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Time and Place
The clock change last night played in my favour because it gave me an extra hour to wake up. But it turns out I still have difficulties getting to work! I’ve had trouble with the police, I’ve had a dodgy light bulb, and I didn’t trust my satnav last week when it wanted to send me over a roundabout that I thought was closed; I drove the normal avoid-the-roundabout-route except I took a wrong turn, and ended up miles out of where I wanted to be.
So this morning I thought I’d trust the nav. It took me, for the first time, along the shortest route from my house to the rescue centre. Over the roundabout (which is open – a fact proved true because there were no police cars waiting for me! 😉 ), and right up to the crossroads where I’m now allowed to turn right.
Except I turned right too early. (What can I say? I’m impatient!). Nomatter – satnav tells me to pull a U-turn just up ahead. No chance of that without me killing myself, so I take the next right so I can turn around. You know that feeling when you find yourself accelerating to join a motorway and you know you’re not only going in the wrong direction, but you have another 6.4 kilometers to go before you can turn off and turn around?
I had that exact same feeling! Anyway. Thanks to the half hour break before work, my glowing sharpness to punctuality still appears to be intact…! 😉
Indeed, in the last remaining few minutes of the break I met someone who’d previously carried out chicken research. I asked him the obvious question, and the answer is: Egg!
Birds in Intensive Care
My first shift with birds!
Cleaning
Like the hedgehogs, the birds are kept in a large(r) room with walls and aisles lined with cages. The cage floor is a grid where crap and piss can fall through onto a tray underneath. Cleaning the cage is a matter of simply swapping the dirty trays with clean ones.
Cleaning the floor was a bit of a comedy moment at times. No point detailing the cleaning ritual of a floor, other than to say brushing feathers into a corner and hoping they’re still there when I re-enter the room through a drafty door with a dustpan and brush is quite far-fetched…!
Feeding
Feeding the birds means taking out the old water and food and putting fresh water and new food back into the cages. I needed to take care not to place the dishes under the horizontal wooden stick which the birds use as a perch; there’s nothing stopping them from perch-crapping into the food beneath them…
I worried about the birds flying out whilst the cage door was open, but this was a false worry. Each cage front is fitted with a small flap which is big enough for a hand holding a bowl of food to pass through whilst making it difficult for a bird to fly out.
The Birds (by) Themselves
Some birds were clearly in a lot of distress – thrashing from side to side in the cages, or scuttling along the cage floor in a flurry of feathers, wings and feet. Be quick! was the feeding advice! In point of fact, this just wasn’t for the practicality of it; it was also to minimise the stress for the birds.
One bird had only one wing. I didn’t have a good view of most others because the design of the cage didn’t really allow it.
Broadly speaking, there are 3 kinds of birds;
- Carnivores such as magpies and crows. These eat cat food(!) because cats are also carnivores! 😉
- A bird which sounded like “turtle” but obviously not a turtle because that’s a turtle and not a bird. It looks like a sleek version of a wood pigeon and has a black ring by its neck. Its small beak means we need to give these birds small seeds.
- Wood pigeons, which are the ‘regular’ grey pigeons with a white stripe by the wing. I used to see these in trafalgar square when I was a boy; city pigeons that flap and fluster and are generally thought to be the rat of the sky. (I’m not sure if that’s unfair to rats or to wood pigeons).
(As an aside, I’ve read that the weight of a pigeon compared to the size of its wings is on the border of what can fly and what can’t. i.e. if it weighs a bit more, or if its wings aere smaller, a wood pigeon wouldn’t be able to fly. This is why when they lift off, pigeons need to extend their wings far above them so they can generate enough lift to get these beasts off the ground. Sometimes the wings are so high, they slap against each other, which is why we hear them flapping so much.)
Anyway, wood pigeons have big beaks so we give them big seeds to eat.
Practically, the difference between these birds is that their crap differs because their food is different. I forget which is which, but there are various combinations of green or yellow piss, and white and/or brown crap for the bird types; sometimes it’s good and other times not.
