One for the birds

I love baby animals. And if you don’t, well then, you’re a heartless asshole.

That being said, I realize that not everyone cares about baby animals as intensely as I do. Some people prefer to focus their attention on other, similarly important things like war and disease and human starvation.

Perhaps you tear up when you see one of those Christian Children’s Fund commercials—as well you should, because they are very, very sad. But nothing tugs at my heart strings more than those Sarah McLachlan animal cruelty commercials, which I cannot bear to watch for fear of developing a serious drinking problem. Whenever one comes on, I instinctively close my eyes, cover my ears, and sputter out sentence fragments like a Tourette’s patient until I can locate the remote and change the channel.

Now that you have a bit of context, I’ll get on with my story. It all started a few days ago when my friend Kim and I headed out for a run on a particularly breezy afternoon. The sidewalk was covered with windblown leaves, fallen branches, gum wrappers, flimsy Dairy Queen napkins, Taylor Swift concert tickets, and other worthless bits of debris.

As we turned onto the main road, I caught a scurrying blip in the far left corner of my peripheral vision. Upon closer examination, I realized that it had tiny legs. And a tiny beak. And tiny wings. I gasped in horror as my brain caught up to my eyes. It was a baby bird—an itsy-bitsy panic-stricken ball of fluff trying desperately to jump over the curb so he could make his way back to the tree from which he had fallen.

He was obviously too young to be out of the nest, and my heart broke as I watched him fail—over and over again—to scale the towering curb. Every few steps, his tiny bird feet lost their footing, sending him crashing into a precious little heap of yellow fuzz. It was the most pitiful thing you could ever watch—besides, I’m told, The Hangover Part III.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that all of his efforts were in vain—that he would never be able to climb the tree and rejoin his little bird brothers and little bird sisters in their happy little bird home. (Also, I don’t speak bird.)

I stared pleadingly at Kim. The look of distress in her eyes matched my own. What could we do? If we left him to fend for himself, he would die—either from starvation or by the heavy paw of a feline predator. If we tried to rescue him, he would die. (Anyone who’s anyone knows that a mama bird will reject any offspring tainted by human scent!)

We paused for several moments and debated what to do.

“What should we dooooooo?!?” I whined.

“I don’t know, what do you think we should do?!?” Kim squealed back.

“I asked you first!” I retorted.

“Ooooohhh…look at him—he so cute!” She said.

“We can’t just leave him—he’ll starve or get eaten!” I wailed.

“I know, but what can we do?” Kim replied. “If we touch him, his parents will smell us on him and reject him anyway.”

“Well, we could put him in a box and raise him ourselves,” I reasoned.

“But what would we feed him?” she asked.

“Well, we could, like, chew up worms and spoon-feed it to him with tweezers,” I suggested.

I could tell from the disgusted look on Kim’s face that she was not down with my worm-mash idea. In fact, she probably thought I was a huge freak for even saying it out loud.

At this point, I knew I had to put a lid on the conversation before I word-vomited any more repulsive comments. I lamented the poor bird’s fate one last time before restarting my watch and resuming the run. I felt a pang of guilt, like I’d just witnessed a pedestrian hit-and-run and was now fleeing the scene of the accident as the victim lay in the street, bleeding profusely and clutching a broken femur.

I tried not to let on, but the truth was that for the remainder of the run, my mind was consumed by the memory of that poor baby bird. The look of sheer terror in his beady little eyes haunted my every thought. But there really wasn’t anything I could have done, right? RIGHT???

As much as I wanted to believe my own words of consolation, I could not shake the feeling that I was, in some yet-to-be-identified way, a miserable failure. There was only one way to settle this—to free my mind of its guilt-wrought shackles: consulting The Google.

The all-knowing power of The Google never ceases to amaze me. I am especially mystified by its crazy-accurate psychic powers. Like, I can type the word “If,” and it will autocomplete the exact question I was thinking: “If I had 7,856 nickels, how much money would that be?” (Answer: $392.80)

So, I brought up The Google and began typing “Can I,” and of course “touch a baby bird” popped right up in the search field. (I wish I could marry you, Google. You just get me.)

I hit enter, picked the most legit-looking search result, and cupped my hand over my mouth in disbelief as my worst fears were confirmed.

To put it lightly, whoever told you that mama birds will reject their human-scented babies—your mother, your babysitter, your kindergarten teacher, that guy Steve from Blue’s Clues—was a dirty liar. Because guess what? It’s A MYTH! The Internet SAID SO!

I probably would have spent a lot more time being upset and angry about this revelation had it not occurred as a result of stumbling upon the coolest fun-fact website of all time. And thanks to my adult-onset ADD, the whole baby bird fiasco quickly faded into the annals of history as I clicked my way through a series of incredibly-entertaining-but-ultimately-useless trivia items. Well, useless to a normal person anyway. As a rambling blogger with adult-onset ADD and a horribly disjointed writing structure, I know just how to use them—as my concluding paragraph!

So, here you go: Chickens have earlobes. Chickens with white earlobes lay white eggs, whereas chickens with red earlobes lay brown eggs. In an average NFL football game there are only about 12 minutes of actual play time. Nine-banded armadillos always give birth to identical quadruplets. Cashews are related to poison ivy. “Pepsi-Cola” is an anagram for “Episcopal,” which some people believe the drink was named after. “Britney Spears” is an anagram for “Presbyterians,” which no one believes she was named after. The end.