The wee burd
(Bird that was caught in my sash windows: Glasgow, Scotland)
Yesterday was one of those hectic Saturdays I seem so prone to of late. My cousin called me around 10am (which is fairly rare) to update me on her skiing leg injury. It has been the talk of the family for some months now as we glean news of her lengthy and difficult recovery from a broken leg and severed knee tendons. It’s all rather horrible. At 11am, my friend Suzy popped round to talk shop about a new project she’d like to involve me in, and just after I answered the door (still with a phone to my ear) and wandered into the kitchen to switch on the kettle, that’s when it all started.
As I was preoccupied with my cousin’s voice on the other end of the line, Suzy alerted me to a clicking and flapping sound coming from my kitchen windows. A very small, jittery foliage coloured bird was wedged in between the two sash windows and was making a great deal of flitting and flapping in the small space it had become trapped in. How the wee fellow became encased between the paned of glass, I still have no idea – I have a couple of theories, each as bizarre and seemingly unlikely as the last. Basically, it did a very decent job of becoming trapped, achieving a feat I thought impossible. I quickly made my honest excuses to my cousin and quickly grabbed a camera (come on now, what could you expect?). Now, the extrication of said bird from the window was no small feat; we began with me stood straddling the sink (the bird was in a cavity about 7 feet up from the kitchen floor) and looking at the tiny spaces I was working with.
Suzy stood on hand to offer the implements I thought I required. We shuffled the lower section of window down to make the cavity smaller and to bring my hands closer to the bird, still flitting spasmodically against the glass panes. I asked for a spoon or two in order to scoop the bird out of the space and release him into the room or my waiting hands. This did not work. It turned out my hands were just small enough to ease into the gap at the top of the cavity to herd the bird between them. Under Suzy’s instruction – I couldn’t actually see what I was doing – I felt the feathery quivering body under my fingers and pressed them around it. As soon as I had a weak hold on the bird, it stopped. It just relinquished itself to being caught. It was probably utterly exhausted, made more probable by the fact I have no idea how long it had been there before we made the discovery.
I decided we had time enough for Suzy to take a quick photograph of the bird nestled in my hands, just as a record, before setting it out on the windowsill gently. It sat, still prone for a moment and then darted off into trees, quicker than I expected. It seemed relatively unscathed by the ordeal and I hope it has fully recovered from the horror of being trapped in a tenement sash window. We looked it up and I think it was a chiffchaff, a small migratory bird found around the West coast in the Summer, but I can’t be sure. It was very lovely and amongst the smallest birds I have come across. The rest of the day rattled along at breakneck speed as I and a bunch of helpers cleared my hideous back garden of all trash! More news on that soon.
– Today Rosie is partaking in a Harris Tweed Bike Ride in Glasgow, Scotland –
很可爱！ she looks very smart.