Is an injured small bird likely to survive?

I rescued a juvenile male great tit(Parus major) from my cat

http://www.garden-birds.co.uk/birds/images/great_tit.jpg

He sustained a wound under his wing that although looked nasty,didn’t seem to puncture too deeply. I cleaned the wound as best I could with alcohol wipes and applied some antiseptic cream. I left the little fellah alone so he could recover from the shock and then placed him on the bird table in my back garden.

The good news is he flew away within seconds. Did I do enough? How do you rate his chances?

http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/g/greattit/index.asp#

British and Irish garden birds are in decline so leaving out food in feeders and bird tables is vital. I could never confine my cat,he comes and goes as he pleases. He’s not much of a hunter anyway,he just got lucky.

It’s hard to know how to rate his chances. After all, if all the birds that fledged survived to breed, we’d be over-run with birds and that, unfortunately, is very far from reality. I think you did the best you possibly could have done in the circumstances, and in my experience it’s more often the shock that kills them – so the fact that he flew off so soon is extremely good news. He may make it to full recovery from this injury and he may not, but personally I’d just think on the basis that if your cat managed to catch one juvenile great tit, that’s an extremely low percentage of all the birds that will have been enabled to survive through your feeding them.

I, too, feed my birds, and that’s especially crucial here as I’m on high moorland with relatively little for most ‘garden’ birds. I’ve got healthy populations. And yes, cats of mine have, over the years, caught and killed a few, but apart from the ghastly time when a new-ish cat worked her way through a whole nest of wrens (she got a bell-collar after that), I really don’t think the cats’ natural hunting has had any impact on the overall bird levels, and the feeding has most decidedly done so, to their benefit.

Mainly Goldfinch and Blue Tit’s feeding from bird table