Sitting under a tree on the University of Michigan Diag, I saw a young man drop all the stuff he was carrying to bend over and mess with the grass.

Strange.

Something fluttered; I realized he was chasing a small brown bird around.

“Is it hurt?” I asked.

“I think its legs are broken,” he said. “Maybe it’s a fledgling?”

The bird tried to fly up to a tree but bounced back to the ground. It couldn’t perch.

I couldn’t let the poor bird continue flopping around the Diag that way, and neither could the man whose name I learned was Andy.

I rinsed out the frozen yogurt container I'd just finished and ripped off the cardboard back of my reporter’s notebook so Andy could use those tools to scoop the bird up. He called the Bird Center of Washtenaw County in Ann Arbor, which agreed to take a look at it.

Bird Center? I had a fleeting only in Ann Arbor moment.

He and the bird went on their way.

Back at work, I couldn’t stop thinking about that poor little thing.

“Whatever happened to letting nature take its course?” my co-worker chided.

“Yeah, but its legs were broken! Did nature break them? Maybe. I don’t know.”

I'd just written about peregrine falcons who hang out at the Burton Tower and eat birds like this one for breakfast. Stuff dies in nature. That’s just the way it is. 

Anyhow, I had a pressing weather story to write that went something like this: it’s summer and it’s hot!

Curiosity got the best of me, and I called the bird center.

Will O’Neill, the manager who answered the phone, offered to take my information and give a status update later.

“Do you know who brought the bird in?”

His name was Andy, Will told me.

With a chorus of birds chirping in the background, he also told me the bird was a house finch. Its legs weren’t broken - they were coated in something that stopped them from moving. Something manmade.

They were going to clean the bird off.

“I’ve got to go make a bird video!” I told my boss, at the risk of being given a newsroom nickname like “Bird whisperer.” 

Off I went in the heat to 926 Mary St.

The center is in a nondescript square building covered with ivy that gives no indication of what’s inside. I opened the door to that chorus of chirps I’d heard on the phone.

There were 117 birds fluttering in containers converted into bird cages - baby playpens, laundry baskets and buckets were covered with mesh. Every bird had been brought in by a concerned citizen, and every last corner of the building was being used for their care. 

Some of the birds had flown into windows, some had fallen too soon from a nest that was too high.

Will busted a myth for me as well: If you see a baby bird that looks too young to be out of the nest, you can pick it up and place it back in the nest if it’s within reach. The tale that touching a baby bird will cause parental rejection is false, with rare exceptions.

The interns flitting around the center Wednesday tending to all these birds were U-M students, most in environmental programs. The center is open May through August - hatching season.

One of the interns, a U-M English and women’s studies major named Melissa Robinson, scooped the house finch out of its makeshift cage. It couldn’t unfurl its little talons because they were coated in sticky goo.

The goo was a product called Tanglefoot, according to the workers at the center. It’s a legal product used to keep “nuisance birds” - pigeons, sparrows and starlings - from perching on some ledges and buildings around town. But the young, inexperienced and federally protected house finch may also have landed in it and would have died if not brought in, they said.

The bird's underbelly and leg feathers were damaged, too. Melissa cleaned it with mineral oil and rinsed it well, which made the finch very nervous, then Will washed it with Dawn dish soap, rinsed the bird off and dried it with a hairdryer, which it seemed to enjoy. The whole process took about 25 minutes.

Bird victims of the BP Gulf oil spill are cleaned with Dawn as well, he said. So long as the bird didn’t ingest too much of the alleged bird repellent product, it should be OK; they’ll release it where it was found.

With that news, my day felt complete, and my faith in humanity a little stronger because of Andy and volunteers who helped to save the little bird in this town of nature lovers.

Juliana Keeping is a reporter for AnnArbor.com. Reach her at julianakeeping@annarbor.com or 734-623-2528. Follow Juliana Keeping on Twitter