Bird karma part 1

As those of you following the twitter feed may have noticed, I got home to find a robin doing laps of the pool/pond. No idea how he got there. Thinking this rather odd, I fished him out and deposited him poolside. Whereupon he looked like this:

Whilst I'm generally of the view that medical care for wild animals is, unless they are extremely rare, inappropriate I couldn't really bring myself to leave the little dude there looking like this:

So I coralled him into a box (he couldn't fly) and warmed him up for a while whilst consulting Wildbird-on-the-fly's Amy Hooper and the Birdchick. The gist of the twitter advice was warm him up and let him go and that was pretty much my own view of what to do too. So after an hour in his box by the radiator during which his eyes opened, I emptied him out of the box and away he flew. Which was nice and may have stored me up some good birding karma of which more later......

PS - on twitter I called him a baby robin; he's obviously in adult plumage but it kind of looked like he'd just moulted into it (possibly because it was soaked). I'm no robin-moult expert so it may well be this isn't a first year bird at all but actually a decrepit old fogey who crashed and burned.