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June 2009
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| Friday 26th June |
Today, after several days camping on the veranda, competing with the geckos for his lunch, Jake flew off. We didn't see him go, but we are confident he is safe and well somewhere in the vicinity. |
 Jake poised to go |
| Thursday 25th June |
Spike is becoming intolerable. It requires two persons to perform the daily chores now - one to feed and water, the other to guard against Spike's attacks. We decided that the next nice day: not too hot, not too wet, he was out of here. We shall miss him - he is our rehab pin-up. The beautiful blue edge to his tail is like nothing we have seen before. |
 Spike: look at that glorious tail. |
| Wednesday 24th June |
After a lot of visits to Dr Isabelle and Dr Hugo, we seem to be making progress. After Dr Hugo's administration today, suddenly Andy seems to be hooking one back toe over smaller perches. We changed all of the braches out for skinny ones, and sure enough, he seemed to be gripping quite successfully. In this picture you can hopefully see four 'normal' toes gripping from the front, and one toe twisted forward. The other toes (two on the far foot, one on the damaged foot) are gripping from the rear. We will try physio with the remaining twisted toe, rather than bind up the foot and impair progress of the newly corrected toe. |
 Andy with an almost-fixed foot! |
| Monday 15th June |
We started the laborious processes of trying to fix Jenny and Andy's feet. A trip to Galen University and Dr Isabelle, and we returned with one baby girl with sticky-tape pants on, and a baby boy wearing a plastic surf-board on his foot. A day later and they were off again! You have to love parrots - they really don't ever give up worrying something. In the picture here, you can see the male on the left with the twisted foot and the female to the right with the splayed out legs (white fronted are the only true sexually dimorphic Amazon: the female lacks the red 'shoulder' stripes of the male) |
 "clubfoot and splaylegs" |
| Saturday 13th June |
A knock on our gate, and two scared white fronted babies are delivered on horseback, clutched in the fists of the riders. Like Pippa, they are fledged but clipped, very hungry and unfortunately these two have foot abnormalities. The male has a twisted foot which cannot grip or perch, and the female has splay-leg. Both conditions common to undernourished birds. Once again, we fed them some much needed baby mash and set about finding out how to fix the deformities. |
 Jenny & Andy |
| Monday 8th June |
Today a red lored baby was delivered to us. She had wandered into the yard of a resident of Valley of Peace. She was about 8 weeks old; almost weaned, fledged, but with clipped wings. She must have escaped from her previous 'home'. We were only too grateful that she had ventured into this particular yard. The poor thing was extremely hungry and her breast bone was very prominent, indicating prolonged malnutrition. We defrosted some ever-handy baby mash and she wolfed it down. Just for the record, Pippa is missing 2 toes... |
 Pippa |
