Rescuing red-vented bulbuls
THEY felt their mother’s claws release their nest as she flew off to find them food for the last time. Three hatchling red-vented bulbuls, only days old, huddled together in their home of twigs and rootlets, nestled behind an air conditioning unit at a mosque in Toorak. But only two metres below them roamed a clowder of stray cats, aware the featherless young bulbuls were vulnerable.
Their lives now hung in the balance, threatened both by hunger and by the same paws that cut their mother’s life short.
A man, among the many who visited the mosque during the midday prayers every day, had been watching the mother bird as she constructed her nest, as she began flying to her nest with food for her hatchlings, as her visits stopped. He, like the young birds, awaited her return in vain.
His suspicions about the mother bird’s passing were soon confirmed, and his attention turned to the tiny bulbuls.
Even when healthy and provided for, most baby birds have a dismally low survival rate. For many species only about a third of the hatchlings make it to adulthood. The chances for this lot were none, and he felt for them, for the cruelty of their fate.
He could take them home with him, but then what? He and his family had raised birds before but never bulbuls. Only poultry birds and the occasional nest of abandoned seabirds.
“I’ll take care of them,” his wife offered when he told her about them that day. They knew the survival rates were low, but at least this would give the otherwise doomed bulbuls a chance.
And so, the couple became adoptive parents to three little bulbuls, and one evening last November, I came home to three barely feathered new siblings.
Still in their nest, but now in a cozy basket in my mother’s bedroom instead of behind a noisy AC unit, they were fed for the first time nearly 24 hours, far too long for their age and species.
They were fed every hour that day, and they eagerly swallowed the pieces of fruit that my mother placed into their open beaks. Even the runt, who would likely have been expelled from the nest if their mother had survived, appeared to be eating his fill.
I fed them bits of banana when I got home from work. They looked to me more like miniature dinosaurs than like the bulbuls that I’d seen in the yard all my life.
Over the next two days they were named three times, each family member calling them something different. I called them Barney, Yoshi, and Godzilla. (The runt being Godzilla, obviously.)
Barney and Yoshi opened their eyes the next day. Godzilla took an extra day to decide he was ready to see the world.
Within days all three of them puffed up, both by growing feathers and by the constant supply of food.
Soon they were standing on the edges of their nest. We were glad for their growth but with the added risk of them flopping over the edge of their basket and onto the floor, a blue laundry basket became their enclosure.
For a while Godzilla seemed to be doing well. He (or perhaps she, we never knew) was still much smaller than his nestmates, and occasionally pushed aside by them when food came, so we started feeding him separately.
But I suppose the statistics won over our efforts. Only about a third of hatchlings survive to adulthood.
We found Godzilla one morning, no longer breathing. Barney succumbed to a leg injury much later, despite our attempts to reach out to bird experts online on how to aid his recovery with diet adjustments. They were buried in the garden beside a bhindi plant.
Yoshi grew, learned to fly, learned to respond to my mother’s voice when she wanted to feed him. For a few days after mastering how to fly he would still return to the laundry basket after short bursts in the air.
But one afternoon when working on his flying on the balcony, supervised by his whole human family, Yoshi decided to test himself. He flew about 20 feet to the first-floor roof below. His longest flight yet and he was gone.
Nearly two months after we first got him, it was time to say goodbye. There was no sadness. Only pride. He could make it on his own now. Our work was done.
My mother opened the main door to the house the next day and found him sitting on the steps.
Just a quick hello, like a child visiting on break from university. A reassurance that he had survived the night and could in fact do this alone.
We still see Yoshi, occasionally. Sitting at the window or perched on the neighbour’s fence.
He may have been ours once, but he is now, as he was always meant to be, a part of the wildlife, a voice in the choir of morning songbirds.