The road to hell is paved with dead birds.

A moral conundrum this morning...
On my walk to the train station I spotted an injured bird on the sidewalk. It was a tiny bird, the same color as the asphalt, on a very busy sidewalk. I stopped and evaluated the situation:
A- The bird needed to get off the sidewalk so it wouldn't get kicked by an unaware pedestrian.
B- I would need some sort of way to move the bird since I get scared touching birds with my bare hands (not a disease thing, I just freak out when they begin to flutter in your hands).
C- It's bitterly cold out here.
At first I began to use a cigarette carton I found on the sidewalk and tried to get the bird onto the flattened box. It didn't flutter its wings, it didn't try hop away. I then realized it was much more hurt than I originally thought. A bird who can't (at the very least) hop isn't in a good spot. Its tiny breast began to palpate faster and I stopped. I wasn't helping it I was only scaring it. So I modified my plan to get the bird to the side of the sidewalk and somehow obviously mark it so that it could recover and pedestrians wouldn't step on it. I had a wad of unused tissues in my coat pocket so I wrapped the little guy in the tissues and very carefully moved it to the side of the sidewalk, against the side of a building. The tissues would protect it from the wind as well as clearly mark it to passers-by. As I began to go on my way I looked back at it in its little tissue cocoon. That little guy wasn't going to make it.

I saw some bushes about 15 feet ahead. I walked back, delicately picked up the little bird/tissue ball and walked it over the to bushes. I set it down under the bush furthest away from the road. As the tissue ball unwound I saw that it had shat all over the tissues underneath it. Its little chest was vibrating in fear. As I stood up, I saw its tiny glass eyes close in a way that didn't feel normal. I'm not proud of it but I turned and walked away. I didn't want to know if I had killed it or not.

So here's the moral dilemma; I just wanted to help the bird but by moving it I think I scared it to death. Did I help? Its death was swifter and warmer than it might have otherwise been but... I killed it. Do good intentions count for anything?