Aside from species, some birds are placed on a special diet, and these bowls of food with extra nutritional additives etc. are marked with corresponding cage numbers.
My general feeling about caring for these birds in intensive care is that cleaning is much simpler, quicker, and a lot less stinky than cleaning the hedgehogs, but there’s zero contact with the animals which makes the task quite tedious.
Geese, chickens and other outside birds
Woohoo, I felt I won here! It’s always nice to go outside here – even if it’s raining!
Geese
First up, the geese. I’ve done these before and I recognised the feeding bowls more than their food. I was told this time to throw the food directly into the water because then the dry pellets soak up water which then gets ingested. I was surprised that geese needed to ‘drink’ water in this way!
But not as surprised as the next instruction: sweep the crap from the concrete surrounding the pool into the pool(!)
I needed to check this 3 times to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood. And I still waited to see if my partner did what I thought she said. She did. So I did. Apparently there’s a pond filter so everything gets renewed. I probably don’t say this often enough, but I’m glad I’m not a goose.
‘Regular’ Birds
In this case I mean the other birds that flap about in their segmented (sometimes) circular cages. A simple matter of replacing the old water and food with the new.
I remember feeling out of my depth the last time I fed the outside birds, but my work partner today had explained stuff about the food (and I must admit, she just generally seemed to be in better control of things!) so I felt I had a better handle on things.
This last phrase was about to bite me in the
Feeling Chicken?
After feeding the first bird cage, my partner asked if I wanted to feed the rest of the birds or feed the chickens. I suppose doing the birds for the first time on my own would have been a good knowledge consolidation moment, but doing the chickens is more fun so I chose to do that.
As a reminder (and also to set the scene), the chickens are kept in enclosures about 2 or 3 meters wide, 1 meter high, and 1 meter deep. Since the enclosure is simply placed on the floor, I need a small n-shape ladder to climb over the edge and into the cage to replace the food and water. And climb back out. But my first cage of 4 didn’t go well.
I lifted the cage lid and put the ladder in place. It’s made of metal so clangs and clanks when someone like me clumsily man-handles it. The chicken wasn’t impressed and in a panic scuttled from one side of the enclosure, through a dividing wall with a large cat flap, into the other (which happened to be the side I was climbing into. Fear takes on no logic…).
But there was a problem; he caught his foot in the cat flap and lay motionless – definitely not a good sign for most animals!
I needed to act quickly. I was still only on the first rung so I could bend over, stretch out and push the cat flap open and free the chicken. But as I doubled-over the side of the enclosure and reached for the cat flap, my feet left the rung of the ladder. This left me balancing on my stomach on the side of the enclosure with my arms, head and upper body upside-down inside, my arse sticking up in the air, and my legs wafting uncomfortably somewhere behind me.
“Uncomfortable” is the word! One hand held the cat flap open, keeping pressure off the chicken’s leg, the other hand clutched a lump on the side of the enclosure I’d found (handy, because it stopped me from falling inside, and my pivotal belly wished my podge acted more as a cushion than as a squashed water balloon 🙁
And the stupid chicken wasn’t moving his freed leg out of the cat flap!
My buddy radioed in for help (ooh, that makes it sound like a real emergency!). Redo. She giggled into the walkie-talkie and got the head animal carer on the scene. She deftly (I assume – I couldn’t see anything…) climbed into the enclosure without a ladder, picked up the chicken and helped her back to her feet. (I could now do the same for myself). She gave the chicken a good check and made sure she could walk properly. She could – and if you’re interested, so could I!
She had a look at the cause of the problem with the cat flap – this kind of thing shouldn’t happen. It was something to do with a loose screw or something; I couldn’t see because there wasn’t enough space for all 3 of us and a chicken to get close to the fitting.
When the chicken rescuer (and mine) tried climbing out of the enclosure I thought I’d (forgive the expression…) kill two birds with one stone. She was inside and so was the chicken, but the food hadn’t yet been changed! I handed her the fresh water and food, then offered her the ladder to help her get out. She didn’t need it, because as I said before, so could do these things very deftly! 🙂
By now it was pissing it down, but I still had 3 more chickens to feed. They were straight forward, and my buddy rejoined me after she finished the rest of the birds. Except one.
