Felt like the Birdman of Alcatraz today

This morning bright and early, Kabota my big gray and black male brought a flicker into the house. I quickly rescued the poor bird and took it upstairs into the cat room which is isolated, put it into a carrier and let it warm up. Then I took it gently out and saw that only the claw was ripped and there was no other injury other than shock. I doctored it's claw, kept it inside by the furnance till it revived and then let it go outside and it flew off.


About an hour later, here comes Kahuna with a wren in his mouth, and I rescued this bird as well. At first examination, it looked like the only thing wrong with it was all the tail feathers were gone, so it went up into the cat carrier upstairs by the heat. But by the time I went to check on it again, it had died. There was a small bite wound to its chest that I had somehow missed, and since the pasturella bacteria virus is common in cats mouths, this is also deadly to the birds. I don't think it stood a chance, though I did try to save it.

It sounds like you had a busy day! I had that happen once at my moms house. One summer I was home and he brought this baby bird into the house. Naturally, I chased him down(through the house, through the bushes, through the car port and back into the house again) and made him give it to me (mom screaming the whole time). Once I finally got the bird and locked the cat up, I saw that it was just a wee one and must have fallen from the nest. I spent all dang night feeding it and warming it. The next day, I went out and tried to find the nest. I could hear the momma, but couldn't get up that high into the tree. So I got the bird up as high as I could, but the mom wouldn't come down. While I was in the house trying to call a bird rescue, it must have fallen, because I heard the poor thing screaming and the cat zooming by. This time Boots knew better and took off WAY up the street. I felt really bad that I couldn't save it, but I tried

So Hissy, what do you do in your spare time?


I'm sorry the little wren didn't make it, but at least you helped one little life today!

Once I rented a house with some friends on the Danvers River, close enough to the sea that we got gulls in the river at certain times of day. I had a little gray and white tabby girl named Dog (she used to follow me around like a puppy) and it was the first time she'd had a yard to go out in so she was a little overwhelmed by all the choices. One day, she managed to catch a gull. One of my roommates saw her with it on the porch and didn't know what was happening. Assuming the quite large bird was attacking my cat, she opened the sliding glass door and amazingly the cat dragged the bird into the house, at which point the bird went limp. My roommate assumed the bird was dead and convinced Dog to let it go, and of course the bird immediately took flight, inside the house! Screaming roommate, flying bird, cat trying to recapture her prey - I ran downstairs from the study to see what happened! I locked the rather wide-eyed cat in my room, and my roommate and I tried to convince the bird it wanted to go back out the sliding doors. Of course there was about a foot of wall above the door, and the bird just wouldn't drop down that much to go through the opening, it kept flying into that bit of wall or circling back. We finally closed all the doors and chased the thing into the bathroom with a broom and a mop as prods, and called the animal control people. They laughed a lot, and said usually they had to rescue bats that came down people's chimneys, not huge seagulls. We had some fallen items to pick up and a few drops of blood, but thankfully no bird poop. And Dog used to sit on the porch and watch those gulls. I'm not sure she would have tried to catch another one, but I am sure she was remembering the one that got away.