Yesterday my husband called out in panic that a baby sparrow had dropped to the ground and sounded something like  a golf ball falling onto concrete from a great height. 

Of course it was upto me to investigate as he was in the process of doing something or other. What I found was an almost featherless bird that was having difficulty breathing or rather breathing very fast.  It looked so young that my first impression was it didn´t stand a chance.

I brought it in and placed it in a small cardboard box, expecting that very shortly it would be gone.  Was I ever wrong.  Once it had time to accept what had happened its breathing normalized and it began calling out.  It had a damaged leg and wing. 

For the next couple of hours I placed it outside to see if the parents would feed it but Alas, that was not going to happen, and I was faced with just one option - to try and rear it.

My husband left for the shops and a tin of catfood, expecting to return in mins.  Mins past and no return, but a phone call to say the car was playing up and he would be back ASAP.  Now I have a very hungry bird and no cat food, but I did have a can of tuna in the fridge and being that tuna was soft hoped that would do for the time being.

What fun that was, I placed tiny piece of tuna on a match stick, held the bird and shook whilst I attemted to open the sparrows beak.  Not knowing what was comming at it, the sparrow pulled back as though I was about to poison it, and thats how it continued for about an hour. 

Without any reason and by luck the little one seemed to decide that if he was going to survive he would have to help me.  From there on the two of us managed to get food into him and now he dosn´t stop calling for more.

The cat food eventually arrived and that made things a whole lot easier.

I wrote a plee for help and advise on one of the forums and within mins Chris responded with advise that I should feed every 15mins but also giving me details of a website about the rearing of baby starlings. www.starlingtalk.com/babycare.htm

It seems my little sparrow is about 7 days old and will need my help for another 5 or 6 weeks.  At this stage I am still pretty shocked he survived at all, but am almost sure he is going to fly free one day.