Instincts

Today as I was leaving work for lunch, I found a tiny baby bird on the front steps of the FH. At first I thought it was dead and then it gave a great lurch and extended it's little beak out in an open-mouthed cry. "Oh my god," I exclaimed and ran back into the building.
What followed was a coordinated rescue attempt involving the entire populace of the FH standing on the front porch while I ran back and forth from the porch to the computer doing a flash google search on how to save baby birds and relaying my findings.
"Pick it up and keep it warm in your hands!" I said breathlessly. Then "This website says you can put it back in the nest, or keep it warm in a shoebox with nesting, but you have to feed it every 15 to 20 minutes from sunrise to sunset."
I was running around the building grabbing things - tissue, a ladder, a camera -- with a strange sense of urgency. I really wanted it to live. It was so tiny and so feeble-looking, and so determined to stretch its head to rub against M's thumb when she cupped it in her hand.
When I was in grade 3, the group of girls I walked to school with and I, for a time in the spring, became obsessed with dead bird burials. The first one was completely unplanned - just a little bird, perfectly intact, lying dead in our path on the way home. I insisted we give it a proper funeral, and so we rolled it in a bit of newspaper and I carried it home to present to my mother, who successfully hid any disgust she might have felt at my morbid offering and allowed me to go ahead with my plans, even letting me bury the bird's embossed shoe box in the back garden.
Then there came a second bird, and a third, and soon we were seeking them out on our way home, and I'm pretty sure we gave our group a name associated with this activity - although now, 15 years later, I can't remember what it was.
And yet, seeing this bird lying there helplessly sprawling it's little half-formed limbs, the same impulse overcame me -- but this was one I could SAVE and not bury.
According to the advice I found on the website, we decided the best course of action was to try to put it back in its nest. I had a moment's hesitation wondering what would give it a better chance at survival -- re-patriating it, or watching over it 24 hours a day. I couldn't decide, but the last option sounded highly impractical. So, after two attempts and a call for reinforcements, we got someone tall enough to see into the nest and place the bird back there with a gloved hand.
I went for lunch, and came back a few minutes later and could still hear the mother and baby up in the nest, chirping away.
But then, about half an hour later, the department head came in from lunch and said casually "There's a dead bird in front of the door."
I was out of my seat and into the hallway right away. "No! It's not dead is it? It fell out before, it's still alive..." But when I opened the door and knelt down to look at the tiny form that was now right on our doorstep, I could see that the straining and breathing had stopped. It hadn't been able to survive the second fall.