I was working on some freelance stuff yesterday afternoon when the door buzzer rang.  When the door buzzer rings during the day, it's usually either a mail carrier (but yesterday was Sunday) or, if she's lost her keys again, PH.  But PH had gone shopping three minutes prior to the ringing of the buzzer: hmm.  I pressed "talk" on the intercom -- "hello?" -- and then the "listen" button.  PH: "There's a baby bird down here; you have to come down."

I found her on the second-floor landing of our building holding a baby bird with both hands which she'd found on the banister of the staircase which leads to the Turkish restaurant on the second floor of our building; he'd looked confused and freaked out and had been chirping loudly and energetically.

We brought him upstairs to our apartment, stashed my cats in the bathroom, and put Habib (PH's name for the bird, "darling" in Arabic) in a Salad Spinner with the rounded, cylindrical basket-thing turned upside down.  We put paper towel, a saucer of water, and some English-muffin crumbs in there with him.

We couldn't figure out what he wanted; he couldn't tell us how we could help him or what he wanted or if he wanted anything.  He held his mouth open like this a few times, as baby birds do when they're hungry...

...but just as often, he held his head back like that, mouth closed.  He also spent some time gnawing on the edge of the china saucer.  He also clawed at the edge of the clear-plastic Salad Spinner as if he wanted to be outside of it, but when we took him out and put him on the floor, thinking that maybe he wanted to walk around or fly away, he just sort of stood there.

PH went to the supermarket to buy ingredients for an elaborate baby-bird-food recipe I'd found on the web (lots of interesting bird-feeding-related stuff on the web, including a forum post by one woman whose bird was "pregnant" and who wanted to know if she should be feeding her differently because of that -- and take a minute, if you like, to think about whether the words "bird" and "pregnant" belong in the same sentence), and I went to check on Habib but he was asleep and I couldn't wake him up.

I said, "wake up, bird" and "time to wake up, let's wake up now" to him several times, and I really wanted for him to wake up, but he didn't wake up.  By the time PH returned from the supermarket ten minutes later, his body was stiff.  He hadn't made it.  PH and I wondered to each other if we should sing "Nearer My God to Thee" or something to him, but neither of us knew the words, aside from the "nearer my God to thee" part.

I put him, still in his little Salad Spinner house, out on the terrace for the night, and I'll admit that I went out there two or three times to see if he was "really dead" (I believe this is called "magical thinking").  Then this morning, I took him and put him under a bush at the edge of the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.

Whenever my mom sees a dead animal on or by the side of the road, she says, "bless your furry little soul."  Unless the animal is a bird, in which case, she says, "bless your feathery little soul."

So, Habib: bless your feathery little soul.