Dan once found a baby bird that had fallen out of it's nest, and, after determining that there was no way to get it back into the nest, brought it home. It acquired a name of "eep," since it was a little bird it maybe should have been "peep" but the first "p" always seemed to get stuck in some other place and never quite managed to cross over into being an actual sound so he got stuck with the leftovers and became eep.

Feeding was a problem. A mommie bird would handle that by catching a worm, eating it, and later barfing it up to feed her babies. Having rejected that plan, Dan went with plan B which was to dig up some earthworms from the garden, rinse them off a bit in the sink, and then run them through the blender. The resulting worm puree which he fed to eep with a small tongue depressor stick from the vet office, seemed to be about the right consistency for a baby bird and may have been close to the traditional mommie bird vomit. eep thrived on it.

Still, in spite of the seeming good health of his charge, Dan was a bit worried about the nutritional value of a constant diet of earthworms, and he was also making a mess in the garden, so he decided to go to a local bait shop and see if he could expand eep's culinary horizons. The only worm the bait shop had other than the standard angle (earth) worm was a "meal" worm which were small, yellowish colored worms that the shop sold in boxes of a thousand that looked like a box of rice that someone had mixed with some saffron or Indian spices. Dan bought a box, and from then on eep's diet became a couple of tablespoons of meal worms and maybe one earthworm if one was available tossed into the blender and pureed. Did eep like the new, yellowish cuisine better than the old, brownish-red earthworm only food? Hard to say, but Dan thought he went after the mealworm puree a bit more enthusiastically than the earthworm only version.