Bird Story

During the great ringworm scare I took my bedroom curtains down so I wouldn't have to keep washing them, and as of today I hadn't put them back up. It didn't occur to me that it would make my windows less visible to birds until a poor little sparrow thunked into one today and plummeted downward. I immediately opened the window and screen and leaned out to see whether it had fallen all the way to the ground or recovered enough to fly away. It was lying on its back on a metal grating in the ground below my window, it's little head dropped down into the grating. I only got a brief look because I had to stop Pyramus from going out the window (he had that going-on-an-adventure look cats get before doing something you really wish they wouldn't) but even from 4 stories up I could see that the poor thing was still breathing, one foot twitching slightly, but not struggling.

The area where the bird had fallen is blocked off by a little fence, but that would be easy to climb over. The problem was that I wasn't sure what to do with the bird once I got there. At the same time though, I couldn't just leave the sad creature there to die. So as one does when one's best friend is a veterinary student, I called Wendy and asked what I should do. She told me that it might have just knocked itself out and if it wasn't stuck I should wait and see what happened or take it to the vet--our vet does look at wildlife--depending on whether or not it looked injured. If it was stuck I should unstick it and she'd tell me how to pick it up. For better or worse, though, by the time I got down to the spot the bird had flopped over on its side, one wing drooping through the grating, and breathed its last.

On the bright side, Wendy did think that it probably concussed itself on impact and never felt anything.