Jenny found this poor Mourning Dove lying on the street, upside down and unable to stand back up. It had been apparently hit by a car. She brought it home and named it "Daisy."

Daisy was unable to stand, let alone eat by herself, but she did take food and water from an eyedropper. Jenny and I had a discussion about the morality of rescuing wild creatures, and the tendency was to not interfere with mother nature, and deprive some hawk or coyote a nice meal. But we decided that in this case, the bird's injury was not caused by mother nature. It was caused by a human driving a car. So we became mother nature's care-takers.

One week of progress and Daisy is standing and learning to eat seeds. A few day's later she learned to walk and run, and became a wild hand-full. She wanted to regain her freedom. But we knew that she wasn't ready for that, and turned loose she would be no match for a predator in her weakened condition.

After three days of struggling, Daisy finally settled down, and actually became quite fond of us. She is still pretty banged up, but starting to heal nicely.

Asleep on my arm.

Daisy can now fly, but prefers to sit on one of us, or on her cage. Three days after this photo was taken, we released her into our back yard. We expected her to fly off, but no, she few back to us. A half hour of gentle persuasion, and we were finally able to leave her. 20 minutes later we found that she had made her first friend, another mourning dove about her age. We were still worried, and the next Mourning we found her sitting on the fence and when we approached she flew up to the highest tree. End of worrying about Daisy! Our rescue efforts had been successful.