Hello? Is there anyone there?

It's been so long since I last posted a blog entry (January 5th to be exact), that I'd be surprised if anyone other than followers or subscribers will be reading this.

What have I been up to that's stopped me blogging all year? Well it's mostly been uni, which I finally finished a couple of weeks ago. I'm just hanging out for the final results for this semester, then I'll be able to call myself a BSc.

We're still looking after wildlife. Remember Tosh, the baby lorikeet we were raising? We still have him in care along with Posh, another lorikeet that we hand raised. The two of them rule the roost in the aviary. They'll soon be joined by Errol, who came into care this season at two weeks old and is now flying. We're now mentoring a couple of new carers, which takes some pressure off of us. ne of them is getting most of the baby Tawny Frogmouths in the area now. She raises them to a certain age, teaches them to feed themselves, then they come to us for their final stage before release in the big aviary.

Workwise, I've pretty much been working six evenings a week since exams finished, filling shelves in a supermarket. It's only three or four hours a night, but it's physical work, so it's keeping me in shape. It beats sitting at a desk all day, that's for sure. There could be a new chapter starting as far as work is concerned too. I've reached the third stage of getting a job as a trainee observer with the bureau of meteorology (I always have to slow down to type that word). If I get the job, it will mean a move to Melbourne for training, then I could be posted anywhere in Australia, or even Antarctica. Considering it's the first job I've applied for in over 20 years, I'm amazed I've gotten this far. Don't let anyone tell you age is an obstacle.

There's lots more I could tell you, but I think I'll save them for future blog entries. I have a bit of a backlog of things to blog about now.

Tosh

As you can see from the first two pictures below, Tosh has grown. He's still got some of his grey, downy feathers under his wings and his eyes are still black rather than red, but he looks like a grown up bird now.



He's now at the stage where he's trying to fly. I let him out of his cage in our spare room each day and he tries to fly toward me. He flies about a foot, then runs the rest of the way. Then he stands in front of me and flaps his wings like crazy. It's quite pleasant on a hot day, having a little fan like that.



It won't be long before we put him out in the aviary with the bigger birds, where he'll be able to fly whenever he wants. Then once he's ready he'll be released. Going on past experience though, I don't think he'll go far.

We've had a bit of rain here just lately, which has made everything nice and green. In fact I can hear one of the neighbours mowing their lawn right now. On Sunday it absolutely bucketed down. We'd just got back from visiting Donna's parents and this is what we found near our back verandah.



It's a wild one, but could be one that we've had in care before. He just sat there looking up at the sky the whole time the rain came down. It was almost as though he was praying to the rain gods. He wasn't the only one either, there were several more sitting in one of the other trees, all looking skyward.

More colour

Little Tosh is getting more colourful by the day. He's now about five and a half weeks old, weighs 83 grams and he's got a few green feathers coming out. You can't quite see it in this picture, but he's now got a little green tail as well.



The other baby Lorikeet that I wrote about in my last post now has company. A day or two after we got him we got two more about the same age. All three came into care because the trees they were nesting in were cut down.

We're lucky with those three as they're all self feeding already. All we have to do is put their food in a bowl in the cage and they'll feed themselves, unlike Tosh who has to be fed about six times a day from a pipette.



The little fellar above is another Tawny frogmouth I picked up from the vet on Friday. We suspect he's had some kind of head injury, going by those eyes. He's slightly cross-eyed and a lot more snappy than most Tawnies that age.

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.