Chickadee!
I wasn’t expecting to talk to a bird today. I should know better.
Scott and I were passing time on the patio, talking about something stupid and possibly Sailor Moon-related. Cleo,
one of the attention-loving neighbourhood cats, was lounging nearby. And then, BOOM. He’s got a bird in his mouth.
Cleo hangs around outside our patio a lot. He has a little perch to sit on, well in view of passersby, all of whom know him by name. He’s a big orange fluffy mantlepiece of a cat. He cleans himself a lot. I’ve seen him swat at a bee, and I’ve seen him do that weird cat-chitterchatter that cats do whenever birds are around, but I’ve never seen it actually work. All I’ve ever seen him catch is a big fat nap.
He dropped the poor thing a few times, and kept catching it again. The little victim’s chickadee buddies flocked around. The cruelty of nature was playing out in front of me. But I’ve seen cartoons, so I know that cats chase birds, and sometimes they even eat them. We meant to go back inside and look the other way.
Then Cleo carried the bird a few feet down the street and ditched it. Just left it by the sidewalk. What? Cleo isn’t my cat. None of the cats in my life have been successful hunters. I don’t known the game. I don’t know if Scott does either. So we walked down the street to take a look at the bird.
I’m not sure if we made the right judgement call, but he looked very much alive and free of injury, though a bit dazed, so we picked him up. This neighbourhood is loaded with cats, and leaving it there would be declaring it dinner, and I guess we’re sentimental squishy-hearts when it comes down to it.
He stood on Scott’s finger easily, and had no visible injuries.
He just sat there for a long time with his eyes closed, which is exactly what I would do if I was just in a cat’s mouth. My limited knowledge of wildlife rescue tells me that birds that just got out of a cat’s mouth tend to go into shock.
Despite that, he seemed okay. He didn’t move around much, but he would puff himself up a bit, and didn’t seem to have lost any mobility. He didn’t lose his ability to poop. That’s always good news. Adorable as he was, we didn’t want to stand around holding a bird all day, so as soon as he started flapping his wings we tried to shove him off onto a branch too high or complicated for the average cat to get to. He seemed hesitant to leave, but we finally ditched him on some tree.
Since then, I’ve found some advice on what to do if you find a baby chickadee, or an injured chickadee, or an orphaned chickadee, but I haven’t found much in relation to a dazed/gummed-by-a-lazy-cat chickadee. From what I can tell, we didn’t do anything wrong – we discerned that the the little guy was reasonably unharmed and re-dispatched him to the relative wild as soon as we could. Most of the wildlife rescue advice I could find stressed that you should probably just leave the animals alone.
All practicality aside, I’m pretty chuffed that I got to hold a wee little birdy in my hands.
We gave Cleo a little hug (you can’t blame a cat for being a cat, however lazy), and had dinner. Chicken.
More photos here.
