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Birb!
So, I meant to talk about this on Monday, but then I dove into retail hell and have only now resurfaced from work exhaustion.
Monday, December 3rd, was my first day off this week. (I have three? By some magical accident? But I'm also not giving them back!) It was around ten in the morning, and I thought to myself: I could be a normal human, get dressed in something that's not pajamas, and take our rent check to the office! I'll actually get a receipt this time! And while I'm out there, I can check the mail, too!
I talk to myself a lot in mental exclamation points in hope that the pretend excitement will translate into actual excitement.
So I wrote out the check and walked over to the main office. On my way, I noticed a bird sitting close to the curb, in a parking space, and because I talk to animals all the time, I said, "Hi, bird!" It fluttered, but didn't get very far. It looked injured, and I immediately became Very Concerned and told it to be careful, and went to the office.
Which was closed. At ten AM. On a Monday. WTF, our apartment complex is ridic.
So I checked our mail and started the walk back to the apartment, and I discovered the bird was still there. So I was still Very Concerned, leaned closer to get a look—it flapped one wing, hopped a little, and was generally way too close to me to be a happy birb. And so, of course, I said, "I'm going to research what I need to do to help you. I promise I'll be right back, even though you're a wild bird and you don't care and you're terrified of me."
I then spent about fifteen minutes reading everything I could about wildlife rescue and asking all of my friends in our Slack channel what I should do. Thusly fortified, I put our rent check in an envelope and headed back out into the cold to deliver our rent to the after hours rent slot, and when I passed where the bird had been, there was nothing there! So it was such a relief, right? I thought: hey, it wasn't run over, I don't' see any blood so a cat definitely didn't get to it.
On my way back from official rent delivery, I decided to take a closer look—I'm genuinely terrible at remembering where I saw things. Was it twenty feet or two hundred feet away? Who knows? What I did remember was a small pink toddler's shoe being right next to where I saw the bird, so I walked the sidewalk until I found the shoe, and then looked all around.
And then I realized I could see tail feathers poking out of the little shoe itself! The little sparrow had gotten cold and had hidden inside the shoe like it would all be okay, and I was like...yeah. Nope. I had a small box and gloves, so I just picked up the shoe (with the bird inside) and put it in the box. I set the box up on my dining table with my heating pad beneath it on low, and the proceeded to call some local vets.
I called two veterinarians, and they told me to call the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, and the AGFC gave me the names, telephone numbers, and counties of the closest wildlife rehabilitators. The closest one was an hour away, in London AR, and so at this point I started lowkey stressing about it, because everything I was reading online said that it was imperative to get an injured bird to a rehabilitator ASAP, because they could easily go into shock and die. And this bird was wedged beak first into a toddler sneaker.
I don't drive and I don't have a vehicle. It was about eleven AM that I brought the bird home, and I was looking at a minimum of four and a half hours before my dad got home, and another hour's travel to get to the rehabilitator. So of course, I was imagining a best case scenario in which my dad was willing to drive for an hour to some strange rural Arkansas town for a wild sparrow, and I would get it to the rehabilitator and the bird would be like, dead because it was suffocated from being in the shoe.
So I was sitting on the loveseat with one of my cats on my lap (they were both super chill, they didn't even care about the mysterious box in the kitchen) and I heard a thump. My cat immediately took interest, so I was like...uh... let's close the cats up and close all the doors and investigate it once I've taken as many precautions as I can.
Sure enough, once I was able to investigate, the bird had actually crawled its way out of the shoe, bumped my box open, and had taken refuge at the top of our tower of board games. And then, after a failed capture attempt, it flew over my head. Was it a wing sprain or something? I don't know, but I do know that if I had left it where I saw it, it would've have one hundred percent been run over. At least this way it stayed warm and safe while it rested.
I took a couple of minutes, then, to ask the internet the best way to get a bird out of the apartment, and eventually I successfully cornered it and threw a hand towel over its head. It screeched angrily at me, but it didn't try to fly once it was covered, so I scooped up the bird and the towel all at once and put it back in the box. Then I—very happyily and quite relieved—took it outside and opened the box, where it screeched angrily at me again and then flew away to a nearby tree. Birb rescue was a success!
