When Being Blue Makes You Feel Good

Here’s a sweet little story to hopefully make you smile. And it happened at the Hughes Home over the weekend.

We have birds nesting around every corner of our roof. We love the blue birds that are seen everywhere.

Sadly though, nature can be cruel. Every few days we see a dead baby bird that fell out of the nest.

Well, this weekend, we were finally getting to enjoy a little swimming when the weather hit 100 degrees. As we were drying off and heading back in the house, I saw a baby blue bird shuffling across the lawn and soon realized it was a baby getting ready to take its first flight.

It must have fallen out of the nest and not quite known how to maneuver very well. Well, our dog was fascinated by it (meaning, it scared her to DEATH) and injured it as she chased it around.

So now we had a baby blue bird that was injured and now totally incapable of flying off. After a few moments we were convinced it wasn’t going to make it. We placed it on a fence rail in the yard and it broke our heart when the momma bird flew to the body and opened her mouth as if trying to feed it.

After a few minutes, I went back outside and the baby bird was actually breathing regularly and trying to flap its wings. But it’s neck looked like it might have been injured.

I held the little critter in my hand and stroked its soft and pretty feathers, its heart beating rapidly under my finger’s touch.

As heartless as people think I am, I am not cruel towards an injured animal–even a tiny little bird. We took the bird inside and my wife kept it warm while I called around to see if animal control or a vet could suggest something.

It would have been real easy to just throw it away and let it die. Or maybe not. My conscience wouldn’t let me do that and my wife wouldn’t have let me anyway.

So we found a 24 hour vet hospital and they told us to take the little guy down to them. During the car ride he started chirping regularly and was actually looking better. I am not a vet but I know the difference between a near dead bird and one struggling and striving to live and fly.

The vet said they would check it out and see what they could do. If they absolutely had to, they would euthanize it. But they said it would probably be ok and they would release it after it was strong enough to fly on its own.

Read my archived blog “Birds of the Concrete Islands” and you can see clearly I am a sucker for birds.

Hope the birdie makes it ok. But even if he doesn’t, it’s a much better fate than throwing him in a bag and letting him starve or suffocate.

Our actions brought us a smile and satisfaction. The choice we made might be considered a hassle by some, but it made all the difference in the world to that pretty little bird.