This is awful! I can't think of anything that traumatic offhand but sure something will pop in my head and I'll let you know. Just had a nosey over at Zan's blog. Since it's my birthday today and I am now exactly 1 year from the big 3-0 I might be inspired to make a 'this year' list, life seems too daunting :)
Also, APW book club - I'm there (hopefully) x

Ugh. Been there, done that. Not with a bird exactly, but you know sometimes the best intentions fall apart and it's doubly awful when you were trying to do the right thing in the first place.

It's early in the morning so it's a little early for actual trauma of the death variety (for me at least) but I will share this one story with you:

When I was in college my BEST friend went away to study abroad in a faraway land for a year. A no-communication kind of faraway land. The day that he was coming back home my friend S and I were crazy excited.The three of us were like a little musketeer's gang. So S and I put on silly matching outfits and made T-shirts that said "Welcome Home!" and went to the airport to meet him.

When we saw him come out the gate S got a little excited and pulled me forward to run up to him and smash him into a human sandwich of a hug. Just as we reached him I kind of tripped (Good one, Zan) and then she kind of tripped and then I reached out and grabbed his shoulder and ... well. We ended up in a giant knot of people on the floor of the airport.

What makes this traumatic? Well, about one second after hitting the ground a flight attendant walked up to us, stood directly over me, and shouted in her most scolding voice, "I HAVE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING MORE RUDE IN MY ENTIRE LIFE." and continued to yell at us as we clambered up.

In retrospect she was in the wrong, we were welcoming home a friend and it was an accident (and kind of funny even) but I still remember that day sometimes and it makes me want to crawl into a hole and hide. I was so humiliated that the rest of the day was kind of ruined since she sucked all the happiness out of that moment. We ended up just going home.

Anyway, there's lot's more where that came from but this comment is already veering into post-length so I'll call it quits.

Oh, but HAPPY BIRTHDAY LINSEY!

Omilord. This is so horribly horribly awful. I feel so bad for teen you.

I once knew a girl who had an inappropriate relationship with her CAT. I've never quite gotten over it.

so there is one story from my childhood that STILL comes back into my head any time my self esteem is a bit low. no animals died, just mortification for me.

so when i was in primary 6, we used to go into paisley town centre "shopping" on saturday afternoons (this primarily involved going to mcdonald's and buying lipbalm from the bodyshop.) on this one occasion i had gone with alison from next door and her friend nicola. we were in superdrug and decided to buy a big massive bag of sweets. off we went to the counter to pay, where we met our VERY SCARY deputy head teacher miss stewart. now nicola was a big suck-up and let her cut in the queue in front of her, separating me from the others. i did not let her cut in because i am stubborn. so we chatted politely until it was my turn at the till. i'd ended up with the sweets, and now, as the cashier looked bored and impatient, i realised i did not have enough money. minor panic, then terror swelled up in my throat. i had to get some more money from the girls with my teacher acting as go between. for some reason this sticks with me as the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me. much, much worse than when i was caught by the cape cod police doing rude things in a car with a boy. stupid childhood memories.

thanks for sharing your story! sorry my comment is so long. was quite cathartic to get that out there...

This made me think of three debacles, two of which were bird related, all of which happened my first year at university.

The first was actually not my fault - I was at the beach with some friends, one of whom threw a rock at a couple of seagulls to make them fly away. Unfortunately he got one of the gulls square in the back. It collapsed at the edge of the water and we watched in some horror as it was immediately pulled under and out by two large waves.

The second avian incident involved my getting a chunk of my thumb bitten off by a parrot in a pet shop. Lesson learned - never verbally abuse a parrot when your hand is within 12 inches of its beak, they don't have a sense of humor.

Then there was the time I was in a surfer bus full of fellow students and we got pulled over by the LAPD at 3 in the morning somewhere (still have no idea where) because our so-called designated driver had been secretly getting rat-arsed along the way. That wasn't fun, but it did prompt me to be the designated driver for the rest of my checkered college career.

Overall, though, the biggest one - two emotional trauma was getting on the wrong side of the curtain during Leah's birth by c-section. There is such a thing as too much knowing your wife inside and out, and I was completely unprepared for the emotional force of becoming a father. Rather like a brick to the forehead. Still, the result was much much better than watching a fledgling drown in a drain. And once I had calmed down (about a week later), I was forced to admit that not having a 24 hour labor followed by surgery perhaps limited my right to use the word "traumatic."

oh, oh my goodness. that is the saddest thing I've ever heard. I'm so sorry! But when things go wrong like that it's always easy to see what you could have done, after the fact. huggo.

note #1: had no idea Willie and Willy had such very different meanings (I mean I knew it could double as a name, I just figured the spelling didn't matter and a William with that nickname just had to live with it).

note #2: all this about ladies with inappropriate relationships with their pets--! a: gross. b: why do they Tell you about it?

note #3: when I was about 7 or 8, I accidentally stepped on a little kitten that was hidden under a blanket in the living room. it didn't even die quick and painlessly, it writhed around a good while as I stood there helplessly screaming. so that was pretty traumatizing.

Oh honey, I'm so sorry. Your poor teen-aged self. Your poor current self, still carrying guilt over this. Let the guilt go, it's time to forgive yourself lady. You did the best you could, even if it did end tragically.
I once shut my boyfriend's little dog's leg in the car door. I'll never forget the awful pitiful cries he made, or the fear that I had broke his little leg. The way he snuggled into my lap for comfort after he was free just made me feel even more guilty.
On a lighter note, I used to work in a pharmacy in my very early twenties. A gentleman came in to get a a prescription filled for a gallon jug of liquid he had to drink within a few hours before amedical procedure. I commented that that must be pain in the butt. Yeah, turns out that he was getting a colonoscopy.

Another story about a bird:
In 1st grade our class raised baby chicks (incubated the eggs, watched them hatch and all that jazz). There was 1 black chick in the batch and being special, it was everyone's favorite. One day I noticed that it looked like the baby chick had something, like a piece of string, stuck around his beak/in his mouth. I was [am] painfully shy and my teacher was intimidating, and I was just too scared to speak up about what I saw. Long story short, the little black chick died the next day and no one knew why. I was never able to forgive myself until about 2 years ago when I was on the way to yoga class and found a tiny little bird (a red-headed kinglet) laying on the ground outside the building and shaking. Remembering the chick, I stood there until someone else came, a couple also on their way to class. When I showed them the husband scooped up the bird, held it for a moment, and then let it go, and it flew away as though nothing happened. His wife turned to me and said he was magical like that. And it was. It felt like after all those years I'd finally gotten to the chance to speak up for another little bird.

It's funny how I've dealt with cancer and death among family and friends, but that bird still ranks awful high on the list of traumas.

Looking forward to your life list. Perhaps it will inspire me to write mine. :)

To add some levity: I had a good neighbor-boy friend when I was in primary school named Willie, and yes, that's how we roll in America.

Oh gosh that's some story... how traumatic that must have been at the time :/

My little sis has a similar one with a bird (I was with her at the time) in that she was holding a baby chick in her hands, at a petting farm, and it sort of just jumped/fell out of her hands... right at the moment that a little boy should go running past and stamp on it. There wasn't a happy ending there either... and I don't think either of us can forget that image.

That is really traumatic! Practically had me in tears reading it - I can't imagine how bad it must have been for you.