Re: Desktop icons sometimes move (NOT auto arrange problem) at startup

Banned Apache wrote:

A couple of years ago I saved a number of blue-tit babies from certain
death. They were little pink things, about the size of my thumbnail.
I kept them warm by putting them on top of my computer screen but had
to keep taking them off the boil before they cooked, then they had to
go back up before they got too cold. I also managed to feed them
warmed soya milk. Some vet quack, tosser told me that wouldn't have
helped and would have run straight through them. I maintain it was
the feeding that warmed them through originally and saved the little
bastards.

The fatality rate for young birds in the wild is about 75%, but it
increases by quite a bit when you're trying to hand-rear them.

Soy milk is great stuff. I had a lot of trouble with mourning doves
until I started using it, and then their survival rate shot right up.

The only trouble with feeding birds liquids is that they have no
epiglottis, and if you're not careful, you'll give them pneumonia. For
most songbirds, I feed a mixture of canned dogfood, farina and
applesauce, although when they're really tiny, I use baby food instead.
The addition of soymilk makes it stick to the paintbrush better, as well
as adding a lot of good nutrients.

Of course, with the morning doves, you feed it almost straight
(depending on their age--as they get bigger, you add baby cereal) using
a large syringe or turkey baster.

Obviously, you didn't drown the little birds, so I think the vet was an
idiot, because warming them up quickly and getting food in them
increases their chances of survival exponentially.

How old were they when you let them go?

When I did it for a living (not much of a living, I might add), I had
some good vets on call in case of emergencies, but my experience with
vets in general is they wanted to put it down, whatever "it" happened to
be. Mostly I only used them when a critter needed to die, unless it was
suffering, in which case I just did it myself.

The cat that ate both the parent birds disappeared shortly
afterwards, I had nothing to do with it, unless the cat was extra
sensitive to hateful vibes.

That's why people should keep their cats inside, not to mention that
it's much better for the cat. People always dumped their unwanted pets
near our house when I was a kid, and although we fed them, they stayed
outside. Even with as little traffic as we had on our road, we still had
an all too high rate of roadkill.

Kitties that live indoors don't get diseases and they can satisfy their
natural instincts by taking out the mice who haven't the sense to stay
outside.

Anyway, I reckon if you lob the attacked cat up towards the branch
the bird is on then the bird may go into attack mode and follow the
cat back down. You might consider juggling some oranges first so you
can be confident about catching the cat and the bird.

HTH

I used to juggle a little, but I don't expect it's like riding a
bicycle. I suspect that if I toss the cat in the tree, it will end up
impaled on a branch. That's my experience of how such ideas work out,
anyway.

The birdlet did eventually come down for food, and it's flying around
the room right now. It's nice, really, because I've been tied to feeding
it every twenty minutes or so for the past two weeks, which means I've
been unable to do anything at all but read and hang online. Now that
it's stopped raining, I'm glad to get outside, even if I'm still pretty
much trapped on the patio.

Suntan time, I guess.

rl
--
Rhonda Lea Kirk

Insisting on perfect safety is for people
without the balls to live in the real world.
Mary Shafer Iliff


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