Hola, I’m Diego Manda, and I’m an animal rescuer.

Last night we were just starting out on a little evening stroll through our foothills when we came across a bird on the trail. We initially thought it was dead. It wasn’t moving one bit. After we poked at it, it made a few defensive moves with it’s wings and mouth. We could see that it obviously had a broken wing. We found a little pile of feathers where it had been attacked, most likely by a dog.

I thought it was on it’s pretty much a gonner and was up for leaving it to the elements but Jer and the kids wanted to save it. We got a box from the car and scooped it up and took it home because the animal control place was closed as well as the local bird zoo.

We googled images of birds and came to the conclusion that it wasn’t an owl for sure but may be a kestrel because it had very similar markings. We felt like we couldn’t get a very good look at the bird because we were afraid to touch it or bother it too much. We couldn’t tell how mangled it was.

When morning came, I was very surprised that it had made it through the night. I called around and found a Wildlife Rehabilitation Center. I got their address, loaded up the kids and the bird and headed up to Salt Lake City. I was driving around looking for the red brick building they had described, I realized there was no such address in SLC. Realizing the truth, I called them back to discover they were up in Ogden.

Arggg. I didn’t want to spend the morning driving but I had this little injured bird in a box sitting on my front seat. What was I to do?

I kept driving north. The whole way I wondered if the little creature was worth it. Had we made a terrible mistake by scooping it up and taking it so far from it home? Whatever it was, was it even going to be alive when I got there?

The red brick building was run down, had gravestones and monuments decorating the outside, and signs declaring that  monuments were for sale inside. I wouldn’t have believed that this was place if the smoky voiced lady on the phone hadn’t told me where they were located.

Unloading the kids from the car was an ordeal in and of it’s self. The barefoot-squirmy toddler in my arms and the fit-throwing-I-want-my-noisy-machine-gun-with-me-all-the-time-4-year-old-boy made it all the more difficult to gingerly carry the box inside.

The second I walked in I knew I was in the right place. I was greeted with a pungent smell of reptile cages, earthy looking children sitting about the floor and long old snake skins draped across the framed picture of a mountain lion on the wall. A gray headed balding man greeted me with a grim face. He was wearing a gray shirt covered in artsy pictures of eagles and hawks. I knew he was the man for the job.

He asked me how we found the little guy and without a nod or smile scooped up the bird with confidence, accessed the broken wing, declared it to be so and said they’d take care him. Without nothing more to do than get my information, he asked for a donation and ushered me out the door.

For some strange reason I felt like crying as I drove away.

Our little bird was not a kestrel or anything near as fancy. It was a Common Poorwill, which is a type of Nightjar (kind of like a very small night hawk) that live in shrubby, grassy areas, are rarely seen but quite common and spend a lot of their time on the ground hidden. Apparently they are the only birds known to hibernate once they migrate south for the winter. The Hopi Indians call them “The Sleeping One.” Ours looked like it was always sleeping.

Looking at this picture, I feel quite silly thinking that it could have been a kestrel but I’ve decided that it’s hard to come up with a type of bird when you’ve never even heard of it.

Sigh. It made for a very strange day.