The Phoenix

Nick sometimes comes home from church bearing gifts – our salary, or vegetables from country church goers…yesterday he had an adult fairy tern in hand! He found the bird on the road on the way to Sandy Bay. It seems to have hurt a wing as it is currently flightless, although seems fine otherwise. Nick took it to both morning services in a bucket where it was duly admired or held. When he came home I was busy at the stove with chips, and I just heard Nick say “open the door quickly”. Sigh – my exasperation must have been heard, but I hurried to do as I was told and my mouth dropped open when I saw Nick standing there with the tern. We’ve always admired the birds, and of course we were so excited to have Reepicheep two years ago, but he died in his infancy. So this is a real treat. We didn’t have any raw fish handy, but it took some water. It was already quite docile yesterday, and harmless despite its long pointy beak. We coddled it all afternoon when it wasn’t resting, and it is happy to sit on our hands. The fairy terns, although very graceful in flight, are hopelessly clumsy on land, not having been designed to walk on the ground. Apparently they can’t take off from the ground either as their wing span is too big and they need the downward flapping to get going. So, once this one had landed on the ground it was going to be flightless, hurt wing or not. Nick’s guess is that it flew into a telephone wire and injured itself in that way. I sat it on the kitchen scale, out of interest – it weighs just under 100g.

Now we are on day 2 of the Phoenix, named such as we are hoping it will rise from the ashes (Greek mythology). We were a little concerned about the feeding situation, because although it took water it had no interest in yesterday’s cooked tuna. I bought a chunk of wahoo today, and after putting it through the food processor, tried Phoenix on it. He loved it, actually, and gulped down a few big stringy bits. I fed some more to him while I was busy making supper – he had waddled into the kitchen – so I sat him on an upturned bucket in the corner where he could watch and not get in the way.