Monday, December 3rd, was my first day off this week. (I have three? By some magical accident? But I'm also not giving them back!) It was around ten in the morning, and I thought to myself: I could be a normal human, get dressed in something that's not pajamas, and take our rent check to the office! I'll actually get a receipt this time! And while I'm out there, I can check the mail, too!
I talk to myself a lot in mental exclamation points in hope that the pretend excitement will translate into actual excitement.
So I wrote out the check and walked over to the main office. On my way, I noticed a bird sitting close to the curb, in a parking space, and because I talk to animals all the time, I said, "Hi, bird!" It fluttered, but didn't get very far. It looked injured, and I immediately became Very Concerned and told it to be careful, and went to the office.
Which was closed. At ten AM. On a Monday. WTF, our apartment complex is ridic.
So I checked our mail and started the walk back to the apartment, and I discovered the bird was still there. So I was still Very Concerned, leaned closer to get a look—it flapped one wing, hopped a little, and was generally way too close to me to be a happy birb. And so, of course, I said, "I'm going to research what I need to do to help you. I promise I'll be right back, even though you're a wild bird and you don't care and you're terrified of me."
I then spent about fifteen minutes reading everything I could about wildlife rescue and asking all of my friends in our Slack channel what I should do. Thusly fortified, I put our rent check in an envelope and headed back out into the cold to deliver our rent to the after hours rent slot, and when I passed where the bird had been, there was nothing there! So it was such a relief, right? I thought: hey, it wasn't run over, I don't' see any blood so a cat definitely didn't get to it.
On my way back from official rent delivery, I decided to take a closer look—I'm genuinely terrible at remembering where I saw things. Was it twenty feet or two hundred feet away? Who knows? What I did remember was a small pink toddler's shoe being right next to where I saw the bird, so I walked the sidewalk until I found the shoe, and then looked all around.
And then I realized I could see tail feathers poking out of the little shoe itself! The little sparrow had gotten cold and had hidden inside the shoe like it would all be okay, and I was like...yeah. Nope. I had a small box and gloves, so I just picked up the shoe (with the bird inside) and put it in the box. I set the box up on my dining table with my heating pad beneath it on low, and the proceeded to call some local vets.
I called two veterinarians, and they told me to call the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, and the AGFC gave me the names, telephone numbers, and counties of the closest wildlife rehabilitators. The closest one was an hour away, in London AR, and so at this point I started lowkey stressing about it, because everything I was reading online said that it was imperative to get an injured bird to a rehabilitator ASAP, because they could easily go into shock and die. And this bird was wedged beak first into a toddler sneaker.
I don't drive and I don't have a vehicle. It was about eleven AM that I brought the bird home, and I was looking at a minimum of four and a half hours before my dad got home, and another hour's travel to get to the rehabilitator. So of course, I was imagining a best case scenario in which my dad was willing to drive for an hour to some strange rural Arkansas town for a wild sparrow, and I would get it to the rehabilitator and the bird would be like, dead because it was suffocated from being in the shoe.
So I was sitting on the loveseat with one of my cats on my lap (they were both super chill, they didn't even care about the mysterious box in the kitchen) and I heard a thump. My cat immediately took interest, so I was like...uh... let's close the cats up and close all the doors and investigate it once I've taken as many precautions as I can.
Sure enough, once I was able to investigate, the bird had actually crawled its way out of the shoe, bumped my box open, and had taken refuge at the top of our tower of board games. And then, after a failed capture attempt, it flew over my head. Was it a wing sprain or something? I don't know, but I do know that if I had left it where I saw it, it would've have one hundred percent been run over. At least this way it stayed warm and safe while it rested.
I took a couple of minutes, then, to ask the internet the best way to get a bird out of the apartment, and eventually I successfully cornered it and threw a hand towel over its head. It screeched angrily at me, but it didn't try to fly once it was covered, so I scooped up the bird and the towel all at once and put it back in the box. Then I—very happyily and quite relieved—took it outside and opened the box, where it screeched angrily at me again and then flew away to a nearby tree. Birb rescue was a success!