It was a typical Saturday morning, and I was drawing with my fictional friends — this time it was The Doctor and Donna — when I heard a thump above me.
I ignored it, because I live on the ground floor, and there are always abstract noises and toilet flushes emitting from the ceiling. But then a blur suddenly fell outside my window and caught my attention. A bird with a red mohawk and black-and-white speckled wings fluttered to the ground.
Alarmed, I Googled, “What to do with injured bird.” Luckily, the National Audubon Society, an American organization that focuses on the conservation of birds, has a guide to help unfortunate animals that come in contact with ignorant laymen like me. The guide states when birds fly into the sides of buildings, windows powered by Windex or egg-stealing pigs, they are often stunned and may die from shock. The guide recommended carefully placing the bird in a cardboard box and putting it in a cool place to rest while it regains its senses.
I frantically ran about my room searching for a box, found a TOMS shoe box I thought at least imbued more goodwill than the Nike one, and rushed outside. My next challenge was getting to the bird, as the area outside of my window is fenced off where the air conditioning units stand next to each other in rows like a small Dalek army.
After attempting to climb the flimsy plastic fence, I convinced a maintenance employee to open the gate for me. He watched as I picked up the dazed woodpecker, put it in a box and took it back to my room. I cranked up the air conditioning and placed the bird aside to chill out.
Honestly, I kind of forgot about it for an hour as I finished watching “Doctor Who,” but then I remembered “Ditz,” my ditzy bird. I went to open up the lid to see if he — She? I don’t know about birds — was still alive, and he sprang out of the box.
Then, Ditz proceeded to poop on my floor and fly across my room, head banging into the interior window.
Oh gosh, I thought, I am not having this bird die in my room and it be my fault. But Ditz continued to dart about like a kamikaze pilot, leaving me to feel unsafe in my own place.
He ran into one final wall before hopping on the floor behind my still-unpacked boxes. So I shuffled on hands and knees, trying to catch him, when he started making woodpecker noises.
I think he was saying something like, “You’ve seen what I can do to a tree. Imagine me doing that to your face.”
However, I kept my calm and sweetly called to him to get back into the box, so I could save him, and get him out of my room.
He slipped my grasp several times until I finally brought the box down above him, as you do with a bug you don’t want to touch, and slid the lid underneath.
He protested as I took him outside and set him free on a tree branch. He peacefully flew away above the scum-covered pond on a gust of polluted air. I looked on as my lungs swelled with pride — and carbon dioxide fumes from a passing bus.
I have a friend who will stop mid-sentence to pick up trash and throw it away. Now, she won’t touch figurative trash, trash that belongs in the red bins in hospitals, or trash that is halfway to becoming a part of nature itself, but she does her part to improve the environment in some small way. And I have seen her inspire others, including myself, to clean up messes they have not personally made.
I didn’t build the four-story structure the bird ran into or invent windows, but I did help clean up the mess they made. And hopefully, I have inspired you to do a slightly better version of the same.
Reflecting on the situation, I probably shouldn’t have opened the box with the bird in it in my room — I just didn’t think it would recover so quickly.
If the bird had been anything worse than stunned, I would have called for assistance from Silver Springs Animal Park, Eye of the Eagle Wildlife Sanctuary or Alachua County Animal Services, whose phone numbers are listed on UF’s Florida Wildlife Extension “Frequently Asked Questions” page at www.wec.ufl.edu.
For more information on how you can help when a bird hits a window, check out the National Audubon Society’s page.
Lauren Adamson is a UF journalism junior. A version of this guest column ran on page 7 on 9/6/2013 under the headline "What a bird brain: My brush with nature"
