Being a bird mum

We found a baby bird!!!! (Well Aric did, I nearly trod on him).  Aric spotted the helpless but feisty little thing on the pavement outside some shops.  We looked around and there was a super tall tree above us - we had no chance of putting him back in the nest, and he was too young and featherless to survive on the floor.  We made a decision to take him home with us and then work out what to do from there.

Aric wrapped him up in his jacket and we walked home giddy with excitement - maybe we could raise him as our own and then The Dodo would do a viral video about us! (Literally my lifelong dream).

We put him down on the sofa and he starts chirping away for food - doing that thing they do when they crane their necks as long as they can with their mouths wide open.  We quickly made up some very runny weetabix for him (first thing that came to mind) and he was gobbling it down off my finger.  When he was full, he closed his eyes and went to sleep - so cute!!! We found him a box, put a warm bean bag in it and a bunch of towels and laid him into his little nest, where he promptly woke up, shat everywhere then started chirping for food again.  This was to be our life for the next 3 days.

We did some research on the internet and discovered that you can feed baby birds with softened dog biscuits and egg, so we bought a bag of biscuits and blended them up with water, a hard boiled egg and some random nutrient powder I have and fed him using a pipette.  Luckily for us, baby birds like their night time sleeps, so he was finished feeding by 930pm each night and sleeping, but ready for food at 6am every morning, for pretty much the rest of the day.

We stumbled across a dilemma when we realised we would either need to stay home or take him into work to look after him - luckily my work is pretty laid back plus I am kind of hidden in a corner on a floor where no senior people work, so I snuck him into work and sat him by the window - for the first day no one knew he was there apart from my 2 work friends who sit next to me.

The following day he garnered more interest as he was pretty chirpy and moving about a lot so I had lots of visitors to my desk, including some ecologists who were trying to determine what he was.  From the research I had done, I figured he was either  a Mynah, a Tui (our hope, but it's also illegal to keep them in captivity) or a Starling.  The ecologists thought he could be a Tui.

On Saturday, having looked after him for 2 days solid, I was pretty tired and ready to take him to the bird sanctuary, but Aric wanted to spend more time with him, so we agreed to take him in on Sunday - I was busy diving Saturday anyways and knew Aric would be ready to take him in after a day of looking after him, cute as he is!!!

I was correct, though it was still hard to give him up.  We had invested our time and our love into him and though he caused a little bit of chaos (literally there was poo EVERYWHERE and his food everywhere and we went through so many towels which are now stained with yellow poop) and the house seemed very empty when I came home on Sunday!  However it has made me think about being a baby mum and has put me off the idea for the future at least....it's tiring to have something rely on you!!

Here's some pics we took of him before we handed him over to the bird sanctuary, he's covered in food (it's super hard to feed him without getting him covered in the stuff)