Wild bird appears at hospital door — and staff realize he's asking for help
Earlier this week, medical workers at a hospital in Bremen, Germany, were alerted to a situation that required their prompt attention. Just outside the emergency room doors stood a wild bird. He was tapping on the glass with his beak, as if asking to be noticed by the caretakers inside.
“[A] colleague came to me and said, ‘Hey, there’s a bird knocking on the window,” Cihat Cirti, a staffer at the Links Der Weser clinic, said in a post.
The bird’s behavior seemed odd — until staff took a closer look.
“We then saw, at a second glance, that there was something metallic on his beak,” Cihat said.
It was a fishing hook piercing the bird’s beak, a problem for which he was in desperate need of help.
And he’d picked the perfect place to get it.
Staff at the hospital enlisted the help of local firefighters in rounding up the frightened, skittish seabird, a cormorant. Working alongside the medical workers, they were able to cut the barbs from the hook that had pierced their feathered patient.
“Then we were able to remove the rest of the hook well and take care of the wound," Cihat said.
The cormorant, freed from that painful predicament, was eager to continue on his way.
After a final examination, he was given the all clear.
The firefighters carried the bird to a nearby pond and released him to fly free again, unencumbered.
Somehow, the bird had chosen to seek help where someone would know what to do. And, while the knocking at the emergency room door wasn’t from a human patient in need, it was answered all the same.
“I haven’t experienced that in my 15 years of work so far,” Cihat said.
