On Sunday night, we were driving home from Connecticut when we saw a very small bird sort of hop-wobbling across the center of the road, maybe with a broken wing, occasionally disappearing for a moment under a passing car.
Yet another “this kind of thing doesn’t happen to city girls” moment (up there with the turtle in the backyard, the trees that come crashing down during rainstorms, and oh my god the bugs). Or…if it did happen it’d be a pigeon, not an adorable, tiny fluffball with beautiful black-and-blue feathers. I had a few birds as pets when I was a kid, so I more or less know how to pick up a baby, and so that’s what I did: scooped it out of the road and brought it back to our car. Then we sat there with it for a minute, trying to figure out what to do.
We had no idea.
To me it looked like its wings had been clipped, and it was a really gorgeous bird: I worried that it was someone’s pet – a parakeet, maybe, or a budgie? – that had gotten out. Or maybe it was a baby who’d been abandoned by its parents. Or maybe it was hurt and would have ended up just sitting there in the center of the road until a car made a direct hit; I didn’t know.
We were only a block from our place, so we decided to take it home while we decided what the next step should be. We fed it (wet dog food with a pair of blunt tweezers, per Google), and I put on a glove because I was worried about it taking on my scent (apparently that doesn’t really happen; it’s more about not disrupting birds’ nests with your scent, but still). It hopped into my hand and – I swear – snuggled up. It sat on Kendrick’s shoulder. It perched in my lap. I obviously fell in love.
And then we Googled some more, and figured that it was a fledgling bluejay, that it’s wings weren’t clipped, but just too small to let it fly, and that what we should have done was to put it in a bush near the spot where we’d found it (or taken it to a wildlife center, but I don’t know that it would have survived the night). So we went back and did that, hoping that the website that told us that parents search for at least 24-48 hours was correct.
I feel terrible. I’m like the Abominable Snowman in Looney Tunes (“I want to love him and squeeze him and call him George”), banging around the suburbs and stumbling into totally unfamiliar situations with small creatures that seem to be in dire straits but that I have absolutely no idea how to protect. Several experiences later, I know that the answer is almost always to get it out of immediate danger (out of a road, etc) and then let it be.
Another lesson learned.
