Cardinal Rescue Service

I was driving down the road early this morning to go to a park to run and I saw a bird sitting on the line in the middle of the road between the right and left lanes. I didn't think much about it until it never flew away as the car approached and past it. I looked at "him" (I don't know why every animal I don't know the gender of is a him) in the rear view mirror and there he sat. Definitely something wrong. Is he stuck? I turned the car around and parked on the side of salem street. I grabbed a pottery barn kids magazine that just happened to be in the car and walked over to the bird who sat on his belly with his legs kind of splayed blinking his little black eyes at me. He is pretty young because of the sparseness of feathers on his head and the ones that are there are fluffy and a light reddish brown. I noticed he had a little bit of blood on the side of his head as I tore the magazine in half and scooped him up from the front and back and walked back to the car wondering what exactly I was going to do. I put him in the car with me and drove back home. He didn't make a peep. What if he started flying around in the car? I don't know, but I was pretty sure he wouldn't.

When we got there I took him to the porch and he was able to swallow a little water and after probably 10 minutes he stood up on his feet. I was considering trying to grind up the bird seed in a food processor and maybe roll it in some soy nut butter or something like the bird feeders you make in elementary school when he took a couple of hops, went to the bathroom and flew up into a tree.

Maybe he was injured and in shock and couldn't recover with all of the cars zooming past him on the street. Moral to the story? Get out of the road, relax, drink some water, go to the bathroom and you'll be just fine.