01/05/2026
January 5 is National Bird Day.
Birds were never meant to be decorations.
They were meant to move, to ride thermals, to choose their direction, to feel the wind answer their wings.
This year’s National Bird Day theme, “A Bird in Flight is Poetry in Motion,” reminds us of something both beautiful and uncomfortable: for millions of birds living in captivity, that poetry is never written.
At Papayago Rescue House, we meet the birds who carry that loss quietly, birds who love deeply, think brilliantly, and adapt with extraordinary grace to lives shaped by human choices. Their dignity does not disappear in captivity, but their freedoms are profoundly altered.
National Bird Day is not about guilt.
It’s about awareness.
It’s about choosing education, ethical stewardship, and lifelong responsibility for birds in our homes, in sanctuaries, and in the wild.
Today, we invite you to pause.
To look at birds not as possessions, but as sentient beings with complex needs, agency, and intrinsic worth. And to help build a future where fewer birds need rescue, and more birds get to write their poetry in the sky, even when that freedom challenges our own ideas of what it means to keep them safe.
A bird in flight is poetry in motion.
Let’s protect the poets.
