Austringer

We have been asked to examine a juvenile gannet that couldn’t move or fly, which is not a good sign.

Examined the bird and found no evidence of breaks on the wings or legs, no punctures or wounds to the body so our best guess is that it’s exhausted and probably not feeding.

Even though it’s weak the beak on gannets is pretty long, strong and fierce so feeding it fish is a pretty difficult process!

The gannet has survived one night but it’s proving very difficult to stop it vomiting up the fish we have just fed it. I don’t hold out much hope for the bird to be honest but we will persist for a while longer.

Finally pulled two eggs from under Alice, she’s been sitting on them since mid May but they are infertile, gutted.

Alice is sitting on two eggs!
don’t know if they are fertile though but fingers crossed!

Decided to do my yearly purchase of Day Old Chicks & quail as we are getting low. Usual supplier has changed their courier and chiller centre but no problem – they have arrangements in place with my local chilled goods haulier – lovely.

Or not.

Phone call from haulier “your parcels have arrived, please come and collect them”

Brilliant thinks I, I will collect them the following day – which I did. Only to find that the haulier didn’t realise they needed to put the parcels in their chiller centre so the day old chicks were only just frozen by the time I got them back to my place – another couple of hours and I would have lost the lot.

Funny thing is that the boxes must have come up to my haulier in a chiller van and then onwards to my local town in another chiller van but the local distribution centre didn’t think “Oh look, these items are from a chilled goods vehicle, perhaps they will need keeping cold”

 

sigh……

Decided to give the mews a bit of a spring clean, as you do and casually sprayed AviSafe around once I’d pressure washed the walls and floors.

My lovely waterproof Foscam IP Camera has now stopped working 🙁

Aaarrggh!!

So Mad Alice has decided to live up to her name and has somehow stretched her leash so that she is (just) able to perch on a stone wall upright instead of the bow perch she is tethered to – all the while squawking at me and scrabbling to purchase on said wall.

I swear that bird does it deliberately!

 

Noun: Falconry

One who hunts using hawks, such as Goshawk, Harris Hawk etc