Saving Jemima: Life and Love with a Hard-Luck Jay
Written and Narrated By: Julie Zickefoose
Length: 4 hrs and 59 mins
Oooooh! For all the baby birds I’ve loved before!!!
I remember being yea-high to an ant and my dad bringing in a baby bird he’d found whilst gardening. My mom helped me make it a little nest, and? That was about all we knew what to do for it. I tried feeding it little bits of bread mushed up with milk, but by morning my dear baby bird was dead.
It was DEVastating! As soon as I learned to draw, I sketched out that poor baby as it cried out amongst tissues and cotton balls.
So I’ve always had a thing about birds. And as I gamely survey my environment, I’m always keeping a lookout to see what-all the sparrows, and the mockingbirds, and grackles, and the warblers are doing.
And did I mention blue jays? What obnoxious and adorable birds THEY are!
Thus was I absolutely delighted to find Saving Jemima on sale over on Chirpbooks. I snatched it up posthaste and listened to it right away. Cuz blue jays are awesome!
It turns out that author Julie Zickefoose is quite famous for her work as a writer and illustrator, for her work in rehabilitating wildlife, posting on Facebook and Instagram and with a legion of avid followers. NATurally I couldn’t feel left out so I hit her site whilst listening. If you love birds, if you love nature, if you love beauty? Make sure you hit her Facebook posts!
Now onto the story. Julie loooooves birds and has even tried hatching a blue jay egg on her own. …Uhm… Things didn’t go too well, and she was quite disheartened. Along comes a plea to help a bit o’ blue and gray fluff with nary a mom to be found. Julie steps in, and Jemima becomes part of the family as the entire group of them try to raise and rehabilitate her.
I do have to admit that, while I did indeed like this book a lot? It was more technical than packed with little humorous bits of Jemima’s life. It’s more about what happened when Jemima’s grave illness was discovered, and how it was treated (Julie helps fine tune the treatment through this experience), and it had information about how lack of nutrition and disease can have a disastrous effect on feather growth (Think rings on trees that show when there was a blighted environment). There was stuff like that, but it was NEVER blah blah theory blah.
It’s all fairly engaging because Julie narrates this herself, and the woman has such playful, such warm tones. She very much loves the world she lives in, her family, the work she does. She seems to be able to make such an emotional investment with all the animals she cares for and all the animals she observes, but she’s able to get just a biiiiiiit of detachment so that it doesn’t take such a heavy toll (As someone who’s been caring for an aloe vera abandoned when a store closed during the pandemic, and who just found that someone TOOK HER AWAY!!!! I can say that, TRULY, I envy such an ability!).
There are enough of Jemima’s antics to make this amusing, and there are enough homey anecdotes to make her going back into the natural world bittersweet. Add a verrrrry bittersweet Epilogue, and I was left with a lump in my throat and dabbing a tear away with m’ hankie. But with Julie Zickefoose writing it all, with the way she lives her life? It pretty much boils down to a single and mighty Huzzah! Cuz now every blue jay I see could be Jemima.
Or not… NOW all of them could just be their own individual selves with their own individual markings with their own individual stories to tell.
Yup, NOW I’m looking!
P.S. And thank GOSH this is “technical” enough that I now know what a poor precious baby bird might need….!
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