Time to go

Donna was manning the BARN rescue phone on the weekend when she got a call from someone in our suburb. The caller had found a baby bird of unknown species sitting in the drive-thru of our local Red Rooster. She'd done the right thing and left it there for a while to see if it flew away or the parents came to feed it, but no such luck. So Donna asked if she could bring it round to us.

It turned out to be a Black Faced Cuckoo Shrike, a species we hadn't had in care before but had recently transported one for another carer. They're insectivores, but they'll also eat fruit which makes them pretty easy to look after as far as feeding is concerned.

This poor little fellar seemed to be pretty exhausted though, and with birds in that condition it's not a good idea to just feed them as normal. Your body has to use energy to break down food, so if you give a starving animal something that isn't easily digestible you may kill them. Fortunately, we have a product called First Aid which is made especially for this situation. I was able to get the bird to take some of it by putting some in a teaspoon and dragging its beak through it from side to side.

The next morning it was crying out for food and we discovered it was able to fly quite well, a fact it demonstrated by flying around our garage when we opened the basket it was in.

As I said, they're quite easy to look after, we got it to take a mix of pet mince (no, it's not minced up pets) and Wombaroo Insectivore, the same thing we feed to the tawnies, magpies, butcher birds and peewees. For the last few days all I've heard is the little bird calling out for food.

Our intention was to get it paired up with another cuckoo shrike of the same age that another carer had, the one we'd delivered a week earlier, but luckily we didn't get around to it. With all the calling it'd been doing it attracted the attention of an adult cuckoo shrike.

We usually put our birds outside during the day as they need the sunlight, even the nocturnal birds.



Yesterday the cuckoo shrike spent all day hanging from our clothes line and calling. We're lucky to have understanding neighbours, because it was a little annoying. Then later in the afternoon while we were busy feeding all the animals we noticed the adult was not only visiting, but it was visiting with food.



Eventually it landed on the cage and tried to feed the baby through the bars of the cage. This was the moment we'd been waiting for, as it meant the baby was either being adopted or the adult was actually one of its parents. As it was only found about five hundred metres from our house it's quite possible that it was a parent.

So I opened the cage, let the little guy perch on my finger and lifted it up onto the clothes line. From there it flew into one of our trees where it was met by one of the adults. It was a very rewarding sight to see the adult fly away, then come back with some food for the littlun. They then flew away in the direction of Red Rooster.

Hopefully we'll see them again, but not in care next time.