Since I was a wee snot-nosed brat myself, I would always stumble upon lost or injured animals. Birds that fall out of nests, land-locked turtles, a pelican with a broken wing...
I even found a stray kitten at the beach. At the beach! How did it get there?
Last week I found Fiona.
Fiona broke her tail. I found her in one of the flower boxes on the patio. So I stared at her a bit, took some pictures, and then spoke to her with a condescending baby voice. "Did you hurt your tail? Oh little baby hurt her tail, didn't you? Didn't you?"
Mom told me to leave her alone, however I insisted we try to save her and Dad agreed she would be gobbled up by a raccoon in just a few hours.
"What are you going to do with her?" Mom asked.
"Well, give it milk." Dad replied.
"Birds don't drink milk." she argued.
"It's a baby. Babies drink milk."
"Milk will give it diarrhea." Mom insisted.
"Oh you just happen to know that milk gives birds IBS."
"Well. Yeah." she countered.
While they bickered, I built a nest for Fiona in a shoe box. I was just about to hurl myself off the dock in search of worms for her dinner when Dad tried to move Fiona into her new nest and she "flew away". She didn't get very far and she had a rough landing but she hid away in a bush while we stared at her trembling yellow chest. There was no bringing her in the house now (or bottle feeding her warm milk) so we left her outside to die.
Isn't that sad.
No comments:
Post a Comment