Two Bird Stories
We've had two funny experiences with small birds this week!
First, on Monday, our cat Momo came into the living room of this apartment carrying something in its mouth. It didn't take us long to realize it was a bird -- and still very much alive. This is not unusual; Momo has always treated her trophies very gently and brought them home uninjured. In her past life in Tokyo, she brought in everything from a rat to sparrows, cockroaches, and geckos. The worst damage she's done to a creature was to take off a bit of a gecko's tail... What was unusual this time is the fact that she doesn't (cannot) go outside; she's kept in the apartment all the time. So needless to say, we were a little surprised to find an unharmed sparrow in her mouth! It turns out that the infant had fallen through a skylight into the bathroom!
We carefully extracted the bird from her jaws and held on to it for a while. Though shocked, it seemed none the worse for wear -- but was obviously very young and only just flying. In the end, when it seemed to have recovered from its ordeal, I put it back out through the skylight. After a minute or so on the roof, it flew off and we didn't see it again.
Our second story involves a baby swallow. We were walking the few yards back from our yoga class last night, when Megumi looked down and saw something moving on the pavement -- right in front of our post office. Cowering in a pothole was a tiny black bird. At first we thought it was almost dead -- it had been a very hot day, and the pavement was stil quite warm. But although it didn't try to escape Meg's hand, it was clearly alive and reasonably healthy. We decided to bring it home, where we discovered it had one damaged eye -- apparently it couldn't open it (or, we thought, perhaps the eye was missing altogether). So into a box it went!
We tried giving it some water, which it drank with gusto. But it wouldn't eat the mashed beans and mashed cat food we tried. In the end, we left it in the box, closed the lid, and put it out of reach of Momo for the night. This morning it was still alive, and even looking quite well. The eye we thought might be missing seemed simply to be closed. (We thought the bird was reasonably mature -- about ready to fly. But this was judging from size alone, and it appears we may have been quite wrong. It could still be quite young, and perhaps the eyes are only just opening properly.)
This morning we picked up some special feed and a syringe from the local pet shop. That cost 8.70 euros! One of the shop staff reckoned it would be another week or so before it was ready to fly -- and reckoned we'd be able to keep it healthy and fed for that time. So there you go -- we now have a tiny bird in the house to worry about! And so no-one forgets its origins, I'm calling it "Pothole", a name Megumi finds rather unattractive for some reason....