Gapeworm

A bit of a sad post today, but it's something quite common so I thought I'd write about it for those readers that might be new to caring.

The young magpie in the picture below came into our care on Wednesday afternoon. He'd been sitting on the ground in someones front yard for three days and we got a call to go and pick him up. He seemed lively enough when Donna got him home but wouldn't eat.



Magpies, crows, ravens, butcherbirds and peewees all belong to the same family, family corvidae, as such they tend to all eat the same kinds of food, usually insects and grubs. This causes a problem, especially in the younger birds, because a lot of grubs and worms are the intermediate host for gapeworm, a nasty parasite that is usually fatal if not treated.

We get a lot of young crows and magpies in care at this time of year and we've got into the habit of automatically checking and treating for gapeworm. The poor little fellar in the picture above was too far gone when we got him and he died the next day. He had the worst case of it I've seen so far. If you look below his tongue, near the base of the beak, you can see what looks like vermicelli, that's the gapeworm.

It basically kills the bird by filling up their throat until they can't swallow food anymore and they starve to death. As young birds need lots of food while they're growing they won't last long if they can't eat. They might even still look in good condition just before they die. It's easy to treat if you get to it in time, but that often doesn't happen because the bird is already past it by the time someone notices something wrong and calls a carer, or takes it to a vet.

So if you're reading this because there's a young bird (of the feathered variety) that's been on the ground in your yard for a couple of days and you're concerned about it, get it to a vet as quick as possible. It may not be too late.

No more room

We doubled the number of different species in our care yesterday. As well as the ringtails, the brushtails, the lorikeets and Gloria the cockatoo we now have four new additions to the family. Three of them are only youngsters too, so they need to be hand fed.

First up we have this young Figbird.


It has a funny way of shaking its head from side to side with its mouth wide open when you go to feed it, but it's still very easy to feed. When it gets older it may have darker feathers and a bright red spot around the eye, unless it's a female, in which case she'll stay pretty much as she is now, just bigger.

Then we have a young Crested Pigeon.


These are often incorrectly called a Topnotch pigeon because of the crest. A Topnotch is a different species altogether. This little fellar is the hardest to feed. Although it's calling for food, I can hear it now actually, it won't take food from us. We have to actually pick it up and open its beak while someone else drizzles Womabaroo Granivore formula into its mouth with a syringe.

Then we come to this young crow, with a face only its mum could love.


Talk about easy to feed, open the cage, show it the mince and it opens a beak so wide you could drive a bus down it. And the satisfied sound it makes as the food goes down is one of the reasons that Donna and I like looking after the black and whites (magpies, butcherbirds, etc). All the corvids that we've looked after seem to be talking with their mouth full when you feed them, as though they're thanking you for each morsel.

Last but not least we have this poor fellar.


This is a Tawny Frogmouth, they're often mistaken for owls, which they aren't and we've even had one mistaken for a Kookaburra. I can understand why people think they're owls as they look similar and they're nocturnal. I'm not sure why someone would think it's a Kookaburra though, you've only got to look at the beak. We've had a few Tawnies in care and haven't had much luck with them, usually because they've been accidentally poisoned.

That's not the case with this one though. The reason its head is tilted to one side is because it had a collision with something and it's brain damaged. If it doesn't improve within a couple of days it will most likely have to be euthenased unfortunately. It's not eating at all at the moment. It'll open its mouth for food, but anything you put in just falls out again. It's pretty alert and the eyes even react to light as they should, but it just sits there with its head to one side unless you disturb it.

All of these birds should hopefully be passed on to other carers soon as we just don't have any room for them, we've run out of cages and baskets. I've got to admit though, they're all pretty cute, even the crow in a strange sort of way. If we did have the room for them they'd probably stay with us. The only trouble is, most of them are communal birds and need to be kept with others of their kind, especially when they're young. Keeping this lot would mean getting more of the same. That's why we have six Lorikeets.

Baby animals

I can't complain that I have nothing to do at the moment, I seem to be spending most of my time feeding animals.

We got a call late yesterday to pick up some noisy miner chicks from a local vet. Donna went to pick them up while I was, you guessed it, feeding the animals. She was amazed at how small they were. I'm amazed at how much they can eat and how much they poo. Those white dots on the cloth under them are about half the size of the poos these little guys do each time they get fed.

There's a knack to feeding them too. I get a piece of their food in the tweezers, then I gently tap the side of their basket. The movement makes them think Mum or Dad has just returned with some food and they open their mouths. Then I just shovel it in and repeat until the bowl is empty.

As you can see from the pics, they aren't even old enough to stand up yet.





Then we have the ringtails. That's Pinky on the left and Yoda on the right. Perky is of exploring somewhere, probably on Donna's back.

The ringtails are about the easiest to look after now. All we have to do is put their food in the cage and let them at it. It would be nice if they didn't make so much mess though.



Last but not least, we've got Gollum, the brushtail.

We were bottle feeding him for a while, but it wasn't working out to well as he had to work to hard to get his milk out of the bottle. We've now gone back to using a syringe to feed him which works much better and we also know exactly how much he's having in each feed.

As you can see in this picture he's also having some solids. That's a mix of banana and honey, with a little bit of milk (Divetelact) that Donna's feeding him. He's also starting to lap his milk, which is a relief. The last time I tried him lapping he was so slow it was painful. This morning when I tried him it was much easier.



This is the beginning of the silly season for wildlife carers as we come into spring. Unfortunately, we can't take on too many animals at the moment as I'm off to Armidale for uni next month, for two weeks. With Donna working there won't be anyone able to devote the time to feed baby animals as much as they need, so we need to hold off getting anymore until I get back. The possums will be okay by then and the noisy miners will have been moved to another carer.

On the phones

I mentioned recently that Donna and I had attended BARN's AGM. One of the things that came up at the meeting was the fact that they're desperately looking for volunteers to man the rescue phone occassionally. At the moment, Natasja our president does it on the weekends, Binnie our secretary does it during the week and two of our support members, Len and Barbara, do one afternoon a week.

Donna suggested we volunteer for one weekend a month. After spending the last twelve years answering telephones at work, I wasn't too keen on doing it at home, even if it was for a good cause.

Well anyway, we're on the rescue phone this weekend.

We've found the easiest part of the job is dealing with the people that call up. A lot of the calls are from the RSPCA, but most are members of the public. Sometimes we give advice on what to do before a carer gets there, but usually it's just a case of getting their details, then getting a carer out to them.

The hard part is getting carers in some areas. Parts of north Brisbane are a bit of a blackspot for us and we don't like to send anyone too far, or too often. On a Saturday morning it's not unusual to get a carer when they're out doing their shopping too. In that case, they have to finish their shopping, go home, then go out to the rescue.

We've had a couple of funny ones too. There was the call passed onto us from the RSPCA about a bird with a broken wing. The contact number they'd been given turned out to be a butcher's shop and they knew nothing about an injured bird. I suspect any birds he may have had were beyond help from us.

Another one was a kookaburra that couldn't fly that was in someone's front yard. The carer that went out called us back to say it was actually a tawny frogmouth. The colouring is very similar in the two birds, but the beak is completely different.

We even had a call last night from the ambos. They'd found an injured ringtail possum in a shopping centre carpark while attending a patient. The ambo was a New Zealander and said the possum didn't look like any of the possums back in NZ. The NZ possums are actually brushtails imported from Australia and are now a pest.

It was actually nice to get a call back from the ambo later to make sure the carer had managed to find the possum. They'd had to take their patient to hospital, so couldn't hang around. She thanked us for what we do, which seemed funny considering all that they do, but it was certainly appreciated.

It's definitely a good learning experience and we'll be doing it again next month. It's coming into the silly season (spring) so it's probably going to be busier too.

Now if only we could get more carers that are available for rescues and some more telephone operators for the other weekends.

If you live in Brisbane and are interested in becomming a wildlife carer, or would just like to help out as a support member, check out the website here, or give us a call on the rescue number 0405056066.

Balls

Just a small piece of advice if you ever see a dead kangaroo by the side of the road.

Okay, this won't apply to a lot of our readers, since you don't have roos in your country, but it may have some relevance to other animals too.

How can I put this in a nice way that won't offend our more masculine readers? Some animals are proportioned differently to humans in the bollocks department. The reason I'm making this statement is because of the rescue we got called out to tonight. It's okay, David Attenborough's Life of Mammals finished last Monday, so we weren't bothered about having our TV viewing interrupted.

It was a report of a kangaroo that had been hit by a car. The person reporting it was worried it may have a joey* in the pouch.

The three of us, Donna, our friend Lesleigh, and I drove about five minutes away with our rescue kit ready, including my university disection kit in case we had to cut a joey out of the pouch. We drove around looking for a dead roo and finally found one underneath the Armco, pulled over, and jumped out to check it over.

I grabbed it by the tail and pulled it further from the road. Rigor mortis had already set in, something we have a bit of experience in with rescues this weekend. While Donna and Lesleigh were walking down with the rescue kit from where they'd parked the car out of the way, I pulled the poor creatures legs apart for a better look.

Standing up, the animal probably wouldn't have come up to my waste, but between its legs were a pair of male parts of the anatomy the size of my fist**. There wasn't going to be a joey here.

We couldn't find any other kangaroos in the area, so we assumed this was the one that had been reported.

So next time you find a dead roo and you think that big lump is a joey in the pouch because you think they're too big to be balls, doesn't mean they aren't balls.

It doesn't make you any less of a man. Honest. They're built different.

-----

* Joey refers to the baby of any marsupial, not just kangaroos. They do tend to look very similar when they're really young though. We often get asked if we look after joeys. Well, yes we do, just not the kind of joeys you're thinking of.

** Okay, maybe not the size of my fist, but definitely a big handful. Check out page ten of the last BARN newsletter to see what sort of proportion I'm talking about. That's a ringtail that Mandy's holding.

The Musketeers

I promised the other day I'd post some pictures of the lorikeets, so here they are.

I could watch these little fellars all day, the way they climb around the cage, preen each other and chatter to you if you say something to them.

They're really messy birds though. Unlike most birds that lift up a bit, relax and poo straight down, the loris prefer to lift their tail, squeeze and shoot it out to the side. That red sheet in the background is covered in lorkeet poo and so is the ground outside the cage. We had a Japanese exchange student visited the other day with my in-laws to see the animals, he very nearly got pooed on.





We actually have four birds, but the other one was on a lower perch at the time and it was too hard to get a decent picture with all four of them in it.

As you can see in these pictures, they're all juveniles. You can tell that by the fact their beaks are still a bit black. The adults have completely red beaks. Once they're a bit older and all healthy they'll be released together so they can look after each other.

New animals

We've got some new members of the Porter family at the moment.

On Saturday I did a rescue at Redland Bay for a concussed lorikeet, nothing unusual there. Because it's a juvenile lori we'll be keeping him for a while, so we've got some company for him, another three lorikeets. We call them the three musketeers, yes there's four of them, there were four in the book/movie too. Pics to come.

While we were at Natasja's picking up Athos, Aramis and d'Artagnan we mentioned possums and Natasja said she had a little 100 gram brushy that was looking for a carer. He'd only been in care for two days after his mum had been attacked and killed by a dog. So now he lives with us.

Our first thought on seeing him was that he looked more like a kangaroo joey than a possum. We've called him Gollum, for obvious reasons, even though he won't always look like that. He's one of the easiest possums we've had as far as feeding is concerned. As soon as he see's the syringe full of Divetelact he's wide awake and we usually have to refill it.


Cute or what? Hard to imagine he'll be 4.5 kg when he's fully grown.


We always have tissues handy when we feed him, he gets milk all over him.