Soft Release

On Friday night we soft released from our house our two ringtails Widdle and Puke. (Steve named them) Widdle is the male and Puke the female. They moved out pretty quickly and one is still returning to the drey to sleep while the other has already found somewhere else but we have seen them every night having a great time feeding on our trees and our neighbours.

Their aviary with the rope leading out.

The rope leading to the first tree and across to our shed and then into the lilly pilly

Widdle who is still returning to the drey.

Persistance pays

Remember the duck that got away? Well Lesleigh rang Donna yesterday afternoon to say she'd caught it.

Apparently she went round to drop off a BARN brochure at the property where the duck had been in the first place and it was back. This time she enlisted the help of Hammy, from Pelican and Seabird Rescue Inc. Hammy has a lot of experience in catching injured birds when they don't want to be caught.

The bird, and Australian Wood Duck, was taken to one of the local vets who is very good with wildlife, where it had part of its foot amputated. Lesleigh looked after it last night and it's now with a more experienced carer.

Three rescues and a night of caring in the space of three weeks. And to think, Lesleigh originally only signed on with BARN as a sponsor.

Oh duck!

We got a phone call from BARN yesterday for a rescue.

Unfortunately, Donna was at work and had the car, so I couldn't do it. Natasja asked if I thought Donna's friend that did the course with us would be able to do it. I told her there's only one way to find out, so she rang Lesleigh.

Well Donna got home from work about ten minutes later, so we could have done the rescue. She rang Lesleigh, who was just about to head out and was all excited about doing only her second rescue. Her first one was the lorikeet the day she did the carer's course.

It turned out the animal to be rescued was a duck that was limping and couldn't fly. Now it didn't occur to me at the time, but I've seen this kind of thing in ducks before. I'll tell you about that in a minute.

Donna got a call from Lesleigh later on. "It wasn't contained Donna".

Now I'm not saying that if you find an injured animal you should try and catch it before we get there. It's just that we've gotten used to people doing just that. A rescue usually means turning up at someones house and them handing over a cardboard box full of bird or possum.

So Lesleigh and two other people ran all around someones backyard (a very large one apparently) trying to catch a duck that didn't want to be caught. I'm sure the Benny Hill theme would have been playing in the background.

In the end it flew away.

As I said, I've seen this kind of behaviour in ducks before, usually when they have young nearby. The father will feign injury to decoy a threat away from his kids. I watched a whole family of ducks hold up traffic one day as they crossed the road. Mum was in front, followed by four or five ducklings, then Dad. Dad was dragging one foot and looking really pathetic. As soon as they got to the other side he resumed waddling as normal.

Ducking clever if you ask me.