How to Eat Fried Worms June 29, 2003 - 11:05 p.m.

Recently, I wrote about finding a dead bird hanging from our gutters when I got home. It wasn't pretty and left this awful foreboding feeling in the pit of my stomach. That stacked with the usual foreboding that I feel when I'm at the house, brought on by general paranoia, and I wasn't a happy person. Hence the breakdown before Chris left.

Despite these feelings, I force myself to stay there on occasion. Mainly for the animals and to help my mom with either yardwork or anything she may be actually attempting to do inside the house.

While I was outside pulling weeds and attacking a hideous [and might I add, painful] holly tree that was growing an inch from the house as well as pointing out to my mom that a flower I had planted seemed to be taking root and doing well, which means more flowers there next season... a bird fell. A foot away from me, there suddenly lay a tiny baby bird. So small it didn't even have feathers. I'm presuming that the bird hanging from the gutter was its mother, especially as that was the very same spot from which this baby bird fell.

Being the animal freak that I am, I started freaky out, wondering what I should do for this thing. Luckily for us our next door neighbor works with birds at least once a week, so it was just a matter of waiting for him to get home and getting his advice.

Which turned out to be not so promising.

He told us how most likely this thing was going to die from the shock of the fall. And if it didn't do that, then it would require almost constant feeding of a variety of insects. If I were determined enough to have done that, then I would have had to make sure to not make any noise around the bird nor touch it, as it would then become imprinted to me.

As horrible a decision as it was, I knew I wasn't going to be able to take care of it. I didn't have the money to go buy insects and there was no way I could have dug up enough to keep this thing fed all the time. I'd be digging and feeding, digging and feeding, digging and feeding, ad nauseum. Not to mention the time involved. Then there was the whole issue of where would we put it, because we certainly couldn't take it inside with our dogs and cats, and if we simply left it outside, it would most likely be attacked by a predator. So we opted to let it lie just where it was and allowed it to live its last hours outside. But not before I fed it about four or five worms. I figured if it had even the slightest chance of surviving on its own, it needed to eat.

Unfortunately, that didn't help, and the bird died by the next morning. I feel bad, but there was no guarantee that had I even tried it would have survived.

Mainly, this little recap was just a way of saying I got to drop a slimy, wiggly worm into a baby bird's mouth, and it was pretty neat. Oh, and that a bird's beak is apparently much like a human's eye. Um... in the sense that it's a set size from birth. Cause this thing's beak was way bigger than its head, so I'm assuming his head would grow to fit it.

That, or all the other birds would have made fun of it for the rest of its life.

In that case, it's quite possible that I may have saved it from a life of ridicule by not attempting to mother it.

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