An update

It's been a while since I last blogged. I always seem to have uni assignments to work on just lately, so I feel guilty if I'm spending time writing a blog entry when I should be writing an essay. I've overcome my guilt for a while and am writing this when I should be finishing my assignment on the biogeography of genus Trichosurus (brushtail possums).

We've been pretty busy recently with the wildlife. The silly season is upon us and we're getting a lot of birds in care, especially young ones. I finally finished the tawny aviary about two months ago and it's already had a few visitors, including a couple of kookaburras that were fished out of an effluent pond.

A lot of our birds come to us via Pelican and Seabird Rescue. Regular readers might remember my post about our day helping them with a rescue last year. On Friday we finally got around to asking Hammy, the fearless leader of PASR, about membership while she was dropping off a baby tawny for us.

Saturday morning while I was lying in bed, feeling the effects of too much red wine the night before, Hammy rang to see if we wanted to go up to Beerwah with her. Beerwah is the home of Australia Zoo and their wildlife hospital. If you've ever watched the TV show Outback Wildlife Rescue, Beerwah is also the home of the Twinnies.

Only one of us could go as we have baby birds that need feeding throughout the day, so I gratiously let Donna stay home to feed the animals while I spent the day having an adventure.

Our first stop was the home of Liz and Alf, the only raptor carers in Brisbane. We had a Brahminy kite to drop off to them. Our tawny aviary is big, about three metres, by two, by two, but theirs are huge, as they need to be for the types of birds they look after. In fact our last visit to Liz and Alf was to see their aviaries and get some ideas for ours. Since Liz and Alf don't do lorikeets and Donna and I do, they gave us six tubs of lorikeet food that had been donated to them that morning.

From there we headed up to see the Twinnies. They live on about three acres with their parents and dozens of waterbirds. We had an orphaned cygnet to drop off to them and since it needed a name for their paperwork I suggested Madonna. Here's little Madonna getting aquainted with a cuddly toy.



From the Twinnie's place it was a five minute drive to Australia Zoo where we had an appointment for a magpie to have her plaster cast removed. They have a couple of bins in the waiting room of the hospital there, where carers can rummage through and take whatever they need. By the time I got home I had a box full of the lorikeet food, bandages, swabs, syringes, forceps, you name it I probably had it in that box.



Once the maggie had had her cast removed we headed back to the Twinnies, since we had some birds to bring back to Brisbane. It also gave us the chance to have a proper look around. Below is a picture of one of the dams on the property, called Pelican Paradise. Actually it's not just the pelicans that find it paradise, there's also a couple of swans, terns, gannets, ducks and some wild whistling ducks that aren't in care but just like to visit.



By now it was starting to get late and the Twinnies had to take some birds to Australia Zoo as well. We headed home with a magpie, a darter and an ibis in the back of the truck. The ibis was released back where it came from near North Pine dam and we finally got back to Hammy's place after dark.

But the work wasn't over yet. Donna arrived to pick me up with five birds in the back of the car that she'd just picked up from a vet. This was apart from the lorikeet she'd picked up from another vet that morning. Hammy took the wood duck, as our permit doesn't cover us for waterbirds yet, and we took the two magpies, the butcherbird and the crested pigeon.

Now you might think we could relax on Sunday, we had some junk mail to deliver but that was only going to take us about and hour and a half. Then we got a call from Hammy about a duck tangled up in some wire about five minutes from us.

We eventually found the duck and discovered it was actually entangled in fishing line in a creek about three metres from the shore where we couldn't reach it. A quick drive back home and I returned with a net on the end of a pole and my diving boots, wearing shorts instead of the jeans I'd originally put on.

I gave Donna the net so she could get it under the bird to support it as it was now getting very tired and kept going under. Just as I got my boots on and emptied my pockets ready to get in the water, Donna fell in. I helped her to her feet then waded in and was half way to the bird when it went under for the last time. Suddenly there was a huge splash next to me, one of the bystanders had dived in to help and she got to the bird before me.

It was then an easy task to pass over some cutters so the line could be cut and we all helped each other back to shore. We would have liked to have got the bird to a vet since it still had some line in its mouth, but as soon as our assistant reached out to drag herself out of the water the bird made a break for it.

Picture if you will, a grown man running round a public park in ankle length dive boots kakhi shorts and a white polo shirt, dripping wet, or a grown woman in bright red shorts with mud all over her backside. When we dropped off a couple of baskets at Hammy's place later that day she said, "did you get any pictures?"

Unfortunately no, we didn't.