bird yells vaguely facing human high-rise occupant for ~2.5 minutes (now with bird rescue story)
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So around 6 something in the morning, there was some dull thudding against my window. Followed by other scuffling noises. I opened the curtains to find a bird of prey of some sort, unable to get out the small balcony outside my room. The exterior walls of this balcony are glass aside from the steel railing at the top and bottom and some support columns, and I just then learned that birds can't glass. (Well, to be fair, humans can't either, but we've just come up with ways to work around that.)
It kept doing this for a while, and when I shined a light out to the balcony it sorta alternately stared at me and kept trying. I attempted to gesture to it to move up, but of course that didn't work.
Eventually, I went outside, despite the risk that it might attack me. I didn't really have a long pole to work with at first so I took a metal folding chair out there, hoping to be able to wedge it out by gradually forcing it upward in trying to avoid the chair, but that quickly changed into trying to use the back of the chair as a platform.
I laid the chair down, and eventually I did grab a swiffer pole, which which I gently touched the bird's beak and foot. It didn't respond to this, aside from continuing to stare at me, so I put the pole back indoors and continued with the chair, trying to get the bird onto the chair as it attempted escape then lifting it slowly.
Even as I lifted it out it tried to keep flying out the glass, and a few times while lifting it it just fell off the chair. Getting it over the railing (which was a little thicker than the glass) turned out to be a surprising challenge, though not one that couldn't be overcome with some even gentler nudging while refusing to give it space to fall off.
I got it over the balcony railing and it flew off.
Photos:
I later tried to figure out what kind of bird it was. I was having some trouble trying to use some websites to identify the bird based on its features, but then I instead tried searching for something like "bird stuck in apartment balcony" and the I found a surprising number of stories about peregrine falcons being stuck in balconies, which provided me pictures that looked quite close to the bird I had encountered -- brown body, yellow ring around black eye, brown tail with white bands, yellow feet. So I think this bird is a peregrine falcon.
Needless to say, I didn't expect my encounter with the world's fastest bird to happen like this.