By Tim Binnall
The staff at a German hospital could not believe their eyes when a bird with a fishhook stuck in its beak showed up outside their emergency room seeking help. The uncanny incident, detailed in a Facebook post by the facility, occurred on Sunday at the Klinikum Links der Weser in the city of Bremen. The "relatively normal" afternoon at the hospital took a wondrous turn, nurse Cihat Cirit recalled, when "a colleague came to me and said 'hey, there's a bird knocking on the window.'" Investigating the situation, the staff were surprised to find a distressed cormorant outside with "something metallic on his beak."
The kindhearted hospital workers initially attempted to corral the injured bird themselves, but found their wrangling skills to be lacking, necessitating a call to the local fire department for help. Upon capturing the creature, emergency workers snipped off the three prongs of the hook before emergency room staff carefully removed the remaining obstruction and treated the cormorant's wounds. Following the successful surgery, the bird was released back into the wild, having no idea that the story of its strange Sunday afternoon visit to the emergency room would soon spread around the world.