By Lisa Kashinsky Staff Writer
Jan 5, 2018
Paul Bilodeau
LAWRENCE — Christine Comforti had
barely been at work for a half-hour Friday when she looked outside the window
of her Marston Street medical office and saw a bird that looked like it was
struggling to fly.
“He was standing on two feet
trying to fly and he just kept face-planting over and over in the snow,”
Comforti said.
It was unlike anything Comforti
had seen before, awkward and painful to watch, she said. The bird, a great blue
heron, finally mustered the strength to lift itself into the air, reaching about
three feet near the Merrimack River, before falling back into the deep snow
from Thursday's storm, Comforti said.
Comforti jumped into action,
pulling on the boots she'd taken off minutes before, and running outside with a
blanket. Jeannette Mercado, a co-worker at Boston Eye Group, followed her to
help.
“I was crying. I was like, 'I
can't leave him here. I can't watch him die,'” Comforti said.
The heron was a frightening
sight. Encrusted in ice from its feet to its beak, the bird was
“completely an icicle,” she said.
At first, the struggling bird
looked like it was going to attack Comforti. But once she managed to wrap the
bird's face in the blanket, she said it seemed to understand she was trying to
help.
“It hurt to see him hurting,” she
said.
Comforti and her co-workers got
the bird inside their office and quickly went to work thawing it out with
blankets and space heaters. Comforti, who has no experience caring for birds,
chipped ice off the heron with her own hands to avoid burning the bird with the
heaters. She cleared the bird's beak so it could open its mouth, and removed
ice from the bird's talons and the back of its legs.
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