Is there anything I can do? It looks like her leg is broken.
Call your vet, now.
Yeah, I did.
And while I was talking to her, the bird flew away! Yay!
Sorry for the panic thread…
If the leg is not too badly broken, it may heal. However, birds can survive with only one leg. I have occasionally encountered apparently healthy birds that have either one leg or one that is so damaged it was unusable.
Leave it alone. Predators need to eat, too.
As I understand it, birds will often be stunned by hitting a window (no surprise) and simply need some time to recover. I would be interested to hear more informed answers so we don’t need a “need answer fast” thread next time, though!
Perhaps it’s worth looking into ways to keep birds from flying into your window, JohnT. I know I’ve read various things on the subject, but I’m sure someone else here has much better information than me.
If you have any idea what kind of bird it was, perhaps you can provide easily-accessible food for it, if it does have any injuries. Some birds will cover a large area daily in search of food, whereas others are territorial. I’d guess the former type is unlikely to find any food you leave out, but perhaps the latter might benefit?
Dark box to put the bird in while it recovers. Usually that’s all that’s needed.
There are removable film decals you can put on the windows/door. Some have UV.
I’ve heard you can put a silhouette of a hawk on a window to keep birds from hitting it. Couldn’t hurt. Or just put any sort of pattern on the glass, like a grid, to make it not seem like a big open area to fly through.
Thanks for the info. Don’t know the type of bird, it was one of “those little brown ones” that tend to travel in flocks of 5-10 birds, chatting at each other like a bunch of old ladies at a quilting convention.
Even the most skilled birds crash into things; not just tricky things like moving cars and windmills, either. They’ll run headlong into great big things that haven’t moved since before the bird was born. We hear it when they run into a window, but they’re just as likely to run into the opaque part of the house.
God may have His eye on the sparrow, but He won’t take a broken bird to the vet. There are plenty of other sparrows to take up the slack. jtur88 is right. God has His eye on the pussycat, too.
Certainly not true. Birds are much more likely to run into windows than into a wall.
I’m glad this bird seemed okay, but for future reference and for other people - call your local wildlife rescue. I volunteer with ours; we take in lots of injured animals and patch them up (or humanely euthanize them). While you’re waiting to take a bird in, put it in a box lined with something soft, keep it warm (heating pad underneath is what we use) and do not fuck with it. Birds can die just from stress.
One of the regular pigeons that visit our balcony broke her leg a little over two years ago. She started coming here as a baby, apparently just learned to fly, and then one day after about a month she showed up with a badly broken leg. It was stuck out perpendicularly. We weren’t able to catch her and feared the worst for her. A cute, all-black one. Must have hurt like the dickens. But the leg apparently healed, and to this day the leg is still sticking out at a weird angle from her body. She hobbles on the edge of it. Found a mate and even has sex out on our balcony. So she’s done okay with just one good leg.
I’m curious about how skilled vets are in bird care. I know from talking to some in Bangkok that the ones here definitely prefer dogs and cats. The vet clinic attached to one major university here has a bird specialist that comes in just one morning a week.
We had a cat. We didn’t have a screen door. A baby gate kept the cat in. (Had it not been there, the cat would have gone out; but the baby gate told him there was a boundary, and he respected it.) Twice, single birds flew into the house. He caught them both, but ‘mom’ got one away before he could do any damage. The other one wasn’t so lucky. The SO took it outside, and the poor thing looked like it was going to die. No visible injuries, but it wouldn’t move from where she put it. It was breathing very rapidly, and I didn’t think it would make it. I was getting ready to humanely put it out of its misery. Decapitation with a shovel? Shoot it with a .22 shot shell? Quickly wring its neck? I wasn’t sure how to do it. The SO told me to just leave it. If it died, it died. I thought it would be cruel for it to suffer a lingering death, but I have to live with the SO so I left it alone.
Eventually the bird recovered and flew up to a limb of a tree. After a while it flew away. She was right, and I was wrong. But now I know that birds that are seemingly doomed may just be in shock.
This. Keep the box in a completely quiet room protected from pets until you can transport it.
English sparrows (and starlings) are invasive species - the sparrow, I saw on the web (no, have no idea, but a real site) has taken over the nesting spots favored by the purple marten - forcing the marten into human-provided housing.
If it is a sparrow: Kill the damn thing.
Also, it’s not usually because the window is transparent, it’s because it’s reflective - the reflection in the window looks like the sky, or like a place they can fly to.
Windex.
If they’re territorial birds, they might see their reflection and try to chase it off, playing a game of cough chicken. The challenger never flinches first, of course. You’ll see cardinals, bluebirds, and robins attacking rear view mirrors all the time.
It the one case (anecdote != evidence, but still) in my experience, I think the transparency is what mattered.
Deep winter, early December. Snow on the ground. Barren trees. Family Christmas tree looking all festive and pretty in the living room picture window.
A little songbird comes rushing out of the twig-bare maple tree in our front yard and SMACKS into the window. Lays dazed for a good 20 seconds in the snow. Recovers, struggles to its feet… and is snatched out of the snow by a hawk.
I believe the hawk scared the bird out of its poor cover in that sparse-twigged maple and the little thing fled to shelter in the only evergreen tree visible… an artificial pine tree behind an invisible force field.
Poor thing. We stopped putting the Christmas tree in front of a big window after that.