Currently in care

[den]

Welcome Swallow. He is maturing into a nice adult now, but still needs hand feeding. Soon he'll go to a flight aviary for pre-release flight and hunting training.

Peewee. He is about 1/2 grown and ready for his third cage move. When he was very small he lived with the swallow but he quickly out grew the little bird.

Two juvenile magpies. I have ordered a new, larger cage so they will have more room to grow.

Blue-faced honey eater. I will transfer the Indian ring-necked parrot into the Magpies old cage, and let the honey eater go in the parrot's flight aviary. Hopefully he'll learn to fly in there.

Sparrow BROWN FINCH! I don't raise sparrows. They are imported feral pests and it is illegal to release them. So no sparrows.

Young raven. I don't have a decent cage for it so the poor thing is in a rescue box until I get the honey eater into the aviary.

Boyde. Technically not in care, but he thinks he is. Not long after his release the poor bird was found by the people in the house behind me, and they thought "Oh! A pet magpie! We will keep him and love him and treat him like a dog." After Boyde escaped their loving care he found his way back here, very thin and thoroughly humanized. The kid over there knows I'm trying to get Boyde back into the wild, but I think he's still sneaking food to the bird, because Boyde is STARVING TO DEATH! FEED ME! Eventually Boyde will go to the wild but it'll be quite a while. His full release has been set back considerably. I hope the other two magpies will show him what to do when they are released.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/crossfire_/]

Would it be worth sitting down with the kid and his parents and explaining what you do and why you should be the one to do it? If the kid is interested you could point him to the right learning materials, or even apprentice him if that's something you could tolerate.

Unrelated, I have a question for you. There's a program on National Public Radio (NPR) here in the US called "This American Life," (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/) hosted by a gentleman named Ira Glass. The show that was broadcast on Halloween was about "true" scary stories, and Glass said that he had been told the following: A bat can bite a sleeping person and not wake up the person or even leave a mark. So if you ever find a bat in a room with a sleeping person, you need to capture the bat and test it for rabies.

Now, even though Glass was dead serious about this, it dinged my urbanlegend-o-meter, so I thought I would ask you what you knew about this. Is there any truth to this?

[ionotter.livejournal.com]

Well, if the person is sleeping in South America, where vampire bats are common, then yes, I'd say that's a valid concern. Vampire bats are all sneak-sneak-sneaky-*zwit* and lick up the blood as meek and quiet as possible. But if it's anywhere else, and a non-vampire bat bites you, it's going to be an "ARRRGH-RAWR-RAWR-GNOM-GNAW-BITE-CHOMP", and if you can sleep through THAT, then you've got bigger problems than rabies.

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

What Otter said. Vampires can get a good drink of blood without disturbing the sleeper. It's highly unlikely an insectivore will bite a sleeper unless the sleeper tries some sleep-bat catching (like sleep-walking, but with nets.)

[tavella.livejournal.com]

Well, I do know of one tragic case where a young girl, six or so, died of rabies in similar circumstances. A bat had been removed from her room, she hadn't apparently been bitten so she wasn't vaccinated, but must have been exposed in some way because she contracted rabies.

I don't think it's *typical*, that's the only case I know about, but I think I might be paranoid enough to get my kid vaccinated in similar circumstances.

[lizardling.livejournal.com]

IIRC, the case that tavella quotes had to do with aerosolized bat saliva, and from there it's easier for rabies to make the jump. Don't take this as a cite though.