Porky recovers in rehab
An Auckland mother and her son risked life and limb to save one lucky morepork, or ruru.
On January 3 Sandringham resident Brigette Jones and her 3-year-old son Blake were walking on Mt Albert’s summit when they discovered a morepork being dive bombed by a group of enraged tui.
‘‘I noticed there was a bit of a commotion going on in the tree, and I looked over and saw there were some tui squawking and diving over what I thought was a baby tui,’’ Jones said.
‘‘But when I walked over I realised it was actually a morepork and he was in quite a bit of trouble.’’
The morepork was flapping around on the ground and when it didn’t fly away she realised something was wrong, she said.
Jones and Blake quickly stood guard over the injured bird, which had a broken wing, keeping the tui at bay while they figured out what to do, she said.
Jones ended up carefully bundling the morepork up into her rain jacket and taking it to the vet, she said.
During the trip the native owl was placid and didn’t attempt to scratch her or her son with his talons, she said.
‘‘He looked at me half sheepishly, half terrified. He didn’t fight or anything like that.’’
They later named the morepork Porky because of its breed, not because of any excess weight, she said.
‘‘I’m hopeful he makes a full recovery and ends up back in his old home. It would be really nice if Mt Albert residents could hear him again in the middle of the night.’’
New Zealand Bird Rescue Charitable Trust hospital manager Karen Simpson, who was looking after Porky, said the owl was looking noticeably better.
‘‘Whenever I go to check on it it rolls on its back, which is a defence mechanism. It wasn’t doing that before, so it’s feeling much stronger.’’
Porky was given pain relief and anti-inflammatory medication twice a day, and would hopefully be released back into the wild in a few weeks, she said.
It was not known if Porky was male of female, she said.
Ark in the Park manager Gillian Wadams said because morepork were not a threatened species there wasn’t much population information about them.
However, they were New Zealand’s only remaining native owl, she said.
‘‘He looked at me half sheepishly, half terrified.’’
Brigette Jones.