A baby bird

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On the morning of July 4th—yay America, yay me—I drove to the River Place nature trail in the hills west of Austin. I hadn’t really even started down the trail when I noticed something gray in the grass off to my right. It turned out to be a baby bird, apparently a mockingbird, and although I slowly walked closer and closer, the chick sat there, even to the point of letting me get within inches. Occasionally it chirped and made small movements or even hopped a little, but clearly it was too young to fly.

A man who came up from the trail said he thought the bird had fallen out of a nest; concerned that a dog or cat would get the chick, he tried tried putting it onto a branch of a tree, but the bird fluttered back to the ground. I saw several adult mockingbirds flying around near by, and perhaps one of them eventually rescued the baby bird. Or perhaps not.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman