After a cat attacked a baby woodpecker in an 11-year old’s yard, she rescued the baby and planned to care for it until it could be released.  Unfortunately, when she was taking it to her Mom’s home a wildlife agent saw it.  According to PopFi,

The mother-and-daughter rescue team had to make a stop on the way back home. Knowing leaving the bird inside the vehicle would be a death sentence due to the high summer temperatures, the Capos carried the cage with them inside the store. In a random encounter, the family ran into a federal wildlife agent who spotted the caged woodpecker.

Unbeknownst to the Capos, transporting a baby woodpecker violates of the Federal Migratory Birds Act, and the agent came up to them in the store and alerted them to their error. As soon as the family arrived home, they opened the cage and the freed bird flew away.

The happy ending is the Feds backed off citing the girl once the news went public.  But sometimes it seems no good deed goes unpunished.

My husband told me about the recent scary animal events in Arkansas.  Gyp Taylor talks about it here,

5,000 birds fall dead in the sky on New Year’s Eve, and thousands of fish are found dead as well. Just reported this morning, were about 500 dead birds in Louisiana (neighboring state to Arkansas). I thought it was strange enough that this occured in the first place, but the fact that there’s still no GOOD explanation for what happened is intriguing.

What could cause something like this?  It has weirded me out.

Photo by William Andrus via flickr creative commons.