We live in the woods and birds sometimes fly into our windows. The most recent casualty is an injured cardinal.
This window strike was a red male cardinal. We’ve had several of these, but no female cardinal casualties yet, so it seems that the male cardinals are the feisty fighters. Some of them attack the glass and dash away, thinking they’re tussling with another male cardinal. These don’t usually get injured.
Other cardinals seem to think the glass is sky and fly into it hard enough to injure themselves, or worse.
We’ve had a few fatalities over the 30 years of living in the woods. Some died instantly of a broken neck. A few died minutes later, likely from internal hemorrhaging. This is always distressing because we love all animals.
The good news is that we’ve rescued and released far more birds than we’ve lost!
A Deterrent to Prevent Bird Strikes
And more good news: we found a fairly effective solution that has helped tremendously. It doesn’t look great, but if it saves the birds… we’re all for it!
You can read more about our bird crash prevention system here in this article on our gardening site.
However, we still have a few accidents here and there.
Our latest injured cardinal was is a very feisty male cardinal that injured his wing. When he tried to fly away, one wing clearly wasn’t working as well and he couldn’t fly. He could scoot around on the ground really well, so we had to scurry to try to catch him again.
We couldn’t let him go because he would most definitely not have survived. But we did learn an important lesson:
Wear gloves when trying to capture an injured bird!
Do Injured Birds Bite?
Typically, when we pick up the birds they’re stunned or shaken from the hit, so they’re docile and quiet while recovering. The feature image at top is actually one of our previous rescues and he flew away after awhile. It was harder to get photos of Cisco, as you will read below.
An Injured Cardinal Can Bite Very Hard
So far, none of the injured cardinal or other birds have bitten us.
But this guy was fully awake and aware and was definitely unhappy, scared and probably in pain. So when captured he bites, and very, very hard!
Imagine… birds can crack nuts and sunflower seeds with their beaks, so they are definitely quite strong. The effect was like being pinched to a blood blister.
Fortunately, the beak isn’t sharp enough to break the skin on most adults, but it sure can hurt a finger, and definitely not advisable for children to come in contact.
Injured Cardinal Francisco
Meanwhile, we’ve named him “Cardinal Francisco”… “Cisco” for short :-), and he’s enjoying eating good wildlife birdseed, drinking water and in general, making a mess and talking a lot… more like squawking a lot!
Local Vet Injured Cardinal for Free
Fortunately, there’s a vet in a neighboring town to us that will take in injured wildlife for free. So if you have injured birds or wildlife that need more than a few minutes in a safe environment to heal, search online for wildlife vet, and you’ll see the options near you.
It turns out that this injured cardinal broke his collarbone. The vet said he needed to stay overnight for observation, then they would work on his injuries the following day.
It turns out they needed to keep Cardinal Cisco for about four weeks to recover. They said they’d call us so we could release him back into our yard, but I guess they forgot because when we called them to check in, they’d already released him in their area.
It was sad not to see him fly off, but we’re just grateful he was healed and cared for.
It’s illegal to keep songbirds in captivity.
I know what they say: if you name them you end up keeping them, but that’s definitely not going to happen here! We love to help birds be free to fly, plus it’s illegal to keep songbirds in captivity[1]http://www.ncwildlife.org/Portals/0/WDCA/documents/Birds.pdf, even if we were inclined to.
Meet Cisco the Red Cardinal
We didn’t have a bird cage but our small pet carrier, with towels placed inside is working out really well. We feed the birds in winter, so had a wild bird seed blend on hand and placed a dish of that along with a bowl of water into his cage. It was good to see him making good use of both as an indication of feeling well and even safe enough to eat and drink.
Cardinal “Cisco” in Recovery
Here’s a video of a previous cardinal rescue. He was only stunned and stayed to visit for awhile.
HeartDaily!
Wild Bird Rescue Stories
If you love birds, you may also enjoy reading some more wild bird rescue stories, and this one.
References