Kansas. Eight-year-old Marcus was playing outside when he heard the thud.

At the time, Marcus was playing Cops and Robbers with his friend Daniel. Marcus was the cop. Daniel was—once again—stuck with the unsavory role of Robber.

“I’d like to be a cop, just once,” Daniel told reporters. And by “reporters,” I am speaking of me.

Their game was interrupted when they heard a loud noise from an upstairs window of Marcus’s house. It sounded “sort of like a drum, but not all the way.”

The boys investigated.

It was a bird. They found it lying in the grass. The bird had apparently flown into the window of Marcus’s home, injuring itself, and lay fluttering its wings. In shock.

Marcus crouched low to look at the bird.

“It was hurt real bad,” Marcus told journalists.

“Don’t touch it,” said Daniel. “It’s very dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” said Marcus.

“Yes. A bird carries diseases,” said Daniel.

Then Daniel recounted to his friend a true story that, allegedly, happened to a friend of a friend, who heard, through reliable sources, about a man whose cousin, evidently, once touched a wild bird and was thereupon stricken with an incurable disease and was later buried in the cemetery of, what can only be described as, a leper colony.

Bravely, Marcus ignored his friend’s strong warning and lifted the bird into his hands. The boys placed the bird into a shoebox, lined with a dishrag.

“Mom!” Marcus ran through the house shouting. “We found a bird!”

Marcus’s mother could tell the bird was wounded. So they took the bird to a wildlife rehabilitation center.

By then, Marcus and Daniel had already named the bird Bob, after their hero and longtime mentor SpongeBob SquarePants. Which is a television show ranking higher than any other children’s show in the world.

A program so popular that in 2011 an actual species of fungus was named “spongiforma squarepantsii,” after being discovered in Malaysia—described as a rubbery orange sponge-like fungi with a fruity or musky odor. The scientists were initially discouraged from naming the species after a cartoon character, but mycologists Dennis Desjardin, Kabir Peay, and Thomas Burns reportedly insisted, “We’re scientists, we can name it whatever we want.”

The wildlife center looked at the wounded bird.

“This bird is hurt,” said a wildlife employee. Whereupon, employees accepted the bird and began rehabilitation.

“We don’t get a lot of birds,” the wildlife worker told reporters. “But we get plenty of squirrels, and last week we got a possum who got hit by a tractor.”

You have to love Kansas.

Yesterday, Marcus’s mother emailed me to say that the bird was released from the refuge after making a full recovery. Marcus and Daniel were present for the sendoff. So were volunteers.

Bob, who turned out to be female, was ready to reassume life in her natural habitat.

“They opened up the cage,” said Marcus, “and Bob(ette) just flew away.” And it was, allegedly, “pretty great.”

Marcus’s mom reportedly cried because, she told reporters, even though it was just a bird, it is one of God’s creatures.

The bird was identified by wildlife officials as a swamp sparrow. And reporters insist that if God is watching over a swamp sparrow…

Well, you know the rest.