Shelley and Free Flying Birds

Life at Larkwood is progressing with the new season under way.  We have had a number of tortoises over the years and sadly last year we lost most of them....not, we believe from old age but rather from ticks.  We have a particularly nasty tick here which if it attaches itself to any of the animals and we do not notice it, will eat into the soft tissue around the area to which it is attached....we know it as a stripy leg tick.  Eventually the skin of the animal , bursts open from infection and in larger animals, like the dogs and horses, once the tick has been removed, the skin will grow back together,,,but it can take months.  With the tortoises, unfortunately, the ticks tend to get in under the shell where they cannot be seen and eventually they cause them to die.

Yesterday, we found 'Shelley'.  Shelley is a young tortoise who now must be about 4 years old.  We found her one day quite by accident walking just outside our back door.  Being the tiny size that she was, she obviously crawled through the gap in the fencing wire where the tortoises were housed together with the rabbits.  To save her from hawks, we put her into a bird cage and there she lived for a couple of years until last year, when we thought that she was now big enough to be 'set free' into the big wide world.   To keep her safe still from the hawks we set her in the 'baby' rabbit camp, which is underneath the parrot suspended cages, feeding her on cabbage and spinach leaves and any of the delectable scraps that fell through from the cages above her.  For months now we haven't seen hide nor hair of her....that is until yesterday.  Suddenly she popped up and was walking around as if it was any other day in the park.  She has grown so much since she went to hibernate and to see her again after all these months really lifted our spirits.

                                                          Shelley eating cabbage leaves

The first morning after our arrival back home I was feeding the parrots and noticed a green ring-neck on the top of the suspended cages, walking across the tops and looking quite at home.  It is a mature male, as it already has a ring which it has developed around its neck, and must be a pet I imagine that has escaped.  I say this because it can only have been in a cage on its own with the length of its tail and the perfection to which it has grown.  People who breed ring-necks...as we do...most often have more than one bird in a cage together and their tails tend to become tatty as they vie with each other for space on a perch or food in the bowl.  It is obviously hungry and looking for food and it has found a good source here...amongst friends.   Over the years we have 'collected' many 'strays' and we now patiently wait for it to to make it's way into one of the many empty cages that we have opened up for it, enticing it with a bowl of food.  Water it can get from any number of places, but food is a different story.

                                                                Sitting in the Flame Tree

                                                               Perched on the fencing

                                                                At home on the gate...

You will be happy to know that the chicks are growing as their clucking mother protects them and the pigeon too is already a fat little thing as I watch how greedily it eats from its parents as they feed it. So animal life progresses daily and I feel there is something therapeutic about having them all around us....  

                                                                  Baby Fantail Pigeon

Chicks