Gary Brown: Watching over a baby bird
My version of the story is that we brought a dead bird back to life.
Still, friends look at me rather suspiciously when I say it that way, so I may be overstating the "miracle." I might not be the zoology savior of the bird species. I'm just a guy who saw a bird lying on its back on the deck. I thought it was dead. Apparently, it was just playing dead. There's a big theological difference.
At first my loved one and I both thought the bird was a goner. Kaput. A winged corpse. A lifeless former resident of the giant avian environment that is the world. If that sounds like a harsh way of starting this story, bear with me. We'll get to a good ending.
We had been alerted to the fact that one of our fine feathered friends was in trouble by strange sounds in the yard that first were detected by my loved one. She heard some screeching. Then came the flapping of wings. And we both heard a bunch of other frantic bird sounds that we ordinarily do not notice early in the evening, when the activity of flying animals in our neighborhood normally starts to settle down.
"Something is happening," my loved one observed.
"You want ice cream for dessert?" I asked, trying to participate in the conversation without actually saying anything pertaining to it, and apparently not grasping the urgency of the situation.
"There's a bird that's hurt on the deck," she continued, after looking through the screen of the sliding patio door.
A baby Baltimore Oriole was lying there, motionless, claws up and seeming defenseless, while a Blue Jay was landing beneath the railing, ready to beat up the Oriole some more.
Fending off the enemy
"Shoo!" shouted my loved one. "Get out of here," she added, after the Blue Jay scurried toward the Oriole and pecked at its head. "Go on!" she hastily yelled, and, startled by the shouts, just as quickly the attacking bird was gone.
It's a life lesson. Bullies are cowards.
"Blue Jays are aggressive sometimes," a wildlife expert told my loved one when she called some official bird-friendly agency in our area. So, Blue Jays can be bad guys. Who knew?
We didn't, initially. And, having participated in the last Great Back Yard Count earlier this year, we consider ourselves bird experts, sort of. At least we can identify some birds, live birds, which is how we knew the bird lying on the deck – now flopped over onto its belly after the new attack – was an Oriole. And we were aware that his adversary was a Blue Jay.
But, the reasons why birds might be almost dead or what what got them to that sad state eluded us. And, we had no idea what to do once the bird got to that perilous condition.
Essentially, the wildlife expert told us to get the heck off our deck and back into our house.
"The mother may try to come back to feed it," said the expert after my loved one said it was a relatively small bird, maybe a baby bird, or at least a child bird, no more than a teenage bird. My loved one didn't actually use those terms because she has more of an aversion than me to sounding like an idiot, but the expert got the idea that this wasn't a full-grown Baltimore Oriole, so it likely had family watching from the trees.
"I think the mother probably won't come around if you're out there standing and staring at her kid," I later explained, in less than scientific language after the expert had told my loved one something like "keep an eye on it for awhile, and you might have to try to delicately put the bird into a shoebox when it gets colder tonight."
And that's why I ended up sitting inside looking up bird things on the Internet while I kept one eye on a bird that sure looked dead, but if it wasn't, the thing wasn't going to kick off from another attack on my watch.
Bringing a bird back to life
Then something miraculous happened.
I like to think that the bird knew I was there watching over it, and that my loved one was making more calls to wildlife people on its behalf, and the reassurance of our actions gave it strength.
Probably it was more like my loved one said. "I don't think it's dead," she said, "I think it's in shock." And, sooner or later the bird – and me, for that matter – started to understand that, "Hey, this situation isn't as bad as I thought."
Whatever it was, a wing that was splayed out on the wood flooring slowly was drawn in. A head that was lying on a small deck table leg was raised. And that head began to swivel back and forth on its little feathered neck, the way birds do when it appears that they have no idea what they want to look at, but they know something is interesting out there.
"Hey, the bird is definitely alive," I shouted to my loved one, who came quickly to the sliding patio door.
But, she was too late to see the "miracle." Before she got there, the bird had stood up, and in only a couple of seconds, had flown away.
"It's gone," observed my loved one.
"I saw it fly up into that pine tree," I said, without shame making it sound as though, somehow, I had helped.
Whatever, the crisis was over. The bird was perched too high up in the tree for me to worry about anymore. What happened to it from then on was going to be God's or Mother Nature's responsibility.
"Now, do you want that ice cream?"
We were back to dwelling in my natural habitat, the freezer section of the refrigerator.
Reach Gary at gary.brown.rep@gmail.com. On Twitter: @gbrownREP.
This article originally appeared on The Repository: Gary Brown: Watching over a baby bird
