Ammi Midstokke: The do’s and (mostly) don’t’s of bird rescue

There are two types of people. Those who research how to do a thing right before starting, and those who start a thing mostly to demonstrate the wrong way of doing it. We all know which group I belong to. I would like to note they basically have the same outcome, though the latter may have more carnage and duct tape involved.

This is how I came to having a pet finch this week despite a family-backed veto on me acquiring any new pets. This may require some clarification, because at the rate the birds are still hitting my windows, I’m going to need to get licensed as a songbird rehabilitation facility. If anyone knows where I can find tiny wing slings, feel free to forward this information.

It is important to note that it is illegal to adopt or treat wild birds if one is not licensed. There is a good reason for this and I’m not exactly sure why Snow White got away with it. Handling wild animals and caring for them can make them habituated to humans, harm them, and in the delicate case of song birds, easily kill them.

When this finch thwack-thudded against my window and landed on the patio, she was still present enough of mind to blink at me and I think I heard some bird cursing. My grandmother told me if a bird is still alive, we can put it in a quiet, dark place to recover. I looked it up on the internet, too, which said the same thing. Anything useful on the internet is basically advice plagiarized from my grandmother.

The tiny-but-fierce bird was a house finch, according to my trusty bird-identifying app (thank you to the kind reader who suggested this months ago). So it made sense that she crashed into my house and then inadvertently became a member of it.

First, I set the bird in the flower pot in the shade while my kid pointed out that we should never pick up a bird with our bare hands. This was the first of the many Bird Rescue Rules I broke. The second was letting the kids name her Candy.

Much to our surprise, the finch was still hanging out in the flower pot that evening (which had by then been baking in the sun all day). I couldn’t leave her there because my vicious fowl-hunting kitty would find her. She had a lot of energy, judging by her loud protests when I picked her up again (bare-handed – gloves seemed so impersonal) and set her in a little basket with a towel draped over it.

The internet said under no circumstance should I touch the bird. It also said I should not feed the bird, but the mom in me couldn’t just let the poor dear be parched. I gave her drops of water and a raspberry. Thankfully, I have about 80 gallons of hand sanitizer left from that pandemic we all want to forget. If you touch a bird, you’ll basically want to bathe in the stuff. They carry an incredible number of pathogens that will make a bad case of giardia feel like a walk in the park.

I’m not licensed to treat birds, and while I did place it in a much larger box so it could recover, I resisted my urge to build the dear a split-level three-bed, two-bath condo with a rooftop lounge. Instead, I left a warm water bottle (now sterilized several times) in the box and purchased a 5-pound bag of bird seed claiming to be the favorite food of finches.

Finding her alive the next day, I put a little bird seed in the box. She flopped herself into the middle of the pile and ate like a corndog competitor at a state fair. For some time, I could hear her chomping away and I began to worry that when she recovered, her little round body would be too heavy to take flight. But she looked a bit stronger and a bit more mobile after that meal. I gave her another night.

By Sunday, she had the look of a bird who wanted to fly. I didn’t know if she could fly as she still flopped around like some primordial predecessor making a break for land. She even seemed a little feisty, probably because we’d anthropomorphized her with emotions and a tacky name (no offense to the Candys out there, but I’m pretty sure birds want to be named after legendary dragons or Egyptian gods).

I decided it was time for her to fend for herself. I’m guessing there are two camps in the hobby ornithologist world: the euthanizers and the optimists. I think Candy was an optimist like me, because when I set her on the ground, she scuttle-scurried off and flapped both wings and disappeared into the bush. It wasn’t a graceful flight or even an inspirationally gritty survivor story, but I’m choosing to hope. And keeping my eye out for a finch with a limp.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com