Heartwarming Story of the Hospitalized Patient and His Feathered Friend: Is it true?

In today's age of social media and instant sharing of information, misinformation, and fake news spread faster than ever before. One such recent example is the viral post of a bird and a patient in a hospital that claims to depict a heartwarming story of a patient who fed the bird every day after being admitted to the hospital. Here is our investigation of this claim.

Social Media Claim

A Facebook user posted this picture in the group called "Weird & Fabulous Pictures" with the caption:

"The nurse who took this photo shared it with the following note: It has been 23 days since this patient came to the hospital, and no one from his family came to visit him during these 23 days. But there is a pigeon that comes to bed every two days, stays there for a while, then flies away. Then we learned that this patient of ours was sitting on a park bench next to the hospital and feeding the pigeons there every day. This must be another proof that animals have a better heart than some humans…"

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A picture of a bird sitting on a sleeping patient in a hospital has been making rounds on social media, with over 200 shares and a hundred likes within one day.

We also found a picture with a similar claim here, here, and in many other places online. However, upon investigation, it was found that the story behind the image was false.

Fact-Check

We used the Reverse Image Search feature to find the source of this photo. We traced the image back to Flickr, a stock photo website, where it was posted by a user named Ιωάννης Πρωτονοτάριος (Ioannis Protonotarios) 10 years ago in October 2013.

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 Ιωάννης Πρωτονοτάριος (Ioannis Protonotarios) also mentioned that the photo was published in loving memory of his father, who used to occupy the bed next to the person seen in the picture.

The photographer told The Quint he took the viral photo at the Cardiology Ward of the Red Cross Hospital of Athens, Greece. His father was sharing the room with the patient in the picture. When he was near his father's bed, this pigeon was close to that patient's body. He further explained that the bird sat there for a while, so he took the picture. It was a one-time occurrence, and the bird was not seen again after that.

As he had also mentioned that the person was still sleeping, the patient lying in bed had not said that that bird was a pigeon he had fed for a long time.

Conclusion

The viral post claiming that a patient used to feed a bird every day in the hospital is misleading. The picture was sourced from a stock-photo website. It was not taken by a nurse but rather by the son of a patient in an adjacent bed ten years ago in 2013 at a hospital in Greece.

Additionally, the pigeon in the photo was only present on one occasion, and the patient has never said that he had fed that pigeon for a long time, as claimed in the viral post.