Mother Nature

We have had two interesting bird events. The first happened in June. Doug and I were walking several evenings out of the week on the local trail and then through our neighborhood. One evening while walking we saw a Mallard duckling in a person's yard. It was making a high pitched noise like a baby crying. It was obviously separated from its family. It broke my heart. I tried twice to get it. What I was going to do with it, I don't know. But it was having nothing to do with me. We left it to fend for itself, leaving nature to take its course.

Then around the first of July my oldest was out shooting baskets when he came inside and said their was a bird on the ground in our yard. Sometimes we have birds crash into our large glass window trying to escape the neighborhood Cooper's Hawk. I thought that it may be a dazed bird.

Well the oldest came into the house a second time and got his dad. It seems that my son determined that there was a nest in our Blue Spruce Tree and surmised that the bird had fallen from the nest. Doug placed our ladder near the nest and had my youngest son and I come out so we could hold the ladder steady for him if he could capture the bird and return it to the nest. Doug put on work gloves in anticipation of handling the bird and between the him and the oldest they managed to contain the bird under a bush. The bird was squawking like crazy. It still had some of its downy feathers. Doug got the bird, climbed the ladder, and put the bird in the nest. The bird immediately hopped out of the nest onto the branch. Doug tried to return it to the nest and it would not go in the nest. It ended up perched on the branch next to the nest.

I don't know why it left the nest. Was it prematurely flying the coup? Had it been rejected by its parents? Was there something medically wrong with it? I know it looked pitiful and seemed scared. The next evening we found it dead under the tree. We've had some sad experiences with Mother Nature.