Walter

Well I couldnt think of anything else to call this one so Walter it is. Lots has happened. I finally discovered the Pigeon and Dove Rescue UK who I sent a photo to and they told me he/she is much younger than we supposed and was probably only about 14 days old when we found him. They also said to feed him on chick crumbs which we have been doing since and defrosted peas. He is doing well and grown loads and still in teh cockateil cage but now sits on a perch and we hav ehad to give him a larger perch since his feet are now much larger than a cockateil and I wouldnt want him to do any damage to them. He has a new perch made from a piece of leylandii! Anyway we are keeping him till the spring. If we release in winter chances are he will die. Turns out the Abandonment act deals exactly with this kind of situation where to release a wild animal that has litle chance of survival is a crime. I had decided he was staying to spring before this but though if we are to keep a wild animal in a cage we should find out the law. Its pretty straight forward by what I ( painstakingly) read so long as he is in a cage large enough to open his wings and he is - easily. The main issue right now is to get him weaned so he can live outside in a flight until the spring. He is supposed to love peas in all stages of development but he just will not eat anything unless hand fed. WE tried to half starve him but had to give in cos do not want the little fellow to die. He will look at fod and pick it up but as far as I know so far is too lazy to eat himself. Aparently my adviser at Pigeon and Dove Rescue has foun juvenile woodies sitting next to wild bird seed and half starving since they do not understand they should eat! Well we will build hima flight in the next couple of days and as soon as he is eating he is living in it. Probably till March or April I would think. To release you have to have weather forcast for 3 clear days and thats when you release them. Until then we will look after him and try not to take him. right now he is ridiculously take and jumps on your hand when you offer it. He can fly though and has had a couple of flights in the kitchen. We now bring inside to feed since I was told to be careful not to lose him else he will just die. So no more outside open air feed and just bring him inside for this. The rest of the time he is outside. Right now its raining and I feel very sorry for him but he has got some shelter and does need to learn to cope with the wind and rain if he is to live free. Once we get him into a run/flight he will have much less human contact so should be less tame. I read that woodies do not do well in captivity and are suitable for hard release ( wildlife and countryside act) - ie no after feeding but Pigeon and Dove Rescue say that it is a good idea to put food out for him once he is released which is good for me cos I will more than likely be very attached to him by then but I do want him to fly off and live free. The lady who has advised me has several woodies in captivity - I assume handicapped ones and there are quite a few santuaries around but I have decided that he should be released here where he came from. WE did cut down his home but we have many more trees and there are lots round us in other gardens as well. Also he has familly here and apparently they could even now still take him on if he was freed but we just do not know and he would still probably perish in winter. People do not understand at all. They seem to think because Walter is a pigeon we should just have left him to die. What a strange world that folk wil help a blackbird or robin but not a wood pigeon!

at last some advice

Finally I found someone who knows about pidgeons who has told me what we should be doing. This is walter today ( without me!)
WE have been doing most of it wrong I think. He should gape when being fed and he hasnt been. basically we have been force feeding the poor little chap! Also he should be eating peas. I did try this and also dipped his beak into a bowl of water but maybe he is just a bit too young to do this yet. My father wants me to just release him but he cannot even feed himself so has no chance at all of survival right now so I went on the web and found a pidgeon website and contacted them and this lovely lady rang me and told me what to do. She seemed to think it is likely to be at least 2 weeks till he can fend for himself and he should get some practice in the hen aviary first. No problem at all but I had best be around to check what my hens do to him when he lands. Also there is a chance his parents may still take care of him for the week after he is released. Brilliant. I am sure he will soon be good enough to fly. Tho right now he does even sit on a perch. My wonderful pidgeon adviser also thinks he may be injured which is worrying. He can fly slightly but not very well but I have sent a photo so hopefully she will be able to guess his approximate age. Must admit though all this reading about pidgeons has made me really interested in getting some racers! Mind you first things first I have a baby woody to sort out. As for work I have done none the last 3 days and actually had to work till 2am this morning to get an order in to one of my suppliers since it has to be in for 9am today! Still one of the really good things about self employment is you can choose to work silly hours when you need to and it all still gets done just not necessarily when "normal" work does. Well if I wanted to do normal work would I even think of being self employed?

