Monday 16 June 2014

01 - introduction



Last year a pair of magpies built a nest in one of the large trees across the road, and this year their family unit included two young birds. Let's call the immature birds IA and IB, and the adults PA (male) and PB (female).
In March we saw that IA  had fishing wire wound around its right foot. Even though it could only hop on one leg, it was still a great flyer and managed to outwit us each time we tried to catch it. As we did not want to stress it unnecessarily, we decided to call the experts.
First we called Wilvos (Wildlife Volunteers, an Australian institution), and they referred us to the rescue team of Australia Zoo, who have shotgun nets for capture. Unwell koalas and badly injured roos took precedence, but the rescue team called us back and were very helpful, telling us to train IA with food (bacon and mince seemed to be favourites), to enable us to catch it ourselves.

Here is a short video of IA being 'trained'. IA is the puffed up bird on the right, and it has its entangled foot tucked in, and is standing on its left leg. IB stays close to IA as it is after a free feed too.
After a week or so I managed to entice IA into the house and caught it by throwing a large towel over it, and then took it to a local vet who cut off all the thin wire that was entangled around its foot, and put some disinfectant on the wound. I released IA back home and thought that we could now stop feeding the wildlife and enjoy their beautiful song from a distance again.
However, less than a week later, IB had managed to get fishing line entangled around one of its feet too! So out came the bacon again and we managed to catch it within a couple of days, and snipped the fishing line clean off its foot. That was in April, and the actual field notes will start as of tomorrow, 17 June 2014.


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