Yesterday morning a Robin flew into my car windscreen. I stopped the car and found it sitting dazed on the road.
I took it back home and put it in a box in a warm room to recover. A friend in the village recommended I contact the Ligue de protection des oiseaux to ask their advice. The robin seemed much chirpier after a few hours but it was apparent it could not fly although it was not trailing a wing or anything like that.
My request was passed on to someone in my department. A man duly got in touch with me. He asked if I could come round to his and drop the robin off. It was about a 40 minute drive, but my sat nav decided it needed to take longer and it took me down some funky detours.
Having finally got there the man took the box off me and felt the robin hopping around inside and remarked that he seemed lively.
He left me in his garden to fill out a form and took the robin inside. A few minutes later he came back out to say the robin had escaped and he had opened the box too wide and forgotten to close the door. Luckily the cats were locked inside he said.
We subsequently spent about half an hour on hands and knees poking through the undergrowth to find the robin. The man then let slip that he was always losing swallows and this was certainly not the first time a bird had escaped.
I decided to leave before it got dark and later sent the man a message asking for news. My OH said my rescue mission had resulted in a ton of extra stress for the bird and it would now either be attacked by other territorial robins or killed by the cats.
The man later sent a message saying he had found the robin in the ivy and it was back inside in the warm house. The robin seemed to be in shock but had no fractures to its wings.
I know anyone can make a mistake but I think I should contact the LPO and suggest the man has some extra training .
Exactly that, whilst I am sure the heart is in right place they are clearly an idiot. You had to drive a fair distance so volunteers must be in short supply so I wouldnt expect too much.
Idiot defined by doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result.
That’s the thing isn’t it, there is probably a shortage of volunteers, but if a volunteer puts the animal in even more danger then that’s not desirable either.
I’m keeping fingers crossed that all’s well that ends well and if I flag this up it is handled sensitively.
I think that, after allowing it to warm up & recover a bit, I’d have taken it back to where you encountered it if that were not far away, and popped it on a tree branch. It might recover or it might become food for something else.
I agree with @JaneJones , well done for caring but what I do in such cases is quite different. It happens quite often, not in the car but here in the house where I get bird strikes against the windows quite often, is carefully rescue the bird and place it out of reach on the bird bar, stroking it gently before leaving it there to recover in its own time.
It is in sight of my usual place inside so I can keep an eye on it. In 9 times out of 10 it flies away within 5 minutes or so, sometimes longer, and sometimes much longer. Once I had a real dilemma when a bird was there for more than 2 hours with darkness approaching but I heaved a big sigh of relief when it flew away.
I would never take it away from its own territory, If it is uninjured but just stunned it will recover by itself and be where it is familiar. If not then I feel nature must be left to its own devices. Although I commend your sentiment in wanting to do what’s best, I would never have driven 40 minutes to meet an unknown person who, at the very least as you found, might be totally clueless.
