mistreated, so trying to help a tiny baby bird survive was nothing unusual. Steve found the bird approximately four weeks ago at his office at T.F. Auto in Dalton.
“We heard them chirping all day, but we couldn’t find the nest. I saw him fall, so I called Sheree,” he said. “He was pink and didn’t have any hair.”
The next day, Steve took the bird back to his office in hopes of putting it back in the nest but again came up empty. Sheree decided to take it to her second-grade class at Westwood Elementary, where she and her students fed him and watched him grow. And grow he did.
“He doubled in size almost every day,” said Steve. “We looked online how to take care of him.”
Part of that care included hourly feedings, but what do you feed a baby bird? Answer — cat food.
“I got some dry cat food, got it soggy, and then fed it to Pete with a syringe,” said Sheree. “Mama birds feed their young every hour except at night when it’s dark, so that’s what I did.”
Pete thrived in the classroom and became a happy little fellow that loved to chirp. Constantly.
“My kids were like, ‘Does it ever stop chirping?’ I said, ‘No, all he does is chirp, poop and eat,’” Sheree said, laughing.
Pretty soon it came time for Pete to learn to fly, a process that took several days. Sheree and her students took him to the school courtyard, where it soon became apparent that Pete wasn’t eager to leave his unconventional nest.
“At first he went up a tree,” she said. “He’d chase the kids on the playground and land on their heads. He wouldn’t fly off. One day he followed the pre-K students into the gym. He hopped down the steps and then walked in behind them.”
Sheree, 25, had a problem — a wild bird with a stubborn streak that had become somewhat childlike. What to do? Pete needed to be released into the wild, but so far he was acting like a toddler who refused to follow directions.
“When I first tried to release him, he flew off. He circled the trees and I didn’t see him,” she said. “The next day I was out with my kids at recess and they heard him chirping. They started yelling at him. When I said, ‘Pete, what are you doing?’ he flew down and landed on my shoulder. The next day I came back to feed him, and when I got out of the car he flew down to me.”
Now Pete stays inside the school courtyard and doesn’t venture out. When he spots Sheree walking into the courtyard, he flies to her, hoping for a big, juicy mealworm. He turns clingy when she starts to leave.
“He follows me like a dog. Then he flies along the glass (in the courtyard) until he can’t see me anymore,” she said.
Sheree spent her childhood here befriending all sorts of wild animals — ducks, hamsters, rabbits, frogs, hermit crabs and turtles — and wanted to be a veterinarian until she realized she was too soft-hearted.
“I feel like I don’t have the right to decide what lives and what doesn’t,” she said. “Our neighbors’ pets that come to our house, if they aren’t fixed I snatch them and take them to the vet and then bring them back. I pick up animals from the mall and try to find homes for them.”
Monday night, a friend brought her yet another baby bird that fell from its nest when he accidentally knocked it out of the tree while removing a tarp. The tiny creature was the only one that survived. It’s currently in a box with a heating pad and covered with a sock. Like Pete, Sheree feeds it hourly with a syringe. However, she vows that she’s not going to baby this one so much.
“My kids are asking me if I’m going to put it in the courtyard here (with Pete),” she laughed. “My friends think I’m crazy. If I’m late for grad school, I get asked, ‘What happened? Was there a squirrel in the road?’”
Even her mother-in-law and father-in-law, who live behind the couple in Murray County, just shake their heads and tell Sheree she can’t save the world. Her response?
With a shrug, she says, “I can try.”

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