A little more than a year ago, a friend called me saying that she had rescued a baby bird from her dog and cat, and she had no idea how to care for it, and she was calling me because she knew that I’d taken care of a baby bird before. (That other baby bird is Buddy the Sparrow who I have on here). At that time, I was watching a movie with dinner, but at my friend’s call, I dropped what I was doing, put on my tennis, grabbed my purse, and I drove over to my friend’s house. When I got there, she had the baby bird in a box line with newspaper and a cover over the top. She handed the baby bird in his box over to me, and I put it on my lap, to make sure he didn’t fly out of his box. I thanked her and said I’d find a home for him, and then I left. I got the bird cage that I’d bought for Buddy out, and put the baby bird into it along with some of the wood shavings that I still had left when I got home. When he was settled in the cage, I got some dry cat food and made it mushy by putting it into some water and brought it to him. I fed it to him, and he took it hungrily. I silently thanked him that he wanted it, because Petsmart was not open this late–it was 9PM. (He also jumped on to my finger as you see here, and perched there quite happily while I fed him). After that I covered the cage and he finally went to bed with the darkness of the cage. I searched online for a bird rescue, and my parents told me he was a baby Grackal. I found a bird rescue in a city about an hour and a half west of where I lived in a small city called Zapata. I called over there the next day, and the lady said sure she’d take him. I told her I’d be over there in a couple hours. Then I left. “Birdie”, as I’d come to call him, (what an original name), “cried” nearly the whole way there. I stopped so often to see if his “crying” was a cry for food–which half the time it was–that instead of an hour and a half, it took me three hours to get there. But I finally did get there, and I turned the little rascal over to the lady who ran the grackal rescue, and she put him into a medium-sized bird cage with wood shavings on the bottom, and plenty of food and water, and two perches, which was next to a much larger cage which held four half-grown grackals. The lady said it was a good thing I’d gotten him to her so quickly because he had some sort of bird disease–which is not transmittable to humans, but to other birds–that beyond a certain point it would have been untreatable, but because I’d gotten him to her immediately he could be treated easily. And so I drove home, glad that he would recover and that, in time, he would eventually be released back into the wild.