Earlier today I came home from having coffee with a friend (and her husband??????? more on this another time) to find a half-dead injured baby bird that had fallen out of its nest and was now flopping weakly/grossly on the pavers in front of my door!!!!

And now, a mere seven hours later, I am basically an expert on normal, healthy, uninjured, not-any-percentage-dead fledglings and all the things you SHOULD NOT do (return them to the nest, give them food/water, call a wildlife rescue, etc.); and now the half-dead injured baby bird is hopping around like a fluffy wind-up toy, having made an INCREDIBLE amount of progress in just a few hours; and its parents are constantly nearby, periodically feeding it and also visiting its siblings in a nest tucked in next to our security camera above our door!!! So I am basically the bird’s godmother, and I expect to soon be godmother to several more “half-dead injured baby birds that have fallen out of the nest”! But also: should the baby bird’s parents perhaps build a nest that is NOT LOCATED OVER HARD AND UNFORGIVING PAVERS??? MAYBE!!!!

I can’t adequately express how exciting and stressful this whole thing has been. We kept thinking of trying things and then discovering our instincts were UTTERLY WRONG. First we looked into returning it to its nest: WRONG. (It had feathers, which means it did not “fall” so much as “launch normally.” Returning it to its nest would be like gently taking a 23-year-old human out of their first grown-up apartment and tucking them back into their childhood bedroom and saying “There, there: you’re safe now!” Not fatal, but counterproductive—and in the case of a baby bird, it would have to repeat the “fall” out of the nest, which is presumably unpleasant and potentially damaging.) Then we thought maybe we should call a wildlife rescue: WRONG. (The baby bird was behaving normally, as were its attentive parents.) Then we thought we would give it a dish of water: WRONG. (Feeding/watering birds, if you don’t know what you’re doing, can be very, very wrong, and can result in bird death.) Then we thought we would put a light-colored towel onto the pavers, to give it a cooler surface: WRONG. (They can get tangled in the terrycloth fibers.) Then we thought we could provide it some SHADE, at least, with an umbrella or something: WRONG. (This can hide the baby bird from its doting parents.) Then we thought we would scoop it gently into the very-nearby grass: RIGHT, gah, finally, a good idea!! Making sure we see bird-parents nearby: RIGHT, yes, right! Leaving it the hell alone and staying away: RIGHT! Watching out the window obsessively and worrying about it for hours: neither right nor wrong, fortunately!