Walter the wood pidgeon having breakfast

This is Walter today after he had his breakfast. You will have to ignore the mess that is me. The white bits are scrambled egg. Laid this morning by my Muriel. Walter seems to understand when we get him out of the cage we are going to feed him. I just need 2 hands to open his beak and M puts the icing syringe into it and pumps the food in. Walter just sits and lets us do all this. To begin with we had to hold him down but now he is too big for that anyway and there is no need. Its loads easier than it was 2 days ago. i suppose even a baby bird soon learns where the food comes from even if it does have humans as surrogates! You can see he is slightly worryingly tame. I really have not encouraged this and we only handle him to feed him. He sleeps outside but protected from cats in a cage. From what I understand which is not much really he is now about 26 days old so should fly off on Saturday or Sunday. Its a pain cos I really need to work Saturday but cannot just leave him to starve if he is still here or not now we have brought him this far. We are not working sunday anyway cos its Ms birthday.Last year we worked it and were so busy I forgot to even say happy birthday till lunchtime and I am not going to have that happen to him again. Anyway the way its going if we still have Walter he is likely to fly away on sunday. I will be sorry but happy when this happens cos he is a wild bird and should not be in captivity. I will just put food out daily. I do anyway for the wild birds but not usually every day and this will change things a bit now I think. I like to think he will live to breed next year and maybe no stupid human will cut down his home! Still it was an accident and he or she has a whole winter to survive yet! Going by the large numbers of blackberries, elder sloes etc its going to be a very long cold one too!

Walter the wood pidgeon

Well M just had to name it didnt he! Its walter - unoriginally and is doing very well it seems. Thanks to the eggs from my Hens. At least they are not all wasted I spose. We do not eat eggs at all, the dogs do sometimes and the neighbours are just to nasty to give to especially since we realised one of them has a saw that was stolen from our shed. Anyway Walter the pidgeon has grown. he/she is practising flying more and more and hopefully not too long into the future walter will take to the skies and be a free bird as he was meant to be. He climbed up my arm onto my shoulder when we fed him about an hour ago - cute but not good from a maintaining wild status point of view. I had to wake M who is on nights this week cos it takes 2 of us to feed the little creature and he was moaning for dinner. He ate 2 eggs yesterday and I reckon wil probably manage 4 today. His tail is growing well now and he has proper wings but still has some bits of baby fluff. I shall be sad to see him go but the sooner the beter cos winter is close now and I worry he will not survive the cold and if he does not fledge soon he will be doomed. My writing wages have just arrived so off to the bank in a minute to pay them in! Cant wait. The rest of this week was a disaster. I have just done the books as well and it looks pretty bad. Maybe I should do a proper writing course. Would that mean I sell more tho?

baby pidgeons, sick chickens and leylandii!

Yesterday was a disaster. I didnt want M to be camping out outside wellesbourne market again so arranged to do a different one. Also with the weather being drizzly it would have been a waste of £50 to do wellesbourne I think. Anyway the day was a disaster from waking up. First the alarm didnt go off, we did get up in time but still late. Went off with RAC route plan to find the market but couldnt find it. Even asked a local police car ( or its ocupants and they had never heard of it the directed us to teh street using the RAC route plan but as they said it was just a housing estate and no market. Anyway it was outside Milton Keynes so we decided to investigate MKs market. What a nightmare place. Appologies to all who live there but I hate the place. Every road looks the same. So confusing and no landmarks. Market looks ok but at £48 probably not worth the bother and you have to pay to park as well which at wellesbourne ofcourse you do not. We will stick it out at wellesbourne. So we came home by 10am and decided finally we will get rid of 2 of the 3 remaining leylandii. We roped the tops and cut them in half so they didnt fall into next doors garden. One small branch fell in and nasty old baggage of neighbour says " I saw that". B1tch. Anyway guy next door to her was helping her sort out her garden and gives the branch back to M so at least the B1tch cannot complain to councillor and take photos of it again. AND she has one of our stolen saws! Ofcourse they were taken frm our shed and we cannot prove a thing but the saw has damage in a certain place and is definitely one of ours! So that is possibly our burglar. Talk about doing it on your own doorstep. We have lived in some really dodgy areas over teh years and never has anyone robbed us and no one would do this to their neighbour. Obviously that is why the folk round here are well off ! They do not buy their tools just rob them off their neighbours! So anyway we gets one tree cut donw and move onto the second one. The top comes off ok but lands slightly on the fence doing a small amount of damage but not too bad. It also luckily helps break the fall cos there is a nest with a live baby pidgeon in it.WE have put teh little one into a cage and fed it chicken layers mash mixed with scrambled egg. Do not know what else to do. We cannot return to the nest and if left where it was a cat would get it. Last night I left it off teh ground in a cage and covered with a quilt - part covered incase of frost. Today it is preening and trying to fly but when let out just runs so is not ready yet to leave the nest. The flight feathers seem to have grown since yesterday and according to the internet it is around 22 days old so shoudl fledge in about a week so has a reasonable chance of surviving and flying off if we can keep it fed. I spoke to a wildlife recuer I found on teh internet - based in Nuneaton I think who has given me advice so i just need to do the best I can and get it to grow and fly. the parents live in the garden and are in constant view - probably thinking we are out of order imprisoning their baby. Hopefully tehy will still be around when it can fly so they can take care of it cos once it goes we cannot help the little creature any more really can we?
Then to top this problem Muriel is again ill. Currently living in the kitchen. She was ill last night. She was sitting on the eggs when we got back yesterday and last night she was still there so I brought her inside and gave her food. She didnt eat but spent the night next to the radiator and this morning all the veggies had gone and she was eating. I have tried to put her back in with tehflock but she was just sitting in teh corner of the run. Honestly she was gone less than 24hours but already she is outcast. I will return her after dark tonight - the way you are meant to introduce a bird and hopefully all will be normal again tomorrow. M is goinmg to put the hen house heater back in today so hopefully all will be fine from now on and we also need to build a better home for gwyneth since the converted blanket chest she currently lives in is fine as a summer temporary house but rubbish for winter and has no way to heat it. And yes I am silly and soft and my hens do have heating! Though I am thinking right now that Muriel is just weak and gets ill lots. She will probably still get ill and come in regularly by the looks of it. I had budgies who did this years ago and it used to seem that every 2 weeks-ish we had one of them inside for a day or 2! I feel very guilty now as well about removing the leylandii - though twas stopping us from growing anything - and making our wood pidgeons homeless just as winter draws in. Maybe we should just build a pidgeon loft/ dove cote!And will my baby pidgeon make it?

life mates and work

Why does everything have to be so much hassle? whatever I do it always seems to be more difficult than it should be. Life right now is just hard but i still want to stay self-employed and free cos its the best decision I ever made. There is no way on earth its the easy option though. There always seems to be a problem and as I work through one up comes another just as bad if not even worse. I was very happy writing freelance for example but now do not know what is happeneing since the original publisher has sold the magazine on to a new publisher so I may now be out of a writing job. Ofcourse freelance is never a definite when oit comes to earning money since they may not like what you write one month etc but I was feeling hopeful. I have 3 articles in this months magazine and although it still will not alone pay the bills it certainly helps and I did feel I was getting somewhere. Now I have no idea what is going to happen. It does seem the new publishers ae very experienced with craft mags tho so just maybe it will be a good one for me but so far I really know nothing. I need to do the books. I should be doing them right now but just cannot get motivated to do it. I can get other things doen and have made candles today, wrapped soap, sorted serveral orers and prob;lems with a safety assessment but I just hate doing the books. I need to go back to a book I read which was the cause of my whole freedom and self employment or the book coupled with finding Ran Prieur on the web was what began the whole thing! Check out ranprieur.com to see what inspired me and the book is "how to make all your dreams come true" by Mark Forster. Thats what really did it. It was so inspiring I ultimatly quit my job and did just that. Doesnt make life easier tho! I got given this book at an event run by my then employer on well being and there was a book crossing stall and the man there gave me several books. I passed the rest on but am still using this - the most unlikely of all the books he gave me. I never normall go in for this kind of book but really it does work. Or maybe I was just so desperate for change I would try anything. Interestingly I found the original sketch book I wrote my first attempts at his quizzes in the other day - dated september2006 and I have actually achieved many of my wildest dreams. I wanted to be self employed but had no idea what I wanted to do. I wanted to live in the country and I do. I had no idea then that I would be able to do this and didnt have a clue where to find a country house. I didnt know if we could sell the current house, I didnt know what I could possibly do to become self employed but now I am. I wanted to be a writer - now I have been published. It was slightly shocking finding out I have actually managed to achieve some of the crazy things I wrote down then since i really never believed any of it. Now I need to go back and do it all again so i can make my life better and get more stuff actually done. Apparently this is called manifesting. maybe its really just about sorting out in your head what you really want in life so that when you do have an oportunity to grasp it rather tha just sit there dreaming. I dont know. i am guessing but one thing I am sure of this book really changed my world so i am going to go and read it again and do al those slightly silly excersies and maybe I will cary on having good luck and getting my wildest dreams. One ampbition should really be - to blog more often and consistently! I will add to my first list............