Rest and Recharge?

I was reminded of this incident after reading an email from a new friend in the Never-Never...

The day after Wilma, I found a bedraggled cattle egret in the parade ground, crouching next to our impromptu lake, clearly waiting to die. Nothing obvious wrong, other than exhaustion and extreme filth. On closer inspection, the bird bugs were running races through its feathers. Hmmm, if it were really dying, they would all be bailing...

I hiked across the compound to the nearest water source I knew of(the sink in my quarters), and gave the bird a rinse, removing its bugs for good measure. The bird tolerated all this. I took it outside, and set it in a protected spot to air dry. Kevin, one of the rangers documenting Wilma damage, took a picture of my new friend. It wandered off into a dark corner, and got on with dying.

"Screw that, there really isn't anything wrong with the bird but exhaustion." So I sat in the sunshine with this bird, in a nice warm breeze(they aren't difficult to locate on the island), supporting its wings and fluffing its feathers till they dried. Niki, another ranger, stopped by and we chatted about what cattle egrets eat, and their life expectancy. "They starve when the bugs run out, though there are enough of them in their feathers to keep them going. Yum! Be sure and wash your hands."(OK, so I adore her and her warped sense of humor!)

Partway through the process, the bird started feeling better; by the time its feathers were completely dry, it was ready to go. I carried it over to the nearest place where there were lots of insects, and left it to get on with living. Thanks to the recent delgue, insects weren't hard to find.

For the next few days, I got to watch my cattle egret stalking round the parade ground, hunting bugs. Maybe? This is debatable. Cattle egrets all look pretty similar to me; though this one's feather's were a bit draggled even after they dried. It probably died; local lore has it that the cattle egrets fly to the Tortugas, and then starve, because they're too stupid to make it back to the Keys.

So maybe I wasn't doing it a favor. Hard to tell. Sometimes helping things heals something inside ourselves...