All Baby Birds Deserve Love!

My daughter’s preschool class was taking a field trip to the Honolulu Zoo, and I went along to help chaperone. It must have been preschool day or something; at least half a dozen other schools were there, too, and preschoolers were everywhere.

As our group was walking toward one of the exhibits, I spotted a baby bird on the pathway, where it was in imminent danger of being trampled by four-year-olds. Having recently learned that birds do not abandon their chicks for “smelling like a human,” and, in fact, few birds even have a good sense of smell, I gently picked it up and moved to it to a grassy patch under a tree on the side of the path. I would have left it alone were it not in immediate danger.

We had only moved to Hawaii a few months prior, and I was curious what sort of exotic-to-me tropical bird it might be, so as I was moving it, I had my daughter’s teacher take a picture. As the bird still only had downy feathers, I couldn’t really tell what it was.

I got home and emailed the picture to the local chapter of the Audubon Society and awaited a reply. In the meantime, I looked through a bird book. Maybe a young cattle egret? A peachick? It wasn’t long before I got a reply.

It was a rock pigeon — not even a tropical pigeon, but the grey pigeon you see in just about every city.

That was nowhere near as exciting as I’d hoped, but at least the bird didn’t get trampled.