In which I free a baby bird, or I Am A Good Person.

I constantly have to remind myself how I am basically a good person. I won't go into detail here but there are a lot of things I do that a good person would not. So once in a while I try to do a good deed. Such as saving a baby Oriole, which I did last week and which Joey documented with his ever-present camera.

I got home last Sunday and Joey had been home all day. He told me there was 'something' stuck in bucket in the next-door neighbor's carport. We thought it might be a bird or a bat, and we went to take a look. It was an Oriole fledgling. It had been struggling to get out, as you can see from this disturbing picture of its blood on the things that were in the bucket it was trapped in:


I wasn't willing to touch the bloody things and I thought the bird might try to peck me so I grabbed some rubber gloves:

And reached in and pulled out the baby:
It wasn't really that hurt. His leg had been caught between two dowels sitting in the bucket, but it wasn't broken. And he flapped his wings like crazy, so they weren't broken either- though he did have a little wound where his wing had rubbed against the things in the bucket. He started making a racket and his parents actually flew over to squawk at me. I put him in the yard and he hopped over to rest beside the fence while his parents watched(you can see one of them on the fence by my cruiser here:
It was cute, but also sad because the little guy couldn't really fly. I left him in the yard for a bit and when I came out a couple of hours later to check on him, he hopped his way along the fence, under the gate and down the alley to a spot under the neighbor's tree. I hope he's still around!