(Mercifully, wild and free most of the time…)
Earlier this morning, I opened the blinds to magpies hovering around the patio. Chased them off and went back inside.
Some two hours later, went outside to cut my fingernails on the patio when I noticed a blue fluttering in the lower netting for the sweet peas against the back of the house.
A caught blue jay; no sign of blood from the earlier predators. He had exhausted himself, complicating his situation by becoming much more enmeshed in the netting.
I put on goggles and gloves and carrying scissors, went out to trim around him so he could get free. Though cold, tired, frightened, and weak, he bit the finger on one of my gloves as I gradually cut away ever tangle around his body and pushed him free onto the flowerbed. Then realizing he was free, he instantly roused himself and with a burst of energy, flew upward and away, no apparent damage to his wings.
Good timing, wot? To happen to come back so soon after the magpie attack. And lucky bird to still be alive and strong enough to go back to its usual life and self. To be wild and free again.
I, of course, felt bad about the netting be the cause of entrapment, but he may have been pursued by the magpies into that trap. Birds, too often, runs into cars on the highway, wind turbines, skyscrapers, and tailing ponds. Nature’s creatures often have it tough with disastrous or tragic outcomes when proximate to humans.
But I was glad to have been able to help the bird by using common sense and reason and a common human tool. There are so many other people who play God out there, too. The passerby who stops a potential suicide on a bridge. The eye surgeon who gives us back our sight when we get cataracts. And so forth.
It is always heartening when things go well as happened this morning. A bird rescue intervention that no one or nothing else could have made in those particular circumstances. The right and best thing with a happy outcome. Life cheating death yet again on a cold December morning. As close to a blue jay as I never wanted to be.