Here's one I prepared earlier

In this afternoon's blog entry I mentioned that we'd got Tweedledee and Tweedledum when they were older than Tosh.

Well not long after that I got a call from Redlands Wildlife asking if we could take another young lorikeet. I sent Donna a text message and she picked the little dude up from our local vet on her way home from work. We usually have a rescue basket ready in the car.

This is what Tosh will look like in a few weeks.



I think Tweedledee and Tweedledum were a little bit older than this one, but not by much. Incidentally, this is a very healthy, very well fed little bird. Mum and Dad had obviously been doing a really good job, before their tree got cut down.

Apparently the tree lopper that found the little guy was devastated.

A month old

Our little Rainbow Lorikeet is now just over a month old and is really growing. We don't know whether it's a male or female, and probably never will as the only really reliable ways to tell are by DNA analysis, or by autopsy. So we came up with a name that can be either male or female. If you're a long time viewer of The Bill, you'll remember a male character called Tosh Lines and if you're a viewer of Torchwood you'll know of a female character also called Tosh (can't remember her surname off the top of my head, but it's something Japanese).

Having said that, if you notice me refering to Tosh as he, or him, it's just because it's easier than saying him/her, he/she, or it.



As you can see from the pictures, he's getting a lot more colour now that his feathers are growing. He'll eventually be blue on top of the head and below the chest, red and orange on the chest and green and some yellow elsewhere. That beak will eventually turn yellow as well.



Tosh isn't the first lorikeet we've hand raised, we had another couple that came early in the season that we named Tweedledee and Tweedledum. They weren't as young as Tosh though, they'd lost most of the grey downy feathers by the time we got them. They got to know us pretty well though and, now that they've been released, they come and visit us every day. In fact, we can't go and sit out on the back verandah with a cuppa in the afternoon unless we first put some food out for them. It's very awkward trying to drink your tea with a bird sitting on your hand trying to drink it with you.

It will be interesting to see what Tosh grows up like, since he only knows us as his parents. Once he gets old enough he'll go into the aviary with the older birds, but if he doesn't fit in then he may end up staying with us.

In future with lorikeets we'll try to use some kind of puppet that resembles an older lorikeet when we feed them. That way we may be able to avoid them imprinting on us. We do have the advantage that the main birds Tosh hears are lorikeets, that's when Bruce the cockateil isn't singing to him.

Edit; 17:51. Did I say his beak would turn yellow? I meant to say orange.

Used to live in shoebox

I promised you an update on the little rainbow lorikeet.

Well, he's not living in shoebox in't middle't livingroom anymore. He's grown and is now in a basket. He's about two weeks old in these photos and if you look closely on the second one, you can just make out the red feathers starting to grow. He's gone from about 1 or 2 mls of Wombaroo per feed, to about 6 or 8 mls. That's about 5 or 6 feeds a day.





Of course he's not the only baby bird we're looking after. At the moment we have 9 baby Tawny frogmouths, 6 of which are in the big aviary outside. One or two of them are getting to the stage now where they're self feeding, meaning they'll fly down to where there's food and eat it, rather than us having to hand feed them.

It's not hard to see why people mistake them for owls when they see those big eyes. They're actually related to nightjars and are distant relatives of kookaburras.



I can't help thinking this last picture looks like a school photo, with the teacher on the right. That bigger bird on the right is actually the mother of one of the little ones. She's been released back where she was found, but the baby's still with us until it's ready.

A new addition

I thought of posting this on our carers blog, since that's what it's about, but I get more visitors here so I thought I'd share it with more people.

Yesterday I got a phone call from another carer in our area asking if we could take another baby lorikeet. There aren't many people in our area that do lorikeets so we tend to get a lot of calls about them from vets, wildlife organisations and other carers. This particular carer told me she was picking it up from a vet, but they weren't absolutely sure it was a lorikeet. They just said it had grey downy feathers, which meant it could be pretty much anything.

Well this is what arrived a half hour later.



You can see why the vet wasn't completely certain of the species, in fact I'm not even sure yet whether it's a Rainbow lorikeet or a Scaley-breasted lorikeet. For those that are interested in such things, the little tyke weighed in at around 31g. That little hole behind the eye is one of its ears. How often do you get to see a birds ears?



This is a photo taken today just after a feed. That bulge in the chest is the crop, full of Wombaroo honeyeater mix, a special formulation we feed a lot of our birds. The crop literally swells up like a balloon when they're fed, then deflates as they digest their meal. Then it's ready to fill it up again in a couple of hours.

As you can see, the eyes are starting to open now. He (or she) can't really stand up properly on those legs, but it won't be long.

I'll keep you posted on the progress.

Shooting star

I saw a shooting star this morning.

Now this is amazing for two reasons; one, I'm not usually up at 4:45 in the morning, and two, I'd literally only just looked up at the sky when it went overhead, so the chances of my seeing it were pretty slim. I was just leaving for work at the time, so you can imagine what my wish was.

Tonight's lotto has jackpotted to $80 million, so you never know.

Mail

We've been delivering junk mail for a few months now and we've seen a huge variety in letterboxes, some are great, some are really original, and some are absolutely useless for anything bigger than a postcard. I've even had a few that have fallen over or broken as soon as I touched them, must be a hard life being a letterbox.

There's a question I've been mulling over since we started doing the deliveries and I still haven't come up with an answer.

Why do letterbox manufacturers find it necessary to put the word 'letters' or 'mail' on the front of their product?

It's not like the postie is going to get confused and not know where to put the mail. Quite often the word is so big there's nowhere to put the house number, or a 'No Junk Mail' sticker. I'll admit I have seen a couple of letterboxes that could have done with a label on them, one was a metal pedal bin. I don't think I ever put anything in that one. If it had the number on it I might have, but then so does the wheelie bin.

Time to move

They've found me again.

I got a letter today from the Reader's Digest Sweepstakes people to say I've got a good chance to win $500,000. I thought I'd got them off my scent years ago, I guess not.

If I ever go missing, don't call the cops, just call Reader's Digest. They'll find anyone eventually. I bet they know where Lord Lucan is.