Baby Ditch Bird #4

In the past three and a half weeks, the baby ditch bird has gone from a slightly fuzzy green squishy ball with a beak, to an actual bird. It still sleeps in the house at night and gets it's breakfast and bedtime meal in the kitchen, but other than that it's outside. It's learned to walk in and out of it's cage. It takes walks around the yard and bites at sticks and leaves. When it's time to eat, I call it and it just walks over to eat. Simple, but amazing. I'm starting to have high hopes that it will live long enough to rejoin the rest of the birds in the yard, and there are a LOT of birds in the yard now.
Last week another bird fell out of the nest and survived. It was not unscathed though, and it has what looks like a broken leg. It's bigger than the the baby bird that I have, and won't let you get near it. It's just too big and too far along to try and capture and feed and rehabilitate. I figured it would be dead by the end of the day, two days at the most, and I contemplated finishing it off so it didn't have to suffer. I spent some serious emotional energy contemplating bird murder. I'm glad I didn't though, because amazingly, it's still with us. It can't walk well, standing on only one foot and using it's wings to help, but it makes it way around. During the day we can watch it poke around and preen itself. There must be an adult that's feeding it at night in order for it to be alive still. Even with that, I'm less sure about it's long term chance of survival than of the other bird, and I still worry.
Having more than one bird around posed a bit of a communication problem in the house. I've been calling the bird that I've been raising in the kitchen Baby Bird. It's a descriptive name, and easy to remember, pretty much everything you could want in a name. Of course the name has mutated a bit, as names have a tendency to, and it's I now call it Baby Burr. What of the other bird? We bounced a few terms around like Other Baby Bird, Injured Bird, and Probably Going To Die Bird. We ended up with Hurt Bird. That quickly, almost instantly, mutated into Herbert and that seems to have stuck. So now I have two named birds around, Baby Burr, and Herbert. Just to confuse things further, a bunch of the other birds in the yard have gotten big enough to leave their nests. It's become common to look out the widow and see two or even three adolescent ditch birds standing in the lawn. I have to look carefully to figure out who they are. There are at least nine chicks that are being raised by their parents just in our yard, and several nests in the neighbor's yard. In the next two weeks it's going to look like a ditch bird elementary school out there. We're hoping that Baby Burr will recognize the other birds as his own kind and befriend and learn from them. I'll keep feeding it as long as it wants to eat, but I'm hoping that I'm starting to see the very start of it's independence.