Guest Post by Chava Sonnier

Here is Willie-Mae the day she was rescued, looking puffed and concerned… a kind young man saw a cat carrying Willie-Mae in its mouth and remembered that his high school teacher had adopted two pij from Palomacy and did a presentation on the importance of being kind to pigeons in their class, so he put the pigeon in a box, named her Willy Nelson, and brought her to his former teacher, Dana, who posted on Palomacy saying she couldn’t drive to Wildcare because her husband had just had surgery, Elizabeth tagged Stephanie and I knowing we were located in Fairfield, I wasn’t on Facebook at the moment because I was at the vet with Jonah, so Stephanie called me, gave me Dana’s number, I called Dana and got the pigeon…

Our initial plan was for me to provide initial triage and care for a couple of days and then for Stephanie to take her to WildCare that coming weekend for rehab in a more wild-pidge setting, with Dana sending her contact info to WildCare so that she could eventually be released back with her Fairfield flock. However, when she arrived she was a classic “collision bird,” with neuro trauma her primary injury that had made her immobile and susceptible to being picked up by the cat in the first place… She could keep herself upright as seen in the photo, with a bit of a tilt to the right, but couldn’t stand or walk. My husband and I were concerned about her prospects for making a complete recovery, so we decided to rehab her here, with the plan of releasing her back to her Fairfield flock if she recovered and was releasable, and fostering her if she wasn’t. I had her DNA tested once we began to strongly suspect she wouldn’t be releasable, and she was a female! I’m pretty good at age guesses based on the condition of ceres, and I’d say she’s between her 1st and second year.

Here she is now, looking much more confident! She’s especially tiny, and especially fluffy (my friend’s 13 year old son got wide-eyed, dropped all his teenage bravado, and whispered “she has magical feathers” the second he petted her). She walks well now as long as she’s going straight forward! When she has to turn right or left, one of her legs doesn’t keep up with the other quite as well and she loses her balance easily, and if she has to step up she has the same issue and is prone to face-planting, poor dear. Her mobility challenges also get worse if she’s stressed/startled and feels like she needs to move quickly, and sometimes instead of moving quickly like she wants to she just winds up “sitting” down with her feetsies sticking straight out in front of her. So I’m quite confident she’s not releasable, but she gets around very well in a pet setting and eats, drinks, goes in and out of her nest, etc very comfortably. She’s still absolutely terrified of the concept of people’s hands, but admittedly for the majority of her time here we had been treating her with an eye towards release so I haven’t actively been trying to people-socialize her, so I’m sure with regular attention she will become much tamer, as now that we’ve concluded she’s definitely not releasable I’ve been spending much more time with her and she will already walk over to you and make tiny little lady-bird coos to you to have a conversation.

And here’s Willie-Mae making friends with Sizzle, a lonesome special needs bachelor. (We call this pHarmony.)

June 9, 2019 Update