By Renée A. La Forest
Just before sunset on a Sunday evening in The Villages, I put a cardboard box on my front porch before heading through the garage to take it to the street for trash pickup. The box couldn’t have been there for more than a minute. When I came around from the garage, it was occupied. Sitting quietly inside was a young bird, fully feathered, with wide, dark eyes and soft brown-gray markings.
In Florida, I suppose I should be grateful my surprise passenger had feathers.
One minute there was an empty box. The next, there was a bird sitting in it. I would eventually give him an appropriate name: Houdini. He did not appear injured, but he wasn’t exactly flying either. He hopped, ran and made short, determined jumps.
More importantly, the sun was going down. Had this happened earlier, I could have backed away and watched. Instead, darkness was approaching, and I had to decide whether leaving him there was safest. I coaxed him, without touching him, into a larger box and placed it on my screened lanai for the night, protected from predators and my dogs. I didn’t give him food or water. Mostly, I left him alone.
When helping means doing less
The little bird appeared to be a fledgling Northern Mockingbird, a young songbird that had left the nest but had not yet mastered flying. Fledglings may hop, run, hide in shrubs and attempt short flights while their parents continue caring for them nearby. To us, that can look remarkably like an abandoned baby.
But a healthy fledgling may simply be doing exactly what young birds do.
By morning, Houdini was gone
My plan was to return him to the covered front porch around 7 the next morning, place the box on its side where I had found him and retreat inside. There was just one problem: the bird was gone.
The lanai doors had been closed and the screens were intact, which meant I now had a very small fugitive somewhere among the furniture. I searched once and found nothing. On my second trip outside, I finally discovered him.
He was sitting in my rain bucket.
Apparently my carefully selected overnight accommodations had not met his standards.
At that point, the little fugitive had unquestionably earned his name. Getting Houdini back into the box required a slow, gentle pursuit around the lanai. He still wasn’t flying, but he could certainly run, hop and evade the woman trying to help him.
Eventually, he hopped into the box. I carried him through the house and returned him to the front porch. When I opened it, Houdini jumped out and went directly to the corner beside my front door. It was the same corner where I had originally found him.
Maybe he wasn’t lost
That changed the way I looked at the encounter. I had assumed that finding a young bird tucked into a corner of my porch meant something had gone wrong. Maybe nothing had. Perhaps that protected corner was exactly where a fledgling with limited flying skills had chosen to hide.
I went back inside and checked again about 10 minutes later. Houdini was gone.
I don’t know whether his parents found him, he hopped into nearby landscaping or managed a short flight somewhere I couldn’t see. I only know that he had escaped his box, climbed into a rain bucket, led me on a chase and eventually disappeared under his own power. He wasn’t nearly as helpless as he looked.
Unable to reach someone for immediate guidance that Sunday evening, I had faced some basic questions: Should I touch him? Feed him? Leave him where he was? Was I helping, or making things worse? Often, the best thing we can do is leave a fledgling where we found it, keep pets and people away and give its parents the opportunity to continue caring for it.
Sunday night, I thought I was giving a helpless little bird somewhere safe to sleep. By Monday morning, Houdini seemed to know exactly where he wanted to be. Maybe he hadn’t been lost at all.
I find myself paying more attention to the mockingbirds around my home now. I don’t know where Houdini went that morning or whether I will ever see him again, but when I see a young mockingbird nearby, I know I’ll wonder if it’s him.