Stressed-out Peacock
At the far end of the beautiful grounds is little Miss Peacock in her own low-stress shelter. Again, a simple exchange of water and food for her, as quietly and as peacefully as possible so as not to disturb her stressed temperament. (I guess…when I saw her a few weeks ago she’d walked towards us to get her food! 🙂 ).
That said, this was the exact wrong moment to get a beeping on our walkie-talkies and an announcement telling us it was time for a break! In a way it was perfect timing for us because we’d finished with the outside animals, but the peacock might not have thought so.
Take the Highway!
By now I was saturated from the rain, but at least it was only water and not hedgehog crap like on other shifts. I trudged blindly along the closest path I could find between the bird cages back to the main building, a narrow path weaving downwards into the beautiful gardens. I heard a shout! I was going the wrong way and needed to take higher path back to the building.
I expected us to be amongst the last to reach the common room, but we were the first. Despite 10 minute pre-warnings on the walkie-talkies that a break was imminent, other couples were still finishing things off for a good stopping moment. Yet again, I’m very impressed with the work ethic of colleagues I find myself working alongside in animal care!
NB: At the end of shift at 13:00 there’s a strict “tools down, stop work” policy for the volunteers. I assume this is to make sure that volunteers are treated well and their willingness to work is not abused by making them stay longer. I’m not sure. But in any case, I’d like to think that Avolare looks after her volunteers well, especially in animal care when there is literally an endless amount of work to do!
Tea leaves
During the tea break I met a guy who’s studying to be a paraveterinary assistant and I had a good chat with him about it. (Maybe it’s a direction I could go into? There’s even an international version of the course available…) In the middle of this chat, I was called by my work buddy from last week. I figured she had a question about an animal we helped.
“Paul, you have a leaf on your head!”
I felt my bald head, and yes, a leaf had stuck and suctioned itself there!
Good Girl, Dad! “Good Bezig!” (Good Job!)!
Second half of the shift was dull. Taking clean stuff off the conveyor belt out of the carwash type thing, and stacking it on a rack or piling it up on the (clean) floor.
But I did have the chance to observe some social stuff. One of the interns here is studying to be a company leader in animal care. I think this means to be the head animal carer, like the one who fished me out of the chicken enclosure. Today, she was in this role on her own for the first time, with help on hand if she needed it.
I was really impressed with how she handled things – and she’s only 17! She had things to do herself (not the regular animal care stuff but more helicopter-view stuff), but also dealt with questions, problems, queries, mistakes from us volunteers. So not just problem solving, but dealing with interuptions too! And all the time smiling through it, and gently asking for help when she needed it. I’m sure she’s gonna go a long way!
Something funny came out of it though!
When my daughters were much younger, if they were happy or pleased with something I did, they repeated the words I told them: Good girl!
It was a bit the same here when I asked the trainee for my next task. She looked at the pile of washing up and told me “Goed bezig!” (Good job!). It was nice to get encouragement, nice of her to give it – but it did make me smile inwardly too when I thought back to my daughters…who are only a little younger!
Hedgehog Medium Care
My last half hour was spent in a hedgehog area I hadn’t seen before. I think it is possibly used for hedgehogs in a better state of health that I’d seen so far. Each caged enclosure was about 2 or 3 meters along each wall; only 1 of the 7 or 8 enclosures had straw lining the floor with a few sleeping bags on top. I assume these had hedgehogs inside.
There wasn’t much for me to do because the couple working there had almost finished everything. All that seemed to remain was to hose down some floors and scrape the excess water down a drain. Which got blocked and needed unblocking. And the new chap (after 4 weeks I can describe someone else as new now!) after fixing the hose nozzle, managed to douse me in some extra water whilst he coiled it back up.
He was very apologetic about it, but I wonder if he’d found any more leaves on me he wanted to wash off! 😉
