On the homestretch of my curb recycling walk, I stopped to grab a few empty boxes for today's shipments.
After reaching over a railing to grab a small Amazon box that had been broken down in a pile of cardboard, I thought I saw something hiding under it.
It was dark, so I thought I was imagining things, but I wasn't...
My heart melted when I saw this:
This was my natural view, so it was originally pretty hard to see.
The little bird was alive, but was stunned and scared.
It didn't seem to be injured at first glance, but I assumed that it was in some way.
I took these pics above and then actually pet it with my finger twice before it hopped up and tried to fly.
It seemed to have trouble flying and sort of bounced like 2 feet away.
I got closer to see if it was hurt, but it tried to fly again and sort of hopped/flew into a fence railing beak first. That was painful to see. Something was wrong.
It was 2:40 AM, and I didn't know what to do, but I felt that I had to do something.
After a minute of thinking, I went back home to get some wheat crackers.
I returned and set up a shelter with a paper bag and a small cardboard box propped open with a twig. I then crumbled the crackers all around so it didn't have far to go to find food.
I wasn't sure if it would survive, but I also didn't think it was a good idea to adopt a stray bird at the moment. I decided that trying to give it some comfort and protection would be the best I could do.
Just after I set up its new castle with food for days, it flew up on a railing to give me some hope.
Maybe it was stunned from a fall and hiding to recover, but my attempts to help probably kicked its adrenaline into gear. Whatever it was, it was looking more promising.
I then tried to feed it a piece of a cracker on the railing, and was inches from its beak, but then it hopped up and flew into the nearest tree.
It didn't seem to be flying at 100%, but this was a big surprise after two failed liftoffs before. It seemed like it was mechanically/structurally ok enough. I waited a little bit to make sure it could hold itself up on the branch and then walked a few doors down to my apartment feeling better.
Here's the bird in a super-high resolution night vision camera I just got...
I'll call him Skip since he was hopping around and seemingly skipped 5 stages of recovery to fly into the tree.
Aside from recycling a bunch of packaging and household goods, this was my good deed for the day.
Also, despite the late hour, two people walked by me seemingly acting insane because they couldn't see the bird in distress, and I had recycled things at my side (like a Miele vacuum) -- a small price to pay to try to help another living being.
@steemmatt