About the hero

This magpie has been tangled in fishing line. An unresponsible person decided to not recover their extra line from the area. She has been wearing it for quite some time and her foot is probably mostly dead tissue. Her young baby is in the tree behind her. If you look even more closely, you will see she is slowly starving. Her keel (the breast bone) is very prominent, which means she has no body fat. When I tossed food to her to entice her closer (to hopefully catch her and remove the line) she grabbed it and immediately flew over to feed her baby. Despite her starvation, she had a single-minded purpose. It was not her own survival that mattered most. I was personally humbled by a show of such selflessness. I contacted a local wildlife rehabilitator who is going to capture her and her fledgling. Hopefully she will recover from her injury and be released. So tonight I honor her.