Edgar the Crow

Two days ago we found a crow.  A baby crow screaming its head off in the long grass by the side of the road.  It sounded more like a frog being taken by a snake than a crow so when I investigated I walked really really slow, peering as best I could through the grass.  Green snakes are harmless but browns are deadly.  Even when the crow was at my feet he was difficult to see.  When I did see him, I saw a bundle of black and grey spiky pin feathers and a yawning red cavern from which the squawks were coming.

Took him home and dug out the emergency rations of frozen mince.  Squirted a bit of water in his mouth with a syringe as I suspect he was dehydrated (next day found his first poop buried in the folds of the cloth used as emergency bedding.  It was pure poop with no urine and as big as the first joint of my little finger). 

For two days I have put off writing about Edgar as I wasn't sure he'd pull through.   He wasn't eating much and seemed very very weak as his head kept flopping backwards onto his back.  That didn't seem normal.  The heat hasn't helped.  Today I've put a cloth covered ice bag in his basket which seems to help.  Today he seems stronger, his head rarely flops back and he eats with more gusto and less coaxing.  Oddly his eyes aren't fully open.

At first I thought he was a casualty of the Channel Billed Cuckoos.  Thought the cuckoo nestlings either ejected the crow eggs or the crow nestlings but that's not what they do.  They actually do nothing

but eat and as they are bigger, grow faster and are stronger than the crow babies, the parents feed them and neglect their own offspring until they starve to death and are thrown from the nest. 

Looking up in the gum tree which looms over the area where Edgar was found, there was a nest on an outermost branch.  It is so high up the tree I can't tell whether the nest is intact or whether there are other babies.  It appeared to be empty. So I don't know whether Edgar was an accident or a victim.

In any case, the task now is to get him well enough and strong enough to move outside into half the galah's aviary.  The less contact I have with him the better if he is to survive in the wild as a wild crow.  The local crows, and there are at least two which live in the mugga ironbark, need to notice and accept him into their circle.  A big ask. 

If I can find that fine line between which he knows to come to me for supplemental feeding at the same time as he maneuvers his way into local society, I will have succeeded.  The fate of tame crows, unless kept permanently in an aviary, is grim.  They don't survive. 

In the meantime, we'll just muddle through.  He's still, compared to photos of other crows his age, very weak.