Most mornings, I wouldn’t have been looking out that window for another half an hour–but today, I did.

Two Bewick’s wrens caught my eye, and I realized with a start that I hadn’t seen one in several months. And as they danced around and I delighted in watching them they drew me to see…

…Oh goodness. How long had that poor thing been there.

A finch was tangled in netting around my blueberries that I’d thought was too fine a mesh for a bird to dart through. It was caught up to its shoulder and around. Oh, man…

I stooped down next to it. It struggled to get away. I put my hand under its feet so it wouldn’t be hanging by its shoulder and wing like that and that gave it something to push against to try harder to get away. Flutterflutterflutter, with the strands cutting in. No blood at least. I had never seen the underside of a finch wing from that close up before.

But then it held still for a moment.

I looked at it and it looked at me–and the little bird closed its eye slowly for a moment. (I could only see the one from there.) I hoped not in pain but to rest ever so briefly.

I felt somehow trusted. By a wild thing. I felt its feet on my hand. I fervently hoped I could do right by it.

Then it struggled again against the strands because it had to. It is the nature of it.

I assessed: what I needed was scissors to cut that plastic so as not to jerk the little thing around when breaking it free, but I couldn’t risk the harm of walking away and coming back out and its panicking or hanging.

So as carefully as I could, I balanced that sweet little finch on my knee and worked on breaking those strands with both hands, wanting so much not to hurt it, glad that at least the netting was that fine.

It knew before I did and suddenly it burst out of there: not to the camphor tree above but over to the step outside the bedroom door, facing me. It caught my eye, and only then was it off and away.

I walked inside marveling that I had even been there at that time. That my favorite Bewick’s wrens had not only come but had kept it company till help arrived. And they’d made it so it did.

Even the sparrow in its fall is known to Him: that scripture became vividly real to me today.