One day my wife and I were sitting in our living room on the floor. We heard a THUD against our window and looked up. We saw nothing so I went to the window to look out.

I didn’t think to look down- just out. As I was looking our I noticed the tiniest little feathers just hanging in the air. Then I saw a little “grease mark” on the window.

Then I looked down. I saw a sparrow (my personal favorite) on its back on the ground with one wing folded up and the other out an flapping like crazy just going in circles.

I feared that it had broken a wing which made its near future very certain. It would be killed by a predator, starve to death or killed quickly and mercifully by me. I really didn’t want to kill it so I went out and picked it up and folded in it’s “good wing”. Then I wrapped a clean rag tightly around the sparrow so that it was immobilized. I put it in the garage for “rest and recovery”.

Several hours past and I then went back to the garage hoping that he sparrow had been well enough to have worked his way out of the rag. No such luck.

I unwrapped it and held it in my hands. I stretch out his “good” wing and put it back. Then I stretched out what I had figured to be a damaged wing. There was no crepitis or protest by the bird at doing so and I folded this wing back in.

Then he flew up to a rafter. It wasn’t good, strong flight but it was flight. I figured that this bird could just live in our garage and would be just fine. I like sparrows pretty much after all and it was just one.

It stayed in our garage all night and looked as though it had no interest in leaving. “No problem,” I thought. I would bring food and water.

The next day it flew out when I opened the door. Free and, apparently, quite healthy. Just the way God intended for sparrows to fly. He knows when the fall, don’t we.

We got a reward for providing this sparrow safety while it recovered from what apparently was just a “bell-ringing” a day later when, as my wife looked out the window, she saw six sparrows in a bush.

As we had seen this sparrow up close we came to know its particular markings. My wife ask me, “Is that ‘WrongWay?” (our pet name for this little fellow). I looked and said that I thought that it was.

Suddenly the other five birds all flew away to the West. Together we said, “Yep, that’s WrongWay,” when several seconds later he flew away to the East.

Mike mike.smith@aurora.org