A few weeks ago, while searching the flowers I’d planted for buds, I heard a little helpless chirp coming from the basement-level 6-7 foot deep window well. I stepped over and around the cosmos seedlings and peered over to find a juvenile robin sitting below on a stick blinking up at me. It didn’t look injured, but it wasn’t moving, either. It was also lunchtime, and I had to get back to work within the hour. So I left the juvenile, fully expecting it to have flown off by the time I got back.

Wrong.

It was exactly where I’d found it 4.5 hours earlier: sitting on that stick, giving the occasional woe-is-me chirp. I figured, if it’s still down there, it can’t really move on its own. Maybe it hadn’t gotten the hang of flight yet. Maybe it was just a touch dumber than its siblings. It was probably hungry, probably dehydrated, and a storm was predicted for the evening. I made up my mind that I was going to save it.

If you know me, you know I can get a little crazy, determined to fix a problem myself even though I could just as easily ignore it… even though I should probably ask for help. I did this when I decided to start weeding the courtyard of my apartment building and sprinkle seeds there. I also immediately took in the poor homeless waif kitten who wandered into my friend’s yard during the Pandemic and is now my furry, naughty big-baby, Dax.

Usually these moments come as a challenge to myself: I bet I can do that. I launch into things as experiments rather than “I’m doing something stupid.”

I tried reaching down the well with a broom. Too short. I borrowed a ladder from the basement, hoping it would be tall enough, grabbed a pair of nitrile gloves and got to work. I navigated around the flowers, lowered the ladder and went down to the sounds of the mother robin sounding the alarm.

This was not a scene from one of those nature videos where the scientists gently handle a calm bird in their hands while they attach a sensor or a tag. Nope. Predictably, the baby robin fluttered away from me. It could fly and loft a little a bit–not enough to clear the wall but definitely enough to streak away from me, screeching and cursing. I chased it inside the window-well for a good five minutes. It did not want to be handled.

When I finally got purchase on it, I quickly heaved it up and over the wall, and the deed was done. As I was ascending, I saw it sitting on the ground in a forest of cosmos, and when I brought up the ladder again (praying that I wouldn’t pull my sciatic nerve again) it had moved over to the lawn.

Its mother was shrieking nearby—maybe at me, maybe at her child: “I told you this would happen, Billy, if you got too close to that wall. You know you don’t fly well yet! I told you if you did that a human would try and eat you!”

Baby did not move from that spot for hours. By the time a thunderstorm swept through, it was gone.

In the grand scheme of things, it probably doesn’t matter. Okay, so I saved a little bird. But I felt like I’d poured back some good into the world. It’s a small victory, maybe inconsequential. No one will put up a memorial commemorating this event. But I’ll take it.

The horrific shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde had happened just a few weeks before this, only intensifying my feelings of helplessness and anger that have been building for a while. This year alone–to say nothing of the last three–has been shocking and brutal. Saving the robin didn’t make those things go away, but it did make me feel better. I had a tiny bit of agency over this tiny part of the world, and I used it for good. 🕊

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