Baby Blackbird - did I do the right thing?

[Nicos]

Gosh- he's looking good!

[FB.]

I think the things which made the most difference to his survival were:

1. Not feeding milk or dairy products.

2. Feeding as varied a range of kitchen scraps as possible, to try to ensure that he'd find something digestible (fruit, veg, wetted biscuits, wetted bread) - for water, energy and vitamins in the case of fruit/veg.

3. Feeding some garden bugs, including worms - for their high protein.

4. In the early days, making sure that everything was small/soft/damp (easy to swallow and digest) and that tough-skinned worms and bugs were chopped-up to make them easier to digest. I have been told in the past that the adult blackbirds have to bite the worms into pieces otherwise the young blackbirds can't digest them and the worms remain alive in their gut which debilitates or even causes blockages in the young birds.

[scarey55]

He's looking really good and growing very quickly into a strong, sleek bird. Whatever you are doing is obviously good for him. Well done

[FB.]

OH NO!

In recent days we've been wondering why he's made occasional peculiar noises.

But......

He appears to be imitating household noises.
He's copying the creak of a chair near to his cage, the click of a computer mouse, the puckering of the lips noise we use to call his attention and the sound of sneezing (it's pollen season).

[Hazel at the Hill]

Uh oh!

Can you play him some birdsong to get him used to what he SHOULD be sounding like!? RSPB used to LP's (going back a bit, I know!), but I would think that these things are available on line nowadays.

[FB.]

I don't mind listening to 1980s hit songs during the day, but I'm not listening to birdsong (we get enough of that with the dawn chorus).

Anything from this list take your fancy?
List of UK Singles Chart number ones of the 1980s - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I'm wondering about "The Chicken Song" from Spitting Image (remember that show?).

[veggiechicken]

There are blackbirds in my garden who can do an impressive ringtone, "Here kitty kitty kitty" and various other calls that they must have picked up from somewhere

[FB.]

He didn't seem much impressed with "Dawn Chorus" by Erasure, but listened very intently to "Orinoco Flow" by Enya.

[Hazel at the Hill]

Anything from this list take your fancy?
List of UK Singles Chart number ones of the 1980s - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pretty much all of them!

I'm wondering about "The Chicken Song" from Spitting Image (remember that show?).

Well, the Birdy Song, obviously.

[Potstubsdustbins]

Do we have an update FB?

Potty

[FB.]

Do we have an update FB?

Potty

He's fine.

I'm intentionally making his feeds a bit less in quantity and a bit irregular or occasional missed feeds to see whether he'll become less dependent on me and more self-sufficient.
He seems to be coping well - he's managing to find all of the worms in his compost and he's grudgingly picking up scraps, crumbs and small pieces of chopped fruit that I leave around his cage.

He had his first bath yesterday (an inch depth of water in a cereal bowl). He enjoyed it so much that he had multiple baths over a period of a few hours until I took his water bowl away because it was getting filled with hay, compost, food and poo. I wasn't able to take a picture because my wife mislaid the camera (and I don't have one of those fancy mobile phones).

He spends a lot of time out of his cage sitting on the back of one of our dining chairs just watching what's going on around him. He can fly several metres now but seems to be naturally quite lazy because he doesn't fly much. He tends to be most active when just let out of his cage - he'll flutter and jump about for a few minutes before settling on the back of his favourite dining chair.

Due to the mild weather quite a few flies, bugs and craneflies are coming into the house. He really loves them and even if he's refusing to eat more kitchen scraps he always seems to find room for another couple of insects.
I try to give him the insects live; I catch the craneflies by their legs or wings and offer them to him. He quickly scampers over and snatches them. Sometimes it's a bit big for him and while juggling it in his beak it sometimes briefly escapes before he snaps at it in mid-air to recapture it. He's not fast enough to recapture an escaped fly though.

I'm not entirely convinced that he can have a normal life. It would not surprise me if, when I try to let him go, he comes back in through an open door or window because he thinks my house is his house and because he's been used to being fed and used to our company (when out of his cage he likes to sit near me and he'll often follow me around the house like a pet).
So when the time comes to let him go, I'll probably just open the patio door and let him explore the big wide world at his own pace.
As for what to do if he doesn't want to go.....

As long as he doesn't go too far away and remains within sight I think I can still lure him with his tub of compost and worms; he knows what it is and if I take it out of his cage he wants to see what I'm doing (usually taking it out of his cage means re-stocking with worms, millipedes, woodlice and other bugs from the garden soil).

I'll see if I can get the Mrs to find the camera to take some more pictures in the next day or two.

[Feral007]

Thanks FB, nice to hear how he's going. Often hard for birds that are handraised, I know a lot of them in the country can't cope because they are territorial and the parents have to teach them that sort of thing for them to survive (unless they are pinching my chook food, which seems to be the in thing now).

The funny thing here is that we have huge numbers of sulphur crested cockatoos. They flock around and eat all the seed that goes into the ground. You'll be walking around sometimes or hanging clothes on the line, and occasionally among all the squarking etc while they bicker in the trees, you'll here one say a word. And you know that someone's tame bird is now part of the colony. It always makes me smile when I hear one talk

[Creemteez]

Lovely to know he's doing so well. I don't think he'll ever fully return to the wild though. There is a young female blackbird in my garden who has yet to become afraid of humans. She sits at my feet picking up stuff that falls when I'm refilling the bird feeders. She's sooo pretty.

[FB.]

I don't think he'll ever fully return to the wild though.

That's what I suspect. I've had him about three weeks now. Given that even now his wing and tail feathers are about three-quarters grown, I dread to think just how young he was when I found him - but a guess makes me wonder if he was probably only 10-14 days old at the time.

But in the medium to long term I don't think I really want to have to keep him as a "pet" if he's too humanised and unable to return to the wild (either house pet or garden pet or free-to-roam outdoors pet).
Now he's three-quarters grown and doesn't need much hand-feeding I've been wondering whether to see if someone else would take him on, to either finish raising him for a week or two prior to release, or to keep him as a kind of pet if he's unable to integrate into the wild.

Something I meant to add to last night's update:
In some of the early pictures it can be seen that his cage has a mirror and bell. His pot of worms sits at the back behind the bell. When I remove the pot of worms to refill it the bell inevitably rings. Whenever the bell rings (even if I knock if by accident) he'll come from anywhere in the house as fast as he can, chattering in anticipation of more bugs and worms!
The bell acts like saying "Come here, dinner's on the table!".

[FB.]

I just noticed again that he's continuing with naturally wanting a varied diet.

In the bottom of his cage are kitchen scraps - bread, biscuit, fruit etc - but they've been untouched all morning. However, I just went swatting flies around the house and fed them to him. As soon as he'd eaten the flies (and a few other bugs) he immediately went and ate several small pieces of bread and biscuit.
He's been like that from the start: even when very young, unable to stand up and being fully hand-fed, he would refuse to eat more than a couple of pieces of one thing in each meal - each meal always had to be about four or five pea-sized pieces of at least three completely different things otherwise he'd start spitting-out the duplicates.