Rescue Efforts

We had an unusually dramatic afternoon here today, and we got the chance to play heroes (albeit on a very small scale).

Andrew surprised me by taking a nap (half-way through his sister's nap)--in my bed, no less! After waking him up around 4, I noticed some unusual movement out of the corner of my eye. Our bed at my parents' house is in the basement, right next to a window well, so we usually keep the blinds closed. I wasn't even sure if I'd seen anything, but then I heard a quail call just outside the window, sounding quite distressed.

My first thought was that one of the cute baby quail we've been seeing in the backyard the last week or so had fallen down the window well.

"Oh no!" I said. Andrew, always alert, said, "What? What's wrong?"

I pulled up the curtain. I saw a male quail standing at the rim of the window well, but I couldn't see anything at the bottom. I thought I must have been mistaken: then I saw it. The quail chick was only about four inches long and it blended in nearly perfectly with the dried leaves at the base of the window. But it was undoubtedly there. It was also too little to fly. No wonder the parents were making such distressed noises!

So, we staged a rescue effort. The kids followed me outside (we snagged a butterfly net from the garage), and I finally managed to catch the chick in the net. I lifted it up, set the net on its side on the grass, and the chick (once it realized it was being set free), made a beeline for the base of a nearby bush. Unfortunately, it's parents were on the other side of a stretch of grass.

We watched for a minute or two. Nothing happened. (Other than the many loud clucks coming from both sides of the grass.) We finally decided that maybe our presence was preventing the parents from claiming the chick, so we went inside and watched from the window. After a few moments and several false starts (apparently, we'd scared them), the parents finally reconnected with their chick.

Later, I saw it, along with its sibling, running contentedly alongside its parents in the grass, and I breathed a quiet sigh of relief. No harm done.

And, as Andrew has said repeatedly this afternoon, I hope that this chick doesn't fall down the window well again! (Still, it was a very lucky chick--if we hadn't been downstairs when we were, we might never have noticed that it was trapped.)

Kind of nice to be heroes, even if the heroism goes unmarked by its beneficiary.