Cheep? No, just economical.

Last Sunday, P and I took the woofmonster for a walk. All was going pretty well, until I saw what looked a bit like a cane toad hopping into the road.

Cane toads are awful creatures. They’re a hideous pest species, poisonous, and just generally ugly and gross. I’m not a fan, if you couldn’t tell 😉

So we kept walking, but something made me look back at it… and I realised it wasn’t a toad, it was something else. I went back to have a look, and turns out it was a wee baby noisy minor.

Now most people who know me are aware that I am not a fan of birds. However, seeing this defenceless baby on the ground, easy prey for any of a number of cats (people in my neighbourhood are not very good at keeping their damn cats in at night, we often find dead and mangled wildlife around the place) – well, I couldn’t leave him. So we found a discarded 12 pack of Bundy rum cans, put him in the box, and proceeded to wonder what on earth we were going to do with a bird in a box.

We phoned the parks and wildlife service, which had a recorded message with the phone number of the local wildlife carer for our area. We rang her, and she said she’d come and collect him from our place in a few hours.

We carefully took him home, placed him in a better box, and waited.

He really didn’t like the wooden box with shred and the perspex lid, so we moved him to a shoebox after these photos

Wendy the wildlife carer came out later that night to pick him up. She said the mothers usually push the babies out of the nest at about 7 or 8 weeks, and this little guy looked to be about 6 weeks old – a bit too young to be on his own. She also said that most people won’t pick up noisy minor chicks, because they think they’re not a native species, when in fact they are – there is another, similar bird from India with much the same feeding habits, and roughly the same size, but those are a dark brown. She said they eat prime mince, so they’re an expensive bird to rescue!

I gave Wendy $10 to help with his feeding costs. She said she’d take him home, put him on a heat source to warm him up, and give him a good feed in the morning. She’d be able to evaluate him better after he’d eaten and had a nice warm rest.

Adult birds get little sympathy from me – they’re big enough to look after themselves, and some are downright dangerous, but babies need help, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let some neighbourhood cat have a meal of a baby bird. No way.

~ by palopinto on October 26, 2007.