Fly Away, Little One

SPOILER ALERT: If you are a cat lover, please stop reading when I advise you to stop reading. Otherwise, you will have your sensibilities wounded. And we wouldn’t want THAT to happen. I will not approve any crying and complaining from cat lovers in the comments section.

We were having breakfast this morning, looking out at a clear summer dawn that promised to turn into another perfectly golden sunny day in balmy southern California, replete with ocean breezes when WHAM! something hit the window really hard. Well, it was too early in morning even for the most die-hard fireworks fan with ammunition left over from the Fourth, and I don’t think any of the Strewers of Advertising Debris have figured out how to get into the back yard to throw out their promotional advertising, so, what?

It was a bird.

With the morning sun low in the northeast and — for just these few weeks — hitting the back windows of the house before it retreats southward from the zenith again, there was probably a glare on the window, and a sparrow had slammed into the big pane of glass, thinking it was an opening.

The little bird was flat out on concrete, its back arched up and back in the reverse of a normal pose, its beak opening and closing, obviously struggling to keep breathing and stay alive.

Oh, man. What to do? You don’t want to see a little creature suffering, and given how hard he’d (or she’d) hit the glass, it might have a broken neck or broken back or at least enough brain damage to think it could be governor of Alaska.

I knew what was going to happen. I was going to have to put it out of its misery. No choice. The Counselor was distressed. I was distressed. What could save the little bird?

I knew what would NOT save the little bird: lying there prone on the patio sending out invisible waves to every roaming neighborhood cat: “Helpless creature at 1957 W Summerland! DINNERTIME!”

THIS IS WHERE ALL CAT LOVERS LEAVE US. GOOD-BYE. IF YOU ARE A CAT LOVER AND READ BEYOND THIS POINT, UNDER WESTERN SKIES IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR WOUNDED PSYCHE NOR WILL WE TOLERATE YOUR COMMENTS. WE ARE ABOUT TO SAY HARSH THINGS ABOUT YOUR PRECIOUS PUDDIES.

So, the first order of business with any disabled creature: bird, lizard, small mammal or wombat, is to make certain that the roaming neighborhood CATS don’t turn it into today’s plaything. This bird MIGHT recover, I dreamed. Really. It MIGHT. But not if some 12-pound feline turns it into a personal toy. So, I quickly assembled a protective cage from the pool net, weighted down by a couple of 5-gallon buckets of drywall mud. I resolved that if, after my shower, the unfortunate creature was still writhing in agony, I’d grab the shovel and … well….

I shed the morning garb and stepped into shower. I recalled the other summary executions I’d been compelled to carry out here in our suburban wasteland: a couple of squirrels, apparently in their prime, left writhing on the concrete driveway; had they fallen out of the tree and broken their backs? Had they been struck by cars and crawled back up into the driveway? Have you ever seen a squirrel FALL? CATS, I say. Then there were the little lizards, squirming in agony on the blazing concrete: CATS! And the BIRDS. Little songbirds and sparrows and mourning doves: victims of the neighborhood felines. And the worst day of all: the Day of The Possums! On that morning, we woke to find the back yard looking like a real-life dramatization of Salvador Dali’s “Persistence of Memory” but, instead of melting clocks, the back yard was littered with wounded and bleeding and eviscerated bleeding baby opossums, courtesy of the neighborhood CATS! I had to round up the poor, suffering little creatures — some of them with injuries that would embarrass the Inquisition in their cruelty — and end their misery. One lonely little survivor had leaped into the pool and was swimming for its life. I took it to the local canyon and turned it loose, with  little expectation of its chances to survive.

CATS! Is there any creature more cruel and cunning in its determination to delight in the torture of the helpless? Ah, yes, there is, but cats lack the creative brain and opposable thumbs of humans, which equip us to revel in the creation of new agonies of destruction we can inflict upon the helpless. If, given the millenia of their domain, cats had been granted the ability to create engines of  torture and pain granted to humans, they would rule the world.

And so, as the  shower streamed down on me, I thought of our tiny sparrow, extended in its pain upon the stone-cold concrete and I dreaded the moment — only minutes away — I’d step out of the shower, put on my shorts and shoes, and grab the shovel to end its days, if only to assure myself that it wouldn’t become the plaything of some monstrous CAT.

And then, as I contemplated this flawed world we inhabit from my shower stall, The Counselor called me, “The bird flew!!”

Through the sound of the water, I thought she said, “The bird is through!”

And then I learned that she had LEAPED to the computer and searched on “stunned bird” or something and learned that birds that fly into solid surfaces sometimes require as much as 2 hours to recover, but often do bounce back. This was, in fact, the case with our little sparrow who, by the time The Counselor took a look again, was up on its feet under the cover of the netting and pecking away at the enclosure that covered it. Once she lifted off the net, IT FLEW AWAY.

I thought that poor bird was dead, or worse.

It still doesn’t make me like cats any better. They owe me three lizards and two squirrels and numerous birds. I’m keeping score.

Fly, little sparrow, and look down upon us here with pity.