Deliver Me Also from Baby Birds....

At this time of the year, there are countless baby birds chirping in their mama's nests which are scattered throughout the trees all over our neighborhood.

And, at this time of the year, there are also countless bird babies who think they can leave the nest before they're ready to spread their wings as wide as need be in order to fly. Those are the baby birds who somehow find their way to me. I want to ask them: Do I look like a mama bird to you?

I've tried to rescue these orphaned birds. It never works. They will sometimes take a bit of warm water from an eye dropper. Sometimes they will even take some soft bread soaked in milk. Usually, they sit in my hand and just look at me, occasionally opening their tiny beaks to blast out a baby-bird chirp, which is less like a blast and more like a burp.

I keep a wooden birdcage on my porch, just in case a baby bird needs a home. They don't seem to like the cage, and I can't say as I blame them. What they do like is to be held in the palm of my hand. I imagine the warmth of my hand reminds them of their mama's warm body as she sat on the eggs. The baby birds also like the sound of your voice, as long as you're whispering to them. "I'm holding you in my hands, baby bird, so my three cats don't think I've brought them a new toy with real feathers."

So far this season, I've seen a baby blue jay in the middle of Space Center Blvd., two baby birds on the front lawn, one baby bird around the corner, and at least half a dozen near the entrance to the park in our subdivision. I have resisted the urge to rescue any of them. The tiny blue jay in the middle of Space Center Blvd. was a hard one to resist. My immediate reaction was to want to slam on my brakes and jump out of my car and get the bird out of the road. But of course I couldn't do that, because not only would someone else have smashed into my car, but I would've been flat out on the concrete right next to the tiny blue jay. So I just kept on driving, willing myself not to look into the rear-view mirror to see what happened to the baby bird.

In a perfect world, baby birds would stay in their mama's nests till they were fully feathered and grown, till they were expertly able to fly out of harm's way, and able to capture bugs and crawling things for their dinner.