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.