Bird Watch 2006
Came home from church today to find a house finch sitting on my front walk. He didn't fly off like the birds normally do when we approach so I suspected something was wrong. This was confirmed by the fact that I could walk up in back of it and pick it up.

After barricading myself in the bathroom with the bird, due to the enormous interest of 4 cats and 2 dogs, I proceeded to give it a health assessment and at the same time pause to think how fragile it was, how helpless and scared. Its little heart was beating so hard underneath my thumb that I thought it would die of fright before I was able to help it.

It immediately became clear that it had an eye stuck shut and that's why it was having trouble flying. Birds must need both eyes to fly because I have seen this same thing in years past, always with the same breed of bird. I got out a Q-tip, soaked it in some contact saline solution and proceeded to gently coax the eye tissue open. The minute the bird had both eyes clear and free, it started protesting loudly which was immediately followed by intense scratching and lunging on the other side of the bathroom door.

I couldn't figure out what to do with it next because it clearly had some sort of eye infection and needed some medicine and then I suddenly remembered my husband had a problem with red eyes a while back and the doctor had given him some steroid eye drops so I got those out and treated the bird with that. The minute I took him back to the front yard and opened my hand, he took flight and flew over our roof, straight and sure.

There was something clearly going on with house finches that seemed to be getting worse. I had not noticed this eye infection in other kinds of birds so I decided to investigate further on Google. The problem with investigating these types of things is that you're never quite sure what to type in the search field. I typed in "stuck eye in bird" with horrible results. I'm sure anyone who has used Google understands what I mean. I got various people with stuck eyes who owned a bird, birds who were stuck somewhere and people who were eye witnesses to it, birds who were stuck in the eye by a twig, etc. Jigsaw Pig tells me I must put quotations around the words in the search field if I want to get more specific results but I've found that most of the time, this ends up with zero results. I finally hit upon the winning combination of "infected eye in bird" and found out there is a whole official study being done by Cornell University's Department of Ornithology on this disease. It's causing the House Finch population to dramatically decrease as it moves progressively westward. They are quite concerned about it spreading to other species and say they need help in tracking the occurences.

So I am now an Official Bird Feeder Watcher of Mycoplasmic Bacterial Conjunctivitis in House Finches (Project Feeder Watch, is its title). I have an official ID number and everything. I have also been warned to "take this seriously" and "report more than once or it will look like 100% of the entire House Finch population of Flushing, Michigan has this disease".

I feel all important and stuff now.