The stork

At 7:30 this morning, while I was sitting sleepily on the edge of my bed (yeah, yeah, I'm sleeping in a little more these days), our cell phone rang. It was my friend LW calling, and as soon as I answered she said, "We have an emergency, a real emergency, and we need your help." My mind started racing. Had something happened to one of her little girls? Did the emergency have something to do with the fact that this is the family's last day in Morocco before moving back to Connecticut? If they were having a real emergency, what was I possibly going to do to help them?

LW quickly explained that this was not a "bad emergency." You see, the W's cat, Sammy, is quite the birder. She has brought several birds home to the family and one time even caught a starling from a window of their second-floor apartment. This morning, as one of the girls was getting ready to head down the stairs that lead from their apartment to the outside, she saw a stork standing in the stairwell. Sammy was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, guarding the stork and keeping it from leaving. How Sammy ever got control of a bird the size of a 10-year-old child is beyond me, and I have no idea what she planned to do with the stork once she had it stuck in the stairwell. Nevertheless, I'm sure she was quite proud of herself for this greatest of conquests. Perhaps she was even confused why her family didn't seem appreciative of her great gift to them.

After LW told me what was going on, as quickly as I could, I ran to their apartment (less than a block away from my apartment) and hissed Sammy away from the door. The Ws came out of their apartment and shooed the oddly reluctant stork outside. Apparently storks are not big into panicking, since the stork decided to stroll around their yard for quite a while before finally wandering out and sauntering around downtown Ifrane. It's possible there's something wrong with the stork, but we did everything we could to save it from Sammy the Bird Killer.

And it was quite a start to my day.

Birds of the world, beware this dangerous